Black Schools Are Improving Fast. It's Not Enough

Predominantly Black schools faced the biggest academic setbacks during the COVID-19 pandemic. They’re also bouncing back the fastest. Despite the progress, Black students are still being left behind.

That’s the complicated truth found in a new study that looked at standardized test scores from more than 9,300 schools five years after the pandemic shut everything down.

Schools serving mostly Black students made the biggest academic gains of any group since 2020. They’re also the least likely to be fully recovered. The reason comes down to simple math: when you fall further behind, you have that much more to catch up in order to be academically proficient.

“Those steeper declines mean that they had a bigger well to dig themselves out of after COVID,” says Dr. Emily Morton, the lead research scientist at the research nonprofit Northwest Evaluation Association and a co-author of the study.

A report released Tuesday by NWEA details how Morton and her team used standardized test scores to determine where and how learning recovery was happening. Researchers compared scores from fall 2019 to those from fall 2024 and called a school “recovered” if it matched or exceeded its average pre- pandemic achievement level.

Nationally, the picture is grim. Only about one in three schools recovered in either math or reading, and just one in seven schools has bounced back in both.

Schools serving mostly Black students had lower rates of learning recovery. Only 13% of schools with predominantly Black students showed recovery in both reading and math, while 16% of majority-white schools and 19% of majority-Asian schools experienced similar recovery.

It’s worth noting what these numbers don’t mean. The students taking tests in fall 2024 are not the same kids who were in school in 2019. A third grader in 2019 was in eighth grade in 2024. What the study is really measuring is whether schools — as institutions — have regained their footing. Think of it less like tracking an individual patient’s recovery and more like measuring whether a hospital has gotten back to full capacity. The patients are different. The question is whether the building is functioning the way it used to.

Learning Gaps and Majority-Black Schools

Morton says the lower learning recovery rates in predominantly Black schools can be attributed to those schools being closed for longer during the pandemic. Since schools that served Black students were more likely to be located in large urban areas, where the COVID-19 virus hit early and hard, they took longer to reopen. The prolonged delay furthered racial learning gaps, leading to Black students being even further behind academically.

Federal aid helped these schools climb back up academically. Shortly after schools were shut down due to the pandemic, the federal government delivered $190 billion in Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief to K-12 schools nationwide — the largest injection of federal funding into public schools in history. Research has shown that the money, which was doled out in three phases, helped improve Black students’ test scores, with schools using it for tutoring, extended learning time, and staffing needs.

But that money’s gone now. ESSER expired in September 2024, right around the same time the test scores in this study were collected. Which makes the question of what comes next all the more urgent.

According to Morton, the path forward is straightforward. Predominantly Black schools need sustained funding.

“We need to see continued investment in schools that are serving Black students to help them recover to that pre-pandemic baseline and then hopefully beyond,” she says. “But, in order to get back to where we were in education quality of 2019 we’re going to need to continued, accelerated growth in schools that are serving Black students.”

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Learning Gaps and Majority-Black Schools