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Though COVID-19 might seem a lifetime ago, America’s students are still recovering from the learning loss that stemmed from pandemic-era remote learning. To explore how students are testing in wake of the pandemic, researchers at Harvard, Stanford, and Dartmouth compiled the Education Recovery Scorecard, which was released earlier this month. To compile this comprehensive report, researchers used the test score results from about 11,000 school districts across 43 states to determine the extent to which the math and reading proficiency of students in grades 3-8 changed from Spring 2019 to Spring 2022, and Spring 2022 to Spring 2024.
Education is the foundation of how we grow, learn, and contribute to society, so ensuring students are proficient in important subjects like math and reading is vital. Unfortunately, the report found that American students are currently about half a grade level behind where they were before the pandemic in both math and reading. While no state has seen improvements in either subject from 2019 to 2024, the rate of decline isn’t equal nationwide: test scores have declined much more in low- and middle-income communities than they have in wealthier ones.
Just 17% of students in grades 3-8 are in districts where the average math achievement is higher than it was in 2019. Reading levels are even more difficult to improve; a mere 11% of students are in districts that have recovered in reading.
Chronic absenteeism, which worsened during the COVID-19 pandemic, continues to hinder post-pandemic academic recovery – especially in high-poverty school districts. Before the pandemic, in 2019, the national absenteeism rate was 15%; over the course of the pandemic, that number nearly doubled, to 29% in 2022. However, things are looking up: the rate of chronic absenteeism has improved slightly since 2023, when the rate was 26%. In the 20 states reporting attendance data through Spring 2024, chronic absenteeism has decreased to 24% — a modest improvement, but improvement nonetheless.
So what can schools do to make up the learning gap? The report concluded that, while there’s still a long way to go, student achievement grew more in districts that spent more on academic interventions, like tutoring or summer school. And hopefully, with more academic interventions and increasing attendance, America’s school districts can start improving students’ proficiency and reading in math – to set them up for success in high school and beyond.
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