For press inquiries, contact Rachel Tropp at rachel_tropp@gse.harvard.edu.
Education Recovery Scorecard
The Education Recovery Scorecard provides the first opportunity to compare learning loss at the district level across the country, providing opportunities to further understand how time remote, federal dollars expenditure, and other factors impacted students during and after the COVID-19 pandemic.
New Release
New state data from the Education Recovery Scorecard project is now available. In addition, a new research brief entitled “The First Year of Pandemic Recovery: A District-Level Analysis” illuminates the progress of the first year of academic recovery for school districts in 30 states.
Last year, students in many states made historic gains in math and reading. Still, they made up only one-third of the pandemic loss in math and one quarter of the loss in reading. Even if they maintain last year's pace, students will not be caught up by the time federal relief expires in September. Moreover, the recovery efforts are not closing the gaps between high- and low-poverty districts which widened during the pandemic.
Read the Press Release
Read the Summary Report
"No one wants poor children to foot the bill for the pandemic, but that is the path that most states are on. States need to take leadership and ensure that every last dollar of the remaining federal relief is spent on academic recovery efforts, like summer school, high-quality tutoring, and after-school instruction next year."
CEPR Faculty Director Dr. Thomas Kane, co-author of the research
The First Year of Pandemic Recovery: A District-Level Analysis
A new report from Erin M. Fahle, Thomas J. Kane, Sean F. Reardon, and Douglas O. Staiger provides a look at the first year of academic recovery for school districts in 30 states.
Read the summary report
School District and Community Factors Associated With Learning Loss During the COVID-19 Pandemic
A new paper from Erin M. Fahle, Thomas J. Kane, Tyler Patterson, Sean F. Reardon, Douglas O. Staiger, and Elizabeth A. Stuart investigates how factors like school closures, community death rates, civic engagement, and social activity impacted learning loss during the pandemic.
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What Do Changes in State Test Scores Imply for Later Life Outcomes?
A paper from Thomas J. Kane, Elena Doty, Tyler Patterson, and Douglas O. Staiger investigates investigate the past relationship between NAEP scores and students’ later life outcomes.
Read the paper
“The pandemic was like a band of tornadoes that swept across the country. 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.”
CEPR Faculty Director Thomas J. Kane,
Education Recovery Scorecard Launch, 2022
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About the Project
Tom Kane at the Center for Education Policy Research at Harvard and Sean Reardon at Stanford’s Educational Opportunity Project have collaborated to provide the first view of district-level losses between 2019 and 2022. Many states have reported results on Spring 2022 assessments, but because each state sets its own proficiency levels, it’s not possible to compare changes in proficiency rates on different states’ tests. We use the 2022 NAEP scores to put the state proficiency levels on the same scale, and then report comparable declines by district and subgroup across the country.
Until now, many parents and policymakers have had no way to know how the national trends have touched their students. According to Learning Heroes, over 90% of parents still think their child is at or above grade level. Our hope is that these resources will prompt local communities to plan more ambitious catch-up efforts, using the $190 billion in federal pandemic relief aid. The interactive maps and corresponding data you will find on this site also provide insight on time spent in remote instruction, federal ESSER allocations and instructional spending per student. When available, achievement data are disaggregated by race and poverty status to provide a complete picture of the disparities in learning loss across the country.
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.