A new report by researchers at Stanford and Harvard finds that while the average U.S. student still lags behind pre-pandemic achievement levels in reading and math, students in a number of school districts across the country have regained the ground they lost in both subjects.
The analysis, which provides exclusive data on district-level changes in student achievement from 2019 to 2024, identifies 102 medium and large districts now performing above pre-pandemic levels in both math and reading, including high-poverty communities in Louisiana and Alabama.
Despite scattered bright spots, the researchers found that socioeconomic and other disparities in achievement have continued to grow. The highest-income districts nationwide were almost four times as likely to recover as the poorest districts, and districts enrolling the highest proportions of Black and Hispanic students have seen bigger declines in test scores since 2019 than predominantly white and more affluent districts.
Even within communities, Black and Hispanic students lost more ground than their white peers in the same district.
"There's enormous variation in how test scores have changed over the last five years, and the overall decline masks a pernicious inequality," said Sean Reardon, the Professor of Poverty and Inequality in Education and faculty director of the Educational Opportunity Project at Stanford University (EOP), who co-led the analysis. "Test scores have declined far more in middle- and low-income communities than in wealthy ones."
The researchers also investigated the impact of federal pandemic aid on academic recovery, finding that the funds helped to prevent larger losses in the highest-poverty districts.
The findings were released on Feb. 11 as part of the Education Recovery Scorecard, a collaboration between researchers at Stanford Graduate School of Education (GSE) and the Center for Education Policy and Research (CEPR) at Harvard.
Mapping trends in thousands of school districts
The Education Recovery Scorecard uses data from the Stanford Education Data Archive (SEDA), a national database built by the EOP that includes test scores and demographic information from 2009 to 2024 for students in every public school district in the United States. SEDA, which has been publicly available online since 2016, is used by researchers and policymakers to study patterns and trends across the country and by race, gender, and socioeconomic conditions.
With SEDA data, the Education Recovery Scorecard delivers a uniquely detailed picture of academic gains and losses for thousands of individual school districts across the country. The analysis builds on data from the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), widely known as the "nation's report card," which measures progress at a state level and for 26 large urban school districts.
The Education Recovery Scorecard provides a higher-resolution picture, mapping trends in more than 8,000 school districts nationwide. It allows users to compare progress in one district with that of another, even if the districts are in different states and use different tests and proficiency standards.
A key challenge in comparing performance among U.S. students nationwide is that all states use different tests and standards to define proficiency, which can change even within a state from year to year. By aligning annual statewide test results with scores from the biennial NAEP, Reardon's team at the EOP established a common metric - in the form of grade-level equivalents - to compare student performance across states and over time.
For the Education Recovery Scorecard, the researchers used SEDA data from 43 states (the remaining states were left out for various reasons, such as low participation rates on state tests or inadequate data reporting). The states included in this analysis capture roughly 35 million students in grades 3 through 8, almost 80% of those enrolled in U.S. public schools.
Widening achievement gaps
As of spring 2024, the average U.S. student remained nearly half a grade level behind 2019 scores in both math and reading, the researchers found. But "the declines were not visited equally upon all school districts," said Reardon, who is also a senior fellow at the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research.
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Sean Reardon | Courtesy Stanford GSE
