State of the Student 2025
Situation Report
March 2025 marked five years since the start of the Covid-19 pandemic, sparking widespread reflection.
CRPE marked the occasion with two papers. One took stock of the lessons our researchers have documented and synthesized over the past five years; the other considered what those lessons imply for a path forward.
Five years after the pandemic disrupted education, public schools are still struggling to recover. Achievement gaps have widened, student performance is in decline, and many schools have reverted to an outdated, ineffective system that fails to meet today’s challenges.
Instead of leveraging innovative solutions that emerged during the pandemic—such as personalized learning models, microschools and learning pods, and community-led initiatives—education leaders defaulted to pre-pandemic norms. Funding was misallocated, bureaucracy stifled adaptability, and political battles over school closures and safety measures overshadowed the need for long-term systemic reform. The result?
A generation of students is falling further behind, and public confidence in education is eroding.
Also released in 2025, the 2024 National Assessment of Education Progress (NAEP) results exposed that achievement of the lowest-quartile students is in a free fall. This impact is also compounding, especially for students with disabilities and other vulnerable populations. These declines underscore a profound, long-standing truth about hard-wired inequities in the American education system: opportunities to learn, including access to quality teachers, are unequally distributed.
These results were a wake-up call for those who had held out hope that pandemic recovery rates would dramatically improve without the dramatic course correction we’ve long called for.
The same month those NAEP results were released, Americans saw the beginning of a sharp realignment of the federal role in education. The Trump administration’s dramatic entry into public education—slashing personnel and programs at the Department of Education—claimed a desire to address broken aspects of American education. But the administration so far has no evident approach to fixing them.
The State of the American Student in 2025 is—once again—dire. The data reveals trends that will have profound and lasting impacts on students’ lives and the US economy for years to come.
Where Do We Go from Here?
“Roughly one third of the students whose K–12 careers were upended by the pandemic have since moved on to college or careers, often without being given the opportunity to make up for the learning they missed in high school. That’s a national shame. But it is not too late for us to do right by the 35 million students following in their footsteps. The only question is whether we will do so.“
Martin West, Professor,
Harvard Graduate School of Education (via Education Next)
Fortunately, the future is not set in stone. Progress is possible.
The 2024 NAEP showed glimmers of hope, with average fourth-grade math scores showing signs of recovery for the first time since the pandemic. It also revealed where states and districts are bucking the national trends and helping students regain what they lost through a steadfast commitment to evidence-based, strategic reforms.
And while new federal policies promise disruption, they also crack open opportunities to make long-needed changes. Burning everything down without a plan to fix it won’t help. But neither will protecting the status quo nor turning our eyes away. Leadership and action are urgently needed to identify effective new policies and implement them, even if they are controversial.
We have much to learn from creative solutions on the periphery about the potential to leapfrog seemingly intractable problems. Innovative staffing models, leveraging community organizations, and technology-enabled math programs are just a few examples.
In this year’s State of the American Student, we picked one topic—math achievement—and went deep to understand the problem, unpack what’s behind it, and chart a bold and viable path forward.
