Released Tuesday morning, is the latest dispatch from the , a data project led by a team of researchers at Dartmouth, Harvard, Stanford, and the testing group NWEA. In two studies released last year, the consortium unearthed in high-poverty areas since 2020, along with resulting from billions of dollars in federal assistance to K–12 schools. 

This week’s update comes on the heels of a disheartening publication of test scores from the National Assessment of Educational Progress, often referred to as the Nation’s Report Card. While some had hoped that results from that exam would provide reason for hope, only minimal progress was made in fourth-grade math; reading scores were actually worse than in 2022, the nadir of the pandemic. 

Thomas Kane, a professor of economics and education at Harvard, compared the sustained learning loss of the last few years with “the tsunami following the earthquake” — a destructive after-effect that has almost entirely resisted remediation efforts by local, state, and federal authorities. Struggling students, in particular, have fallen further behind their higher-performing peers, he observed.

“Given all the money that’s been spent, and the fact that students already lost ground between 2019 and 2022, you would have expected that there would be some bounce-back in reading,” Kane said. “But no, actually. Students continued to lose ground, especially at the bottom end.” 

While NAEP offers state-by-state comparisons, along with the results from several dozen major urban districts, the Scorecard group combines those figures with local testing data for 35 million students across 43 states, allowing the public to chart the trajectories of individual districts since 2019. 

Across the country, Kane and his collaborators calculate, just 11 percent of students in grades 3–8 are currently enrolled in districts where average reading levels exceed those measured in 2019; 17 percent are in districts where math knowledge is higher than the last pre-pandemic year. Set against the continuing fall in literacy, a slight rebound in math scores — about one-tenth of one grade level since 2022 — represents most of the good news. 

In relatively poorer communities, that silver lining is almost entirely accounted for by federal ESSER funds, which totaled $190 billion between 2021 and 2024. The report indicates that those grants prevented an even greater freefall in learning, while noting that “there were higher-impact ways to use the dollars” to speed student recovery.

Rebecca Sibilia is the founder of , a research and advocacy group that advocates for more and better-designed resources for schools. A frequent critic of the quality of school finance data, she said the breakneck pace at which ESSER dollars were appropriated and distributed made it virtually impossible for them to be maximally effective.

“We absolutely have research that shows money matters, and helps us understand how money matters,” she said. “ESSER was not constructed in a way that aligns with that research.”

Michael Petrilli, president of the right-leaning Thomas B. Fordham Institute, called the Scorecard study “devastating.

“We already knew that the bottom had fallen out for most states, but now we see how hard it is to find districts bucking the terrible trends,” he wrote in an email.

‘Two kinds of bad news’

Perhaps the most alarming trend of the period bridging the COVID depths of 2022 and the present day has been a substantial rise in educational inequality. 

By sorting thousands of school districts according to their number of students eligible for free or reduced-price lunch (a commonly used proxy for poverty), the Scorecard researchers found that academic recovery over the last two years has proceeded much more quickly in affluent areas.

In nearly one-third of all low-poverty school districts, math performance has been restored to the pre-pandemic status quo; the same is true in just 8 percent of high-poverty districts. In all, over 14 percent of the richest districts (i.e., those where household income is higher than in 90 percent of other places) have returned to 2019-era learning in both math and reading, compared with less than 4 percent of the poorest districts. 

A similar dynamic has been apparent in NAEP scores going back more than a decade. While the 2010s saw gradually declining results on average, the highest-scoring students tended to make some progress in each administration of the exam. Meanwhile, their struggling classmates experienced much larger reversals. Since 2013, the disparity in fourth-grade reading performance between kids at the 90th and 10th percentiles, respectively, grew by 14 points; the divergence in eighth-grade math grew by 16 points over that decade.

Stanford sociologist Sean Reardon, who leads the Scorecard project alongside Kane, said the widening gaps make it clear that the task of general academic recovery must be accompanied by a special focus on students who are at risk of never getting back on track. 

“There’s two kinds of bad news between the NAEP results and ours,” Reardon said. “One is the disappointing lack of recovery, and even continued decline, in reading. Those average trends are disappointing, but they’re compounded by the fact that the negative trends are worse for the kids in the highest-poverty districts.”

The worrying class bifurcation is apparent from coast to coast, but Kane specifically identified achievement gaps in his home state of Massachusetts. There, the well-to-do Boston suburbs of Lexington and Newton have either surpassed their academic performance of a half-decade ago or have very nearly dug themselves out of the hole. 

