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
“The slide in average NAEP scores masks a pernicious inequality: scores have declined far more in America’s middle- and low-income communities than in its wealthy ones. The good news is that it could have been worse: the federal investment in public schools during the pandemic paid off, limiting academic losses in high-poverty districts. The pandemic highlighted inequalities in our education system; it didn’t create them. And so we don’t need just `pandemic recovery’ now, but long-term structural reform. A real `recovery’ requires that we make sure students in middle and low-income communities have all the resources they need to thrive in school.”
Sean Reardon
Professor of Poverty and Inequality in Education“The rescue phase is over. The federal relief dollars are gone. It is time to pivot from short-term recovery to longer term challenges such as reducing absenteeism and