When COVID-19 shut down schools in 2020, the U.S. saw a rapid decline in average math and reading scores on standardized state tests such as MCAS. Many states reported math and reading scores that placed students over half a grade in content behind 2019 averages. As of 2024, in 48 states, standardized test scores have remained lower than they were in 2019.
While studies in 2025 indicated some recovery in math scores, national averages had not fully rebounded, and for many states, English scores had continued to decline. Recovery was uneven, with score disparities between wealthy and poor districts widening.
According to teachers, six years post-pandemic, the impact of COVID-19 on education is harder to pinpoint. It’s difficult to separate the impacts of COVID-19 and an increasingly digitized world on classrooms and whether changes in student behavior stem from the pandemic or technology.
Immediate impacts of COVID-19
On March 13, 2020, Brookline Public Schools closed for the rest of the school year. As online learning became the standard, teachers spent the summer of 2020 learning how to teach remotely, working within small groups and departments to make the most of digital tools like Zoom and Canvas.
Chemistry teacher Steve Lantos said the switch to online learning was disorienting, and many teachers had to figure out how to teach in a new format as they went along. According to Lantos, students could pass chemistry without ever having lifted a beaker.
“Suddenly, everybody was looking at screens. So that was a monumental shift: from being in person — this is a people place, we see each other live every day — to exclusively being on screens. It worked for some, and it definitely didn’t work for others.” Lantos said.
According to math teacher Julie Padgett, the online format forced teachers to move more slowly through the curriculum.
“Math is obviously a topic where discussing it is challenging. So there’s a lot of writing involved. It’s hard to be like, ‘show me what you did’ [online]. So, giving students feedback or assessing mistakes, all of those things became more challenging.” Padgett said. “Again, we were still able to do them; we just had to slow way down, so we covered a lot less content.”
Latin teacher Elisha Williams said he noticed the greatest loss in social capability.
“I think the social component was the hardest. To not get an opportunity to be with your peers and socialize, to be stuck at home with your parents,” Williams said. “So much of elementary school is learning how to be a kid in social situations.”
English teacher Rob Primmer tried to keep up with his junior and senior classes through Canvas announcements, sharing fun facts and writing activities. He said he tried to prioritize and adapt to the needs of his students.
“[I gave] interesting [prompts] where you have to make an argument, but certainly not rooted in a book or a text or whatnot. So [I was] giving students who wanted to do that kind of work the opportunity to do that work,” Primmer said.
For his students who were really struggling during the pandemic, with parents working at hospitals all day, for example, he adopted a different message.
“[It’s] ‘do nothing.’ Allow them to do nothing because that’s where their focus needs to be,” Primmer said.
Primmer also said that the online format made it much harder to gauge and encourage engagement in his discussion-based class, with virtual learning making it easier for students to hide behind their computers. He said he couldn’t tell if people were avoiding participating or struggling with technical difficulties.
“[There was a] lack of connection when we were all talking about this academic text. I think people lost some of the rigor of those conversations or the requirement to participate.” Primmer said.
Coming back to the classroom
After finally adapting to remote learning, teachers and students were quickly thrust into new, hybrid-style classrooms. With half of students at home and half in person, teachers faced new challenges in engaging classes and keeping the focus on school.
Lantos said that while they had learned strategies for teaching online, it was even more difficult to apply teaching skills during this in-between period.
“[Hybrid] was truly the worst. I have skills being live, in front of live students. But having half the audience be at home, I could really not attend in the best way I am as a teacher to either. So I was just constantly feeling like I was not doing the best that I could be,” Lantos said.
According to French and Spanish teacher Andrew Kimball, AP French scores were lower than average for a few years following the pandemic. Padgett said content gaps were apparent in math, too, where incoming students had lost at least three months of content.
“We had to adjust the curriculum the following year. But then, again, we were slowing down. So we had to take curriculum out. And so, one of the first impacts was just content missing. Kids were just like, ‘I’d never seen that before,’” Padgett said. “We had to adjust what we taught and what we had to review. And it became a little bit of each new year, like, ‘What did these people not learn?’”
During the pandemic, Lantos said that grades were meaningless, as anyone could cheat or collaborate for an A. This created a new expectation for grades from his incoming sophomores.
“In the second year, third year, the majority of students felt like, ‘Well, I’m an A student, so I should be getting the same grades now that I’m back live,’ and, no. Now that we’re back doing school, it really took at least two full years after everybody was back to — we teachers called it instilling academic muscle. Getting back to the rigor of ‘you have to sit and read, and reading is work, and you have to do some work on your own,’” Lantos said.
Lasting impacts
According to the Educational Opportunity Project at Stanford University’s estimates, Brookline’s test scores in 2022 fell almost half a year behind benchmark averages in 2019. In 2024, they were close to a month behind. However, looking solely at test scores leaves out important elements of education: classroom readiness and socialization.
In his classroom, Primmer notices a greater need for consistency on behalf of his students. He also said it’s hard to attribute changes to the pandemic or to the drastic technological developments of the last decade.
“The smartphone and the constantly being wired into the internet, that was a major development. COVID-19 was a major development. AI is a major development,” Primmer said. “The flexibility of rules that we have in the building, about phones in the hallways, or AirPods in, all that’s changed. It’s hard to isolate one particular thing and say, ‘well, that was a COVID thing.’”
On the social end, freshmen were in 3rd grade when the schools closed, and seniors in 6th grade. While content gaps have mostly been filled, Padgett said that current high schoolers are still behind in social skills.
“We’re still in that [place] where students have greater social anxiety. [There are] interpersonal effects of being in a developmental stage as a child and being told not to talk to people when that’s when you’re supposed to be playing with other kids, learning how to share, how to cooperate and how to work together,” Padgett said.
Primmer said students enter his class having read fewer books, which makes grade-level texts less accessible than they were 10 years ago. He said smartphones and COVID-19 have facilitated the decline in literacy.
“Over the span of my teaching career, I definitely feel as if the median attention span has reduced. It’s harder to focus for longer, it’s harder if your phone is in your pocket and then chiming at you, it’s harder if you are reminded of all the other things that you have to do. It’s harder to be in that present moment. COVID-19 has certainly, I think, contributed to that,” Primmer said.
Williams said his students behave differently with AI,and that it’s hard to define the relationship between technology’s impacts and COVID-19’s on the classroom. He said he questions whether the problems with AI and technology would have arisen naturally or if they were stimulated by the pandemic.
“In some ways, [AI] is making [students] less practiced at dealing with stressful, anxious things,” Williams said. “But I’ve often thought about this: students were on their phones before COVID-19. Did COVID-19 ramp everybody up, and so, you’re on your phone, and you’re just used to interacting online? Or was that bound to happen regardless because phones are addictive pieces of technology?”
Kimball, who has been teaching at the high school since 2007, said he’s seen two or three “microgenerations” of students, and that while schools always have to adapt to these new generations, COVID-19 forced teachers to adapt suddenly. Kimball now has his desks set up in groups.
“I have students participate more actively, using whiteboards in almost every block. I think there’s a more social component to learning a language now that I understand better, as opposed to pre-pandemic, when my students were sitting in a different configuration that was more individualized,” Kimball said.
Padgett said the adapting she’s done since the pandemic is part of the job.
“It’s always a little bit different, and we always have to adjust to meet the needs of the particular kids that we have that year. So if this year I have a class that’s quiet, I’m going to introduce some community-building activities, or I’m going to adjust my curriculum so that I’m encouraging them or forcing them to be more interactive,” Padgett said. “That’s just naturally teaching; we’re constantly adapting how we do what we do to meet the needs of the kids that we have.”