Just a few miles away, however, in the working-class cities of Everett and Revere, the average student is floundering more than a year behind the pace set by similarly aged students just five years ago. In Lynn, one of the most troubled school districts in the state, elementary and middle schoolers are two years behind in math and over 1.5 years behind in reading.

The report includes from relatively disadvantaged communities (including Union City, New Jersey, Montgomery, Alabama, and Natchitoches Parish, Louisiana) that had made significant strides back to normalcy. But the typical such district still faces years of work to regain what was lost. 

Joshua Goodman, an economist at Boston University, said that education leaders needed to guard against the sense that emerging gaps simply represented the “new normal.” If he’d been told in 2020 that children would still be scuffling to this extent by the middle of the decade, he said, he would have been shocked and disappointed. 

“I think I implicitly believed that, once the pandemic receded and schools reopened, the normal operation of kids’ lives would somehow cause them to bounce back,” Goodman recalled. “I don’t know if I was just being naive or not thinking it through properly, but this is a very grim result.”

Meager return from COVID funds

The dour note struck by observers is largely related to the meager returns of Washington’s relief efforts. 

Previous work from the Education Recovery Scorecard has pointed to a modest bump in student performance that followed an infusion of billions of dollars to states and districts. But that upward movement didn’t come close to reversing the full extent of COVID’s damage; for that, researchers estimated, hundreds of billions of dollars more would be needed.

With federal funds now expired, and no new federal appropriations on the horizon, ESSER’s final impact can begin to be measured. For every $1,000 spent per student between 2022 and 2024, the authors estimate, math scores increased by roughly .005 standard deviations (a scientific measure showing the distance from the statistical mean). 

In comparison with other policy changes in education, Kane and Reardon showed, this is a fairly small figure — just a tiny fraction of by schools that adopted the Success for All reform model, for example, or those that followed the implementation of high-dosage tutoring programs. 

Kane said the relatively freewheeling structure of ESSER funds — states were only required to spend 20 percent of the aid on programs specifically aimed at lifting student achievement — meant that many expenditures were not efficiently targeted at the schools and students of greatest need. The small payoff could serve as a warning to Republicans reportedly the Department of Education and disbursing its various revenue streams to states to spend freely. 

“This is an example of bypassing federal regulators, or even bypassing state regulators, and giving all the money directly to school districts,” Kane argued. “We just saw what happens: Some school districts will figure out how to use the money well, but others won’t.”

Referencing widely circulated papers by school finance researchers Kirabo Jackson and Eric Hanushek, Sibilia said the general case for spending more on K–12 schools was sound. But ESSER money was sent out the door quickly, often to districts that didn’t serve large numbers of needy students. While spending it, district leaders had to make fast decisions with incomplete information.

The simultaneous and temporary explosion in districts’ budgets had led to a concurrent increase in shoddy vendors for services like tutoring and professional development. No matter the amount of money that Congress might have awarded, she added, the effects of ESSER would have been dampened by the limited supply of high-quality providers.

“There are a few researchers in the country that are dogmatic in saying that money, no matter how it’s spent, will give you a positive return,” Sibilia said. “But I think 95 percent of the people studying money in education will tell you that spending is only as good as what you can buy.”

The puzzling finding comes from figures released Friday by education researchers at Harvard and Stanford universities. Their new resource, the , compiles test scores from roughly 4,000 schools that serve some in third through eighth grades across 29 states and the District of Columbia. Their work presents the first school system-level analysis of student learning through the pandemic.

Students in urban and suburban schools were 65% and 54% of a school year behind in math, respectively, according to the Scorecard; yet young people at rural schools were buffered somewhat, losing half a year. Meanwhile in reading, where drops were less dramatic overall, rural students fell behind by a third of a school year while urban and suburban students were just 29% and 24% of a year back.

Focusing on math scores, where COVID losses were more stark, Harvard education professor Thomas Kane said his findings are relatively good news for rural schools.

“The average rural district fared better than the average urban district,” he said in an email.

The reasons explaining the trend still remain something of a mystery, added his research partner, Stanford education professor Sean Reardon.

“We haven’t had a chance yet to dig into possible explanations for why we see some difference between rural and urban districts,” he said. 

