Three school years after classrooms shut their doors in March 2020 following the initial outbreak of COVID-19, Georgia students remain behind in phonics compared to children in other states, said Woody Paik, executive vice president at education company Curriculum Associates, but the data also shows some good news.
“If I look across all grades for the spring of ’23, Georgia’s a little bit behind every grade relative to national,” he said, pointing to data from children from kindergarten through eighth grade.
Curriculum Associates sells lessons, assessments and classroom tools, including the popular i-Ready software, which is used by more than 11 million students nationwide. Paik spoke at the Georgia Board of Education’s retreat in Young Harris, Georgia, last week.
Across the nation, Curriculum Associates’ data shows academic recovery is sluggish in both reading and math. The data shows that while elementary school students in majority Black schools saw the biggest increases in reading and math scores between 2022 and 2023, majority Black and Latino schools remained significantly below majority white schools.