Education has faced unprecedented disruption during the COVID pandemic. Understanding how students have adapted as we have entered a different phase of the pandemic and some communities have returned to more typical schooling will inform a suite of policy interventions and subsequent research. We use data from an oral reading fluency (ORF) assessment—a rapid assessment taking only a few minutes that measures a fundamental reading skill—to examine COVID’s effects on children’s reading ability during the pandemic. We find that students in the first 200 days of the 2020–2021 school year tended to experience slower growth in ORF relative to prepandemic years. We also observe slower growth in districts with a high percentage of English language learners and/or students eligible for free and reduced-price lunch. These findings offer valuable insight into the effects of COVID on one of the most fundamental skills taught to children.

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Education has faced unprecedented disruption during the COVID pandemic. Understanding how students have adapted as we have entered a different phase of the pandemic and some communities have returned to more typical schooling will inform a suite of policy interventions and subsequent research. We use data from an oral reading fluency assessment-a rapid assessment taking only a few minutes that measures a fundamental reading skill-to examine COVID’s effects on children’s reading ability during the pandemic. We find that students in the first 200 days of the 2020-2021 school year tended to experience slower growth in ORF relative to pre-pandemic years. We also observed slower growth in districts with a high percentage of English language learners (ELLs) and/or students eligible for free and reduced-price lunch (FRL).

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Every year, the U.S. Department of Education selects hundreds of thousands of low-income students to provide additional documentation to corroborate their financial aid eligibility in a process known as verification. Although many are concerned about the potential deleterious effects of being selected, to date, studies are limited to descriptive analyses. To fill this gap in the literature, we use population-level, multicohort data to estimate the effects of financial aid verification on initial college enrollment for recent high school graduates in Tennessee. An entropy balance weighting approach indicates that students selected for verification are 3.8 percentage points (4.9%) less likely to enroll in college with underserved populations and late Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA) filers most negatively affected.