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.
A collaboration of:
Project Leaders
“It’s not readily visible to parents when their children have fallen behind earlier cohorts, but the data from 7,800 school districts show clearly that this is the case,” said Sean Reardon, Professor of Poverty and Inequality, Stanford Graduate School of Education. “The educational impacts of the pandemic were not only historically large, but were disproportionately visited on communities with many low-income and minority students. Our research shows that schools were far from the only cause of decreased learning—the pandemic affected children through many ways – but they are the institution best suited to remedy the unequal impacts of the pandemic.”
Sean Reardon
Professor of Poverty and Inequality in Education“Children have resumed learning, but largely at the same pace as before the pandemic. There’s no hurrying up teaching fractions or the Pythagorean theorem,” said CEPR faculty director Thomas Kane. “The hardest hit communities—like Richmond, VA, St. Louis, MO, and New Haven, CT, where students fell behind by more than 1.5 years in math—would have to teach 150 percent of a typical year’s worth of material for three years in a row—just to catch up. That is simply not going to happen without a major increase in instructional time. Any district that lost more than a year of learning should be required to revisit their recovery plans and add instructional time—summer school, extended school year, tutoring, etc.—so that students are made whole."
Thomas Kane
Walter H. Gale Professor of Education and EconomicsMedia Resources
Change In Average Math Scores
Change In Average Reading Scores
Data Provided by:
Videos
Project leader Thomas Kane speaks with Dr. Tequilla Brownie about the key findings in the Education Recovery Scorecard.
In the News
Many American parents would be shocked to know where their kids were actually achieving. Nationally, 90% of parents think their children are reading and doing math at or above grade level. In fact, 26% of eighth graders are proficient or above in math and 31% are proficient or above in English.
As a new school year begins, parents are trying to figure out where their children stand after the dramatic learning losses of the coronavirus pandemic. School boards and lawmakers are deciding how to spend their remaining federal recovery funds — which must be designated by next fall — and where to concentrate their efforts.
New research paints the clearest picture yet of just how much learning students missed during the pandemic, and what it may take to help children in the hardest hit districts to make up ground.
As part of a team of researchers from Harvard, Stanford, Dartmouth, Johns Hopkins and the testing company NWEA — the Education Recovery Scorecard project — we have been sifting through data from 7,800 communities in 41 states, to understand where test scores declined the most, what caused these patterns and whether they are likely to endure.
Without a successful recovery effort, student learning loss will be the longest lasting (and most inequitable) legacy of the COVID-19 pandemic.
From unfinished learning to missing students and lost earnings, these charts help explain the pandemic’s long-term impact
Contact Us
For more information or an answer to a specific question regarding the data, please submit your questions through the form to Lindsay Blauvelt at the Center for Education Policy Research.
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