COVID’s Lingering Impact: Young Readers Struggling

First and second graders today still read worse than their peers did before COVID-19 shuttered schools five years ago, and the gap shows no signs of closing anytime soon.

Story Snapshot

NWEA’s March 2026 report reveals first and second graders remain below pre-pandemic reading levels in 2024-2025
Reading scores have stayed flat since COVID disruptions while math shows slow improvement
Lower-performing students suffered the largest declines, with age 9 students dropping 5 points since 2020
The reading crisis hits Black, Hispanic, and suburban students hardest, threatening long-term workforce readiness

The Reading Crisis Nobody Fixed

The Northwest Evaluation Association delivered sobering news in March 2026: our youngest students cannot read at acceptable levels. The nonprofit’s analysis of 2024-2025 test scores confirms what parents and teachers already suspected. First and second graders lag behind where children their age performed before March 2020, when schools slammed shut nationwide. What makes this revelation particularly alarming is the timeline. Five full school years have passed since the initial disruption, yet reading scores remain stubbornly frozen at pandemic lows. Math scores inch upward, proving recovery is possible, but reading refuses to budge.

The scale of this failure becomes clear when examining fall 2020 data from over 950,000 students in grades one through six. Every single grade showed sharp reading declines compared to the previous year. National Assessment of Educational Progress figures from 2022 recorded a 5-point drop for nine-year-olds, the steepest plunge since 1990. Students at the 10th and 25th percentiles saw the worst damage, creating an achievement chasm that widens with each passing semester. Researchers described these gaps as quasi-experimental evidence of pandemic harm, though the controlled conditions of traditional studies were impossible during a national emergency.

Who Got Left Behind and Why

Remote learning during 2020-2021 affected 70 percent of age nine students, but not all children suffered equally. Lower-performing students, Black and Hispanic children, and those in suburban and Southern districts bore the brunt of educational collapse. The reasons trace directly to unequal access during lockdowns. Higher-performing students had quiet spaces, reliable technology, and parental support. Their struggling peers lacked all three, attending Zoom classes from crowded apartments with spotty internet and caregivers working essential jobs. City schools saw scores stabilize between 2020 and 2022, while suburban gaps persisted, defying conventional assumptions about resource distribution.

Fourth-grade proficiency rates tell the larger story of systemic decay. Before the pandemic, only 34 percent of fourth graders read proficiently in 2019. By 2022, that figure dropped to 32 percent. These numbers represent not just pandemic disruption but decades of stagnant reading instruction that COVID merely exposed. Twelfth-grade reading and math skills were already declining before 2020, suggesting the virus accelerated trends educators ignored for years. The youngest learners, ages five through seven during initial shutdowns, never experienced normal early literacy instruction, the foundation every subsequent skill builds upon.

The Cost of Five Lost Years

Short-term consequences already plague classrooms. Students unprepared for grade-level work slow instruction for everyone, forcing teachers to reteach foundational skills that should have been mastered years earlier. Broader NAEP assessments confirm no student group has increased reading scores since 2020, meaning the problem spans every demographic and region. Higher education institutions report rising rates of missed assignments and student disengagement, problems that begin with reading deficits in elementary school. These struggles compound over time, turning third-grade reading gaps into high school dropout risks.

Long-term economic and social damage looms larger. Persistent low reading ability predicts college dropout rates, reduced lifetime earnings, and workforce unpreparedness in an economy demanding higher-level skills. The Annie E. Casey Foundation connects current proficiency rates below 33 percent in key grades to future economic productivity losses. Widening equity gaps threaten social cohesion, as disadvantaged children fall further behind peers whose families could afford private tutoring or pandemic pods. The political response has focused on funding targeted interventions, but results remain mixed. Programs like Kids Read Now, active in six states, maintain skills in 97 percent of participants for just 3 percent of summer school costs, yet lack the scale needed for millions of struggling readers.

Years After The Pandemic, Younger Students Still Have Far To Go In Reading, Report Says https://t.co/0xTok1qvWH

— zerohedge (@zerohedge) March 12, 2026

The education sector faces a reckoning over sustained intervention needs. Technology access divides persist, and demand for scalable, cost-effective programs exceeds supply. Some experts note math recovery demonstrates children can rebound with proper support, offering cautious optimism. However, consensus among researchers emphasizes that reading requires different cognitive development than math, and younger brains missed critical windows for phonemic awareness and fluency practice. The flat trajectory of reading scores since 2020 suggests current approaches fail to address root causes: insufficient individualized instruction, inadequate teacher training in literacy science, and systemic tolerance for mediocrity that predated the virus. Until policymakers and educators confront these realities with urgency matching the crisis, millions of children will grow into adults who cannot read well enough to thrive in modern America.