The Scorecard’s analysis also includes town school districts, which are typically less remote and more populated than rural districts, but further from city centers than suburban districts. Town school systems had drops in math similar to their suburban counterparts and losses in reading slightly less severe than rural districts.

Alex Baum works as director of advocacy and research at the , which supports several rural counties in Iowa and runs a regional . He has not yet seen “clear and convincing data” explaining the differences between rural and urban schools through the pandemic, he said. (Iowa is not yet included in the Scorecard.) But he believes part of the reason for relatively larger drops in reading scores among students who live in more remote locations may be their limited access to outside-of-school learning opportunities.

“With fewer literacy programs, summer learning options [and] libraries, … rural students didn’t have the additional support that urban students had, leading to a larger decline in reading proficiency scores,” Baum said. 

Nancy Mondragon, a classroom aide in Arkansas’s Waldron School District, said the children’s struggles reflected the parents’ economic woes.

“In rural communities like ours, parents were juggling a lot in trying to make a living, and children spent more time on devices,” she said. “The reading loss definitely shows.”

Mondragon is training to become a lead teacher through Reach University, a program working to combat teacher shortages in rural districts. Reach Dean of Undergraduate Studies Kimberly Eckert believes those persistent staffing issues may also be a factor behind literacy losses.

“For reading, where different learner needs demand different interventions, the teacher shortage may be more of the issue here,” she said. “Access to reading specialists in rural communities may have been impacted by COVID, even if schools remained open.”

The length of school closures has been a commonly cited factor in the conversation around missed learning, particularly in math. Schools play an especially large role in teaching students arithmetic, and sparsely populated areas were less likely to shutter their campuses during the pandemic. 

It’s “plausible” that the difference between rural and urban districts’ scores could have hinged significantly on rural systems reopening sooner, said Reardon. But vastly different virtual learning programs from one district to the next and with young people juggling traumatic life-changing events like the death of a caregiver, he stressed that other factors also certainly played in.

“There was a lot happening in communities that shaped the magnitude of learning losses in addition to when schools were open or remote,” he said.

Overall, the Harvard and Stanford research suggests that school closures were not the primary element explaining achievement losses. Though setbacks tended to be higher where schools remained closed longer, there was wide variation in the results. Districts that remained virtual for equal amounts of time often had vastly different learning outcomes, and states and school systems that underwent extended closures in many cases outperformed those that opened sooner for in-person learning.

The Scorecard relies on state test scores for its analysis, but because many states use different exams, the researchers used results from the Oct. 24 National Assessment of Educational Progress to normalize the data so they could make apples-to-apples comparisons. States that have not yet released their test scores are not included in the analysis, including several with large drop-offs in achievement and high rates of school closures during COVID, such as Maryland, New Jersey and New Mexico.

Beyond differences between rural, urban and suburban schools, their research reveals several other key findings on pandemic learning:

• Losses were most pronounced in high-poverty districts compared to more affluent ones. The wealthiest quarter of districts in the sample maintained an extra 21% of a year’s worth of learning in math and 6% of a year’s worth of learning in reading over the most economically disadvantaged quarter. 

“We’ve seen the greatest increase in inequity in our lifetimes over the last few years,” Kane. “Unless we act over the next couple of years, these losses could become permanent and could have long-term consequences for social mobility.”

• Math setbacks exceeded a full year’s worth of learning in the school districts of over a half million students, some 5% of those represented in the analysis. On average, students were behind about a half grade level in math and about a quarter grade level in reading. A small minority attended districts that made gains in math, 2.5%, or reading, 15%, from 2019 to 2022.

• Recovering missed learning will be expensive. In nearly two-thirds of districts included in the analysis, catching students up will likely require investments exceeding the total cash delivered to schools via the American Rescue Plan. (The researchers reached that conclusion by assuming the cost of additional recovered learning will be equivalent to the typical cost of learning during the school year. In other words, catching students up on 25% of a year’s worth of learning will require 25% of a district’s annual operating budget.)

Tequilla Brownie, CEO of TNTP, she sees the new data as a “call to action.”

“It is clear that the problems pre-date the pandemic and, therefore, we should not confine ourselves to solutions that present a path back to pre-pandemic levels of proficiency,” she said.

Today, , a collaboration with researchers at the Center for Education Policy Research at Harvard University (CEPR) and Stanford University’s Educational Opportunity Project, released the first comparable view of district level learning loss during the pandemic utilizing the recently released 2022 NAEP data, and states who have publicly reported their district proficiency rates on their spring 2022 assessments. These interactive district level maps include data from 29 states (plus DC) – where the necessary data was available.

