The decline in learning was astonishing. Many of these children simply did not do any reading at all for a whole year.
> The long-term assessment is a crucial piece of data for another reason: It was administered to students between October 2019 and March 2020, making it a final snapshot of academic trends before the emergence of COVID-19. Loveless said he hoped future analyses of how kids learned during and after the greatest disaster in K-12 history wouldn’t overlook the “deeper,” persistent stagnation that preceded it.
If testing for the 2019-2020 school year stopped rather than completed, then you've got a data problem because it's not clear that tested performance is independent of scheduling.
Also, even if the testing was all completed as scheduled, COVID-19 was on at least some student's minds throughout February, which could reduce test scores. It can be difficult to focus on testing when a not yet declared pandemic is starting up.
> The latest release comes from NAEP’s 2020 assessment of long-term trends, which was administered by the National Center for Education Statistics to nine- and 13-year-olds before COVID-19 first shuttered schools last spring.