A new study has found some improvement among Michigan K-through-8 students as the education system continues to rebound from the COVID pandemic’s disruptions. But the study found that more than five years since the pandemic’s first disruptions to Michigan schools, students have still struggled to overcome challenges.
Michigan State University’s Education Policy Innovation Collaborative, or EPIC, has been studying student struggles arising from the COVID years.
In their latest report, the EPIC researchers said students are making strong progress in math.
During the 2023–24 school year, Michigan students advanced from the 43rd to the 50th percentile (relative to pre-pandemic national norms) between the fall and spring testing periods. When students returned the following fall, their relative achievement fell to the 47th percentile. Accelerated math growth during the 2024–25 school year enabled students to regain lost ground and reach the 51st percentile in the spring of 2025 — slightly above the pre-pandemic national median and well above the average for Michigan students in fall 2020.
While these short-term gains are encouraging, the larger-than-typical setbacks between school years suggest that students are not fully retaining their progress from one year to the next.
But EPIC’s study found Michigan K-8 students continue to struggle with reading.
Michigan students began the 2020–21 school year above national norms in reading, with average scores at the 53rd percentile. By the end of that year, reading achievement fell to the 49th percentile (just below the national median) and has remained within 1 percentile point of this ranking ever since. This stagnation in reading … is consistent with national results from the MAP Growth and i-Ready assessments. The initial disruptions to student learning in 2020–21 widened gaps between higher- and lower-performing students in both reading and math. Although average reading scores remain relatively unchanged, the report finds evidence of improvements among Michigan’s lowest-scoring readers, especially in middle school grades. As a result, gaps between high- and low-performing readers have narrowed. While these gaps are improving, they have not yet fully recovered to pre-pandemic norms. In math, gaps between high- and low-performing students remain about as large today as they were in 2021.
“It is encouraging to see Michigan students making gains in recent years on these reading and math assessments,” said Interim State Superintendent Sue Carnell. “Hard work by local districts and students is paying off. That said, we still have much room for further improvement.”
The report also found school districts that were remote in 2020-21 are “catching up” to the rest of the state in terms of student growth (measured by increases in test scores) but remain behind in overall scores on assessments.
