US students performing worse than 10 years ago, new report shows — but there are reasons for hope

A new report from the organization Education Scorecard shares a mixed picture of American education, showing that districts with middle incomes are lagging in recovery from COVID-19 — and that achievement was already falling before the pandemic.Video above: Congress passed a national school choice program, but will states participate?Students’ reading and math skills, as measured by test scores, took a hit during the COVID-19 pandemic, when schools went online and norms were upended. But according to the report, the U.S. actually entered a “learning recession” years before, beginning in 2013.The Scorecard, which comes from researchers at Stanford, Harvard and Dartmouth, uses state test results but ties them to a national scale to compare achievement. They found that the average annual loss in reading achievement in the years leading up to the pandemic — from 2017 to 2019 — was just as big as the loss sustained during the pandemic itself, from 2019 to 2022. According to the National Assessment of Educational Progress, a congressionally mandated program, eighth-grade reading scores are now at their lowest point since 1990, and fourth-grade scores are at pre-2003 levels. But the report said the 2025 scores are the first signs of a “turnaround” in reading for students, and math began improving back in 2022.”The recovery in reading appears to be related to state early-literacy reforms,” a press release said, pointing to reforms related to the “science of reading.”All of the states where reading improved between 2022 and 2025, including Kentucky, Maryland, Louisiana and Tennessee, were implementing comprehensive “science of reading” reforms. Meanwhile, none of the states that had “eschewed” literacy reforms as of January 2024 improved in reading between 2022 and 2025, including Georgia, Massachusetts, New Hampshire and Wisconsin, the report says. But the experts noted that those interventions weren’t working everywhere that they were implemented, meaning they may not be sufficient for improvement.”The pandemic was the mudslide that followed seven years of erosion in student achievement,” said Professor Tom Kane, faculty director of the Center for Education Policy Research at Harvard University. “The ‘learning recession’ started a decade ago, after policymakers switched off the early warning system of test-based accountability and social media took over children’s lives.”He went on to say, “The recovery of U.S. education has begun. But it’s up to the rest of us to spread it.”One stubborn issue has been absenteeism. In 2024-25, 23% of students were chronically absent, which usually means missing at least 10% of school. That’s lower than the peak during the pandemic, but higher than the rate before the pandemic, which was 15%. According to the report, if attendance had gone back up, the recovery in student achievement would’ve been “meaningfully” larger.The report recommended that the federal government should focus on the role of social media, early literacy reforms, lowering absenteeism, and encouraging districts seeing success to share their strategies with other districts in their states.Notably, lower-income and higher-income districts have seen larger improvements after the pandemic. Middle-income districts — where 30-70% of students receive federally subsidized lunches — have seen the least improvement on average. Growth among low-income districts seemed to have been driven by federal relief funding that has now expired, the report said. High-income districts had more capital to draw on during the pandemic. But middle-income districts didn’t get as much relief funding, nor did they have that capital to fall back on.