CEPR Faculty Director Thomas J. Kane and Sean Reardon, Professor of Poverty and Inequality in Education at Stanford University and director of the Educational Opportunity Project have used the 2022 NAEP scores to make state assessment results comparable. The new research, found on , also incorporates data on weeks remote and the federal recovery dollars (ESSER) received per district, equipping state and local leaders with the information they need to re-calibrate their current recovery plans.

“The pandemic was like a band of tornadoes that swept across the country,” said CEPR Faculty Director Thomas J. Kane. “Some communities were left relatively untouched, while neighboring schools were devastated. The Education Recovery Scorecard is the first high-resolution map of the tornadoes’ path to help local leaders see the magnitude of the damage and guide local recovery efforts.”

“One of the things we found is that even within a district, there is variability. School districts are the first line of action to help children catch up. The better they know about the patterns of learning loss, the more they’re going to be able to target their resources effectively to reduce educational inequality of opportunity and help children and communities thrive,” said Reardon, Professor of Poverty and Inequality, Stanford Graduate School of Education.

In response to the findings, U.S. Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona said, “We must muster the political will at the state and local level to match the urgency and federal investment in our students through the historic $122 billion in the American Rescue Plan. The latest Nation’s Report Card results must serve as a call to action to revisit our existing plans and scale up proven academic recovery strategies such as ensuring a robust and qualified teacher and leader workforce, intense and frequent tutoring aligned to high quality curriculum, and after-school and summer enrichment programming. While the recent data is alarming, catching our students up to the 2019 achievement levels is a low bar. We must aim higher. Our students should be leading the world.”

• The average U.S. public school student in grades 3-8 lost the equivalent of a half year of learning in math and a quarter of a year in reading.
• Rather than rely on headlines about state achievement, parents and local officials need to understand how their local schools were affected. Six (6) percent of students were in districts that lost more than a year of learning in math, while 3 percent were in districts where math achievement actually rose.
• The pandemic widened disparities in achievement between high and low poverty schools. The quarter of schools with highest shares of students receiving federal lunch subsides missed two-thirds of a year of math learning, while the quarter of schools with the fewest low-income students lost two-fifths of a year.

While many states and districts are using their portion of the $190B in federal aid to add tutoring and summer school and extended days, many of those efforts are not yet large enough to fully address the learning loss that has occurred. Using these estimates of achievement losses along with expected effect sizes for catch-up efforts and the share of students being served by each, districts now have an opportunity to make sure their plans are commensurate with their students’ losses.

“We now see how much ground districts have to make up to get their students back on track. More than ever, we need district leaders to communicate with their communities on how they are using recovery funds to address those gaps,” said Marguerite Roza, Director of the Edunomics Lab.

Civil rights leaders see this new research as a call to action for state leaders to rise up a much bolder, aggressive response.

“Learning losses among minority students over the last two years have put the long-term vitality of the nation at risk. Latino and African American students make up of all students, making it a national imperative to invest in their academic recovery,” said Janet Murguia, the President and CEO of UnidosUS.

“If there is a sparkle of light during these dark times, it’s our nation’s historic infusion of funds through ARP and ESSER,” said John B. King, president of The Education Trust. “To address unfinished learning, we implore district leaders to invest in evidence-based strategies, including increased access to strong, diverse teachers, targeted intensive tutoring, expanded learning time, and strengthening socioemotional supports and relationships weakened during the pandemic.”

Kane said, “The whole village needs to hear the bell ringing, not just schools. Mayors should organize tutoring efforts at local libraries. Community organizations should plan school vacation academies and summer learning opportunities. Governors should be funding and evaluating innovative pilots to provide models that everyone could use. We cannot wait for the Spring 2023 state test results next fall to tell us that we underinvested in recovery efforts. Many are happy just to get back to normal, but normal won’t help kids catch up.”

The Education Recovery Scorecard is supported by funds from the Carnegie Corporation of New York, Kenneth C. Griffin and the Walton Family Foundation. The Stanford Education Data Archive (SEDA) is based on research funded in part by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

Disclosure: Carnegie Corporation of New York and Walton Family Foundation provide financial support to both the Education Recovery Scorecard and ����Ӱ��. The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation provides financial support to both the Stanford Education Data Archive and ����Ӱ��.