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.
“That high-resolution picture is much more informative for district leaders, for parents, for local communities, and for state leaders who want to know where are the bright spots and the trouble spots in their state,” said Sean Reardon, a professor in Stanford University’s Graduate School of Education, and an author of the new report.
The district-by-district portrait reveals some troubling trends.
School systems where family income is highest are almost four times as likely to see full academic recovery for students, in both reading and math, than school systems where more students come from low-income families. And both within districts, and between districts, socioeconomic and racial gaps in math achievement are growing.
The more granular, district-level analysis also complicates state-level NAEP results.
Alabama, for example, was the only state to have made gains beyond its pre-pandemic 4th grade math scores on NAEP. On average, low-income districts in the state made more progress between 2022 and 2024 than high-income districts. Still, more than a third of students are in districts that haven’t recovered in 4th grade math.
What role did pandemic-relief aid play?
Across the country, students still have a lot of ground to make up, the researchers found. Compared to students in the same grades before the pandemic, students in spring 2024 were about half a grade level behind in both reading and math using the Education Recovery Scorecard’s composite measure.
When NAEP reported similarly lagging scores in January, some observers asked why achievement hasn’t rebounded further, given the infusion of $190 billion in federal money for recovery.
But that’s not the right question, said Reardon: “The appropriate way to think about it is the counterfactual—if we hadn’t spent the money, would it have been even worse?”
The Education Recovery Scorecard analysis suggests that ESSER funding did, in fact, “prevent larger losses” in low-income districts. There, the researchers calculated, the federal dollars had about as much influence on student achievement as a general revenue increase—a marginal boost in test scores, but one that could translate into higher lifetime earnings.
The researchers were also able to evaluate whether spending more money specifically on learning recovery, like providing tutoring or expanding summer school, led to a greater bang for the buck.
In California, where the state maintained detailed data on how districts used their funds, this seemed to be the case—districts that allocated more than the 20 percent of funds required to go to academic interventions saw more improvement in test scores.
It would be “unreasonable” to extrapolate that districts should have spent 100 percent of the funding on academics, said Reardon. Other uses, from building safety upgrades to mental health services, likely had positive effects that can’t be measured in test scores, he said.
Still, the finding implies there would have been more academic recovery if other districts spent more on interventions, said Thomas Kane, a professor of education and economics at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, and an author on the report.
The report recommends that states and districts find the money to continue the learning recovery programs that pandemic relief aid previously paid for, and “double down on the academic catchup efforts.”
Lessons from one district that’s defied the downward trend
That’s what the Ector County schools in Texas have done.
The 33,000-student district, where 75 percent of kids qualify for free or reduced-price lunch, is one of a small number of districts serving a large majority of students from low-income families that have brought students back to pre-pandemic achievement levels.
Only about 4 percent of districts in the bottom 10 percent of the income distribution in the Education Recovery Scorecard sample have recovered in both math and reading.
In Ector County, a tutoring program that served 6,000 students, paid for through COVID relief funds, is now supported through general funds, said Scott Muri, the former district superintendent who left the position in January.
Before the pandemic, the district had already shaped an “aggressive strategy” to improve student academic outcomes, Muri said. Ector was in the process of launching an outcomes-based tutoring program, which tied compensation for the tutoring companies to student achievement, and had already begun implementing a staffing approach that incentivized the highest-performing teachers to go to the lowest-performing schools.
Having a “clear vision” in place before the federal money started coming in helped Ector apply it immediately, Muri said. Instead of the outcomes-based tutoring program reaching a few hundred students, for example, it served thousands, he said.
“The dollars helped us simply accelerate that strategy,” Muri said.
