🛝 We've Spent 20 Years Closing the Achievement Gap. It Got Wider

Welcome to Playground Post, a bi-weekly newsletter that keeps education innovators ahead of what's next.

This week's reality check: The achievement gap between the highest- and lowest-performing students has widened steadily since 2005, long before COVID. Meanwhile, the most celebrated reading reform in a generation, Mississippi's science-of-reading overhaul, produces gains that vanish by eighth grade.

Data Gem

Private schools educate about 9% of K-12 students but account for just 1.3% of NAEP test-takers. The last time NAEP reported separate private school results was 2013. As publicly funded school choice programs expand to 18 states, the nation's primary measure of student achievement has no way to track whether they're working.

Achievement Gap Has Been Growing for 20 Years. COVID Just Made It Worse.

Everyone talks about "pandemic recovery" as if the problem started in 2020. It didn't.

A new paper from Brown University's Annenberg Institute examined NAEP scores from six million test takers across 10 administrations of the exam between 2005 and 2024. 

The finding: the gap between students at the 90th percentile and those at the 10th percentile has widened dramatically, across public schools, charters, Catholic academies, and Department of Defense schools.

In public schools, the divergence was most pronounced. 

Fourth graders at the top gained about four points in math and three in reading over two decades. Students at the bottom dropped roughly three points in math and five in reading. The net result: the 90/10 gap expanded by 1.3 years' worth of learning for fourth graders between the Bush and Biden administrations.

The gap was growing before COVID hit. 

Between 2005 and 2019, struggling students were already stagnating while top performers pulled ahead. The pandemic turned stagnation into steep losses.

Patrick Wolf, an economist at the University of Arkansas and co-author of the paper, called the findings "demoralizing."

"We expect and hope our public schools will be great equalizers," Wolf said. "But over the last 20 years, we don't see that in the data, and the gap has grown by a lot."

Peggy Carr, former commissioner of the National Center for Education Statistics, said the discourse around NAEP has been too focused on average scores, which conceal wider swings at the extremes. "We were not being heard as clearly as we wanted to be," Carr said. "We were trying to make it very clear that you need to look at the entire distribution for years, but it wasn't the focus of policymakers."

For education innovators, the data reframes the market. "Pandemic recovery" products have a limited shelf life. The structural opportunity is in adaptive learning platforms and diagnostic tools designed specifically for students at the 10th percentile, not the average student.

The Mississippi Miracle Disappears by Eighth Grade

Mississippi reformed its reading curriculum in 2013, retraining teachers in the science of reading and sending coaches into schools. 

The state's fourth graders went from near the bottom nationally to surpassing the national average by 2024.

Then those students reached middle school. And the miracle stopped.

By 2019, more Mississippi eighth graders were scoring at the bottom than in 2013. Scores dipped further during COVID. By 2024, only higher-achieving eighth graders had recovered somewhat. 

Nationally, 39% of eighth graders cannot reach the lowest "basic" achievement level on NAEP.

"Mississippi moved a mountain in fourth grade," said Dan McGrath, a retired federal education official who oversaw the NAEP assessments. "When should we see the Mississippi miracle reach eighth grade? Why haven't we seen it yet?"

According to researchers the phonics instruction helps students decode words, but decoding alone isn't enough for middle school reading, where sentences are longer, vocabulary is specialized, and texts demand background knowledge.

Carl Hendrick, a professor at Academica University of Applied Sciences, points to research showing diminishing returns to reading strategy instruction after just 10 hours. "When a student cannot grasp the main idea of a passage, the problem is almost never that they lack a 'strategy,'" Hendrick wrote. "The problem is that they do not understand enough of the words."

Sarah Webb, a senior director at curriculum maker Great Minds, put it plainly: "They used to say you learn to read and then you read to learn. Now people realize it needs to be both for much longer."

For education entrepreneurs, this is the most underserved market in K-12 literacy. Investment and product development have concentrated on K-3 phonics, leaving grades 4 through 8 wide open. 

The gap demands vocabulary and knowledge-building platforms for upper elementary and middle school, sustained reading engagement tools that rebuild stamina in an age of declining book time, and content-rich curriculum that goes beyond strategy drills to build the background knowledge students need to comprehend complex texts.

The Pandemic Babies Are in First Grade. They're Already Behind.

The pandemic's academic damage wasn't limited to school-age children. Kids who were babies and toddlers during COVID are now in first and second grade, and they're struggling too.

A new NWEA analysis of math and reading scores for students in grades K through 2 in spring 2025 found that first and second graders scored lower than their pre-pandemic peers in both subjects. 

In math, second graders are about one month behind. In reading, both first and second graders trail by roughly one month.

The gaps are small. But they are persistent.

A separate Johns Hopkins study analyzed developmental screenings from more than 50,000 children aged 0 to 5 and found that pandemic-born children had slightly lower abilities in communication, problem-solving, and social skills than pre-pandemic peers.

The causes extend beyond the classroom. 

Thousands of child care centers closed permanently in the pandemic's first year. Preschool attendance among 3- and 4-year-olds dropped from 48% to 40% between 2019 and 2021. 

The federal funding that supported districts in hiring instructional coaches and interventionists is now expiring, just as these children arrive in school needing extra help.

Districts need early screening and kindergarten-readiness tools that identify developmental gaps before academic gaps show up on tests. K-2 intervention platforms designed for children who may have missed foundational social and communication milestones fill a category that barely exists. 

And the preschool attendance collapse points to family engagement and home-based developmental support products that can reach children before they ever enter a school building.

⚡️More Quick Hits

This week in education:

• 42 states dedicate a smaller share of funding to K-12 than 20 years ago — An Albert Shanker Institute report found the cumulative loss totals nearly $600 billion since 2016, with Black students three times as likely to attend chronically underfunded districts

• Holistic community college support boosts degree attainment by 48% in randomized trial — Students who entered Chicago's One Million Degrees program while still in high school were 83% more likely to have a stable job and earned $14,000 more seven years later

• Nearly 60 colleges are trimming the bachelor's degree to three years — Ensign College plans to convert all its programs to the reduced-credit format, as more than half of students on the traditional four-year path already take longer than four years to finish

• New student visa issuances dropped 35.6%, with India down roughly 60% — Over 100,000 fewer F-1 visas were issued in summer 2025 versus 2024, following a month-long freeze in visa interview scheduling by the State Department

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