2025 Summary: ELA & Math Proficiency Changes Post-Pandemic
A look at back at progress in 2025 across 32 states
Overview
Over the past few months, we have periodically provided a look across states on 2025 student achievement and recovery post-pandemic for students in grades 3-8. Today, we are closing out our state test score updates for 2025 and would like to share our final summary of these changes and patterns.
To date, 49 states and Washington D.C. have at least partially released their summative test results from Spring 2025. We expect to see test results in early 2026 for Vermont.
Looking at Trends Across States
We limit our sample below to states with 2025 data comparable to 2019. In other words, we are excluding states that have entirely new assessments and/or a different set of “cut scores” in 2025 compared to 2019, as we cannot make valid comparisons to pre-pandemic outcomes.
Across all U.S. states, our sample therefore includes 32 states with comparable math data between 2019 and 2025, and 28 states with comparable ELA data. The remaining states changed their assessments/proficiency criteria at some point during that time period. In two cases - New Jersey and D.C. - we cannot include results because assessments were not administered in 2021, which we use as our post-pandemic baseline.
States included in our sample:
Arizona
California
Colorado
Connecticut
Delaware
Georgia
Hawaii (new)
Idaho (new)
Indiana
Iowa
Louisiana
Massachusetts
Michigan
Minnesota
Mississippi
Missouri (new)
Nevada
New Hampshire
North Carolina (math only)
Ohio (new)
Oklahoma (new)
Oregon
Pennsylvania (new)
Rhode Island
South Carolina (math only)
South Dakota (new)
Tennessee
Utah (math only)
Virginia (math only)
Washington
West Virginia (new)
Wyoming
Looking at Recovery in 2025
The overall recovery pattern in 2025 continues to be more varied in ELA than in math. Every state in our sample has shown at least some math gains since 2021. Given current trends, we anticipate several more states will surpass their 2019 math proficiency rates in 2026. In ELA, however, some states have made gains on proficiency outcomes while several have continued to decline. A report from Brookings that analyzed math and ELA trends speculated that the steady math gains could be the result of more focused attention on math skills due to larger learning losses during COVID, or due to the nature of the subject itself:
“One possibility is that schools focused recovery efforts more heavily on math skills coming out of the pandemic, since math is where the largest initial drops were reported. Another factor may be that math, by its nature, is easier to remediate. Mathematical concepts can often be broken down into discrete skills, making targeted interventions easier to implement. In contrast, progress in ELA may be more dependent on broader instructional shifts, such as the adoption of research-aligned reading practices. These practices vary widely across states and districts—and take time to translate into measurable gains in student outcomes.”
While we focus here on state-level trends, reports have documented the important nuance across student subgroups. In our conversation with Chalkbeat Ideas, Emily Oster documented how female students experienced greater learning loss post-pandemic than male students, and that their recovery has not kept pace with male students in the years since.
The 74, meanwhile, shared reports from the Education Recovery Scorecard at Stanford that recovery between 2019 and 2024 has varied significantly between high-poverty and low-poverty school districts. As the Stanford team found:
“In nearly one-third of all low-poverty school districts, math performance has been restored to the pre-pandemic status quo; the same is true in just 8 percent of high-poverty districts. In all, over 14 percent of the richest districts (i.e., those where household income is higher than in 90 percent of other places) have returned to 2019-era learning in both math and reading, compared with less than 4 percent of the poorest districts.”
Significant differences are present across many other student groups, and each state presents its own context for these changes. In the figures that follow, we share takeaways from the state-level results only.
Of our full sample of states:
Only 7 of 32 states with comparable math data have met or surpassed their 2019 proficiency levels in 2025.
6 of these states have surpassed their 2019 math proficiency levels in 2025: Colorado, Iowa, Mississippi, Missouri, Rhode Island and Tennessee.
1 of these states has reached but not surpassed 2019 math proficiency levels: Georgia
Only 6 of 28 states with comparable ELA data have met or surpassed their 2019 proficiency levels in 2025.
These states include Hawaii, Iowa, Mississippi, Tennessee, West Virginia, and Wyoming.
Across both subjects, only 3 of 28 states with comparable data in both ELA and math have met or exceeded 2019 proficiency levels: Iowa, Mississippi, and Tennessee.
In the two graphs below, we present information for ELA and math outcomes by state for students in grades 3-8 in two ways:
First, we show the change in proficiency from 2019 to 2021 (for all states, this was a decline in both subjects), represented by the red dot for each state; and
Then, we show the change from 2019 to 2025, represented by a blue dot.
States with a negative value here remain below their 2019 rates
States with a positive value here have surpassed their 2019 rates
A Note on State Assessment Comparability
As a reminder, each state administers its own state assessment, so the number of students who are proficient in one state cannot be directly compared to another state, and is not the focus here. Rather, we believe there is value in reviewing patterns of academic recovery across states as a starting place for understanding where there are pockets of success to explore and build upon.
Thank you all for following along with us as we’ve moved through our understanding of 2025 state assessment results. We look forward to seeing you in 2026.
As always, if the raw data are of value to you or your organization, or if you have any questions, please reach out to info@eddatacenter.org. We appreciate hearing from you!