Districts Recovering From an Achievement Slide Have This in Common

On the heels of the recent disheartening results on the test known as the nation’s report card, another analysis adds some nuance to the overarching story of a downward slide in student achievement.

Though students are still behind their pre-pandemic peers in math and reading, there are a number of districts across the country that have bucked these trends. In part, this could be related to how school systems used federal COVID-relief funds. In at least one state, districts that spent more of those dollars on academic recovery saw greater student progress.

The findings are the latest release from the Education Recovery Scorecard, a project from researchers at Harvard and Stanford universities that tracks pandemic-related learning loss at the district level across the country. To make comparisons across districts, the analysis combines state test scores for nearly 40 million students across 43 states from 2019, 2022, and 2024 with data from the National Assessment of Educational Progress.

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