The 2024-25 Benchmark Assessment Legislative Report, put together by researchers at Michigan State University, tracks student performance from fall 2020 through spring 2025. Lawmakers use it to help decide how to spend education dollars.

Math is improving. Reading not so much.

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The good news: math scores have climbed fast over the past two school years with Michigan students ending 2024–25 slightly above pre-pandemic national averages. The not-so-good news: reading scores barely moved. After dropping during COVID, they’ve stayed mostly flat since then.

Remote learning left long-term damage.

The report confirms what many families already suspected – districts that stayed remote in 2020-21 took the biggest decline in both math and reading. By spring 2025, students in fully remote districts were still 14 percentage points behind fully in-person districts in math – twice the gap we saw before COVID. Reading gaps have mostly, but not completely, returned to where they were in 2020.

Gaps are shrinking in some places, sticking in others.

Lower-performing middle schoolers have made bigger gains in reading than higher-performing students, but in math, top and bottom performers are improving at the same pace.

Another warning sign: although students gained four percentile points in math during the 2024-25 school year, they lost most of it over the summer. That’s happened two years in a row.

Racial and economic gaps show some improvement in reading, but math disparities are still worse than they were before 2020.

Recovery is happening but it’s not complete.

The report repeatedly stresses that Michigan is improving, just not all the way. And there’s a data problem: the students most hurt by COVID may have changed schools and may be underrepresented. Plus, districts haven’t been required to give benchmark tests since 2023, so fewer students are taking them. This makes it harder to get a complete and reliable picture of student recovery.

The big picture.

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Five years after COVID upended classrooms, Michigan’s academic recovery seems to be happening – but is uneven. Math is showing real momentum, reading is stubbornly stalled, and the gaps between student groups haven’t fully healed. The report makes one thing clear: progress is happening, but the state’s road back to pre-pandemic learning isn’t finished yet.