Inside a High-Poverty School District’s Exceptional Postpandemic Rebound
But what will happen to Birmingham City Schools and other districts when federal relief ends this September?
In 2022 Birmingham City Schools superintendent Mark Sullivan was stunned when he found out how much his students had fallen behind. Their reading scores had dipped modestly from prepandemic levels, but their math performance — already well behind national averages before COVID-19 — had plummeted to “dismal” lows. For Sullivan, a former math teacher, that felt like a “punch in the gut.”
His district wasn’t alone. Across the country, students suffered historic learning losses after COVID-19 shuttered classrooms, with dire losses in math. The impacts were especially felt in poor communities like Birmingham, where the vast majority of students are Black and receive free or reduced-price lunch.
New research by Harvard and Stanford researchers, with support from Carnegie Corporation of New York, finds that school districts are making a partial comeback. According to the Education Recovery Scorecard, the first nationwide study of pandemic education recovery, U.S. students made up roughly one-third of their pandemic loss in math, and one-quarter of their pandemic loss in reading during the 2022–23 academic year — aided by $189 billion of federal pandemic funding for elementary and secondary schools.
The study also revealed dramatic rebounds in some low-income districts, including Birmingham City, where students have nearly caught up to their prepandemic math scores. Can other school districts and policymakers learn from these success stories before the time to spend the federal aid runs out?
A Lack of Data
The COVID-19 pandemic was devastating for student achievement — and recovery has not been a straightforward task, as schools must generate more learning per day despite staff shortages and rising student absenteeism.
There hasn’t been a clear playbook, either. The majority of the federal Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief Fund (ESSER) has been directed at local school districts, which — while given wide latitude to make spending decisions — must do so before the program ends this September.
Tom Kane, a coauthor of the Education Recovery Scorecard and faculty director of the Harvard Center for Education Policy Research, was curious to find out which districts are seeing successful recoveries, and how their own districts’ recoveries stack up against state and national trends. But, because states use different tests and different proficiency definitions, it was not possible to compare the achievement gains of students in different parts of the country.
Recognizing the urgency, Kane joined with Stanford Educational Opportunity Project sociologist Sean Reardon, an Andrew Carnegie Fellow, to publish the Education Recovery Scorecard, the first study to directly compare school districts’ pandemic recoveries across the country. Using a method pioneered by Reardon, the researchers stitched together school districts’ local test scores with states’ performance on a national assessment to place every district’s scores on a common grade-level scale. Educators and decision-makers can use the scorecard to zoom in on more than 8,000 school districts and check out how many grade levels their math and reading scores dropped between 2019 and 2022, and how much they’ve recovered since then.
The scorecard reveals important national trends. Because U.S. school districts have, on average, recovered just one-third of their math loss and one-quarter of their reading loss, many school districts will find themselves still far short of their prepandemic achievement by the time federal relief ends this fall, according to the researchers.
The report also identifies outperforming districts, like Birmingham City. While the study could not draw conclusions about the specific intervention strategies used by districts, Kane hopes the successful districts they identified can serve as case studies for educators and policymakers. “Without this, people might say, ‘Okay, we’re still behind; there aren’t any bright spots to try to learn from,’” says Kane. “But now a district elsewhere in the country has a chance to learn from what Birmingham did.”
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