Call it a post-COVID push of the good kind.
West Virginia’s fourth- and eighth-graders in 2024 continued to inch steady improvements in reading and math scores, despite big losses wrought by the pandemic in previous years.
That’s according to the Nation’s Report Card, released Wednesday by the National Center for Education Statistics, which charts the academic fortunes of students in the U.S. and Department of Defense Schools across the globe.
While students in the Mountain State had academic victories, their counterparts elsewhere were languishing, said Peggy G. Carr, the center’s commissioner.
“Overall, student achievement has not returned to pre-pandemic performance,” Carr continued.
“Where there are signs of recovery, they are mostly in math and largely driven by higher-performing students,” she said.
“Lower-performing students are struggling – especially in reading.”
The national average in fourth-grade math, the report card shows, is 237. West Virginia’s fourth-graders came in with a collective 232.
Eighth-graders across the Mountain State netted an average 261 in math, versus the 272, nationwide.
Reading scores for West Virginia’s fourth-graders came in at 206, compared to the 214 among their peers across the country.
The net reading score of 247 for the eighth grade class here was 10 points lower than the rest of the nation at 257.
County-by-county breakdowns aren’t shown in this particular snapshot, but Monongalia County students, as shown in more defined assessments, generally outpace their neighbors in West Virginia.
Two years ago, for example, nearly 63% of local students achieved proficiency in English compared to the 55% showing statewide in those same subjects.
More than 61% of students did the same, compared to the collective 51% elsewhere in West Virginia.
