Students with free or reduced-price school meals improved 0.7 percentage points to 73.3%, while students with paid meals dropped from 90.0% to 88.6%. (The Indiana Department of Education uses these categories to demonstrate socioeconomic status.) The year before COVID-19, the two groups were at 81.9% and 94.2%, respectively.

IDOE also compared scores by ethnicity, gender, whether the student was an English learner or not, and if the student received general or special education.

Students with disabilities—those who received special education—scored the lowest both before and after the start of the pandemic, with 60.9% proficient in 2018-2019 and 52.4% in 2020-2021. The second lowest were students with a Native Hawaiian/Pacific Islander ethnic background.

Both groups saw improvement this year, as 52.8% of students with disabilities and 63.4% of Native Hawaiian/Pacific Islander students showed proficient reading skills.

The percentage decrease from 2018-2019 to 2020-2021 was the largest among Black students. About 16% fewer Black students demonstrated proficiency.

“We know that students first learn to read, and then they read to learn,” said Dr. Katie Jenner, Indiana’s secretary of education. “Data shows a direct link between reading by the end of third grade and future learning.”

Information on the IREAD-3 scores references a Yale University study, saying, “Students who are poor readers at the end of third grade are likely to remain poor readers throughout their life … They even are less likely to graduate on time or may never receive their high school diploma.” Jenner also mentioned this study in an IDOE update from January.

This is likely referring to a journal article from 1997, which the book Start Early, Finish Strong references when it says, “According to researchers at Yale University, three-quarters of students who are poor readers in third grade will remain poor readers in high school.”

“As many students continue to recover from the academic impact of the COVID-19 pandemic, specific student populations—including our low-income, Black, Hispanic, special education, and English learner students—had persistent learning gaps even prior to the pandemic,” Jenner said. “That’s why it’s so important that educators, families, and communities continue to come together to lead innovative, intentional efforts to make sure all students are able to read.”

One way IDOE will try to accomplish this is by better preparing educators to teach students younger than third grade.

In May, IDOE released a statement saying, “Reading coaches will support kindergarten through second-grade teachers at 54 schools across the state as they lead research-based instruction rooted in the Science of Reading, which is a compilation of scientific research on reading, reading development and reading instruction.”

There is also a grant program available to schools and organizations to help students whose learning was affected by the pandemic and an upcoming dashboard that will display how well schools are preparing their future graduates for success.

In addition to these efforts, the state is partnering with Schoolhouse. world and Get Your Teach On and introducing grants parents can use for high-impact tutoring (“one-on-one or small group instructional programming … at least three times a week for 50 hours a semester,” according to the National Center for Learning Disabilities).

Indiana isn’t alone in combatting learning loss after COVID-19. Politicoawarded Indiana’s handling of pandemic-time education a D-, which still ranked it above about half of all states.

In June of this year, the United States Government Accountability Office compiled a report for Congress. “Compared to a typical year, teachers [across the U.S.] had more students start the 2020-2021 school year behind and make less academic progress,” it said. “Further, almost all teachers had students who ended the year behind.”

It added: “Schools will likely feel these effects for years to come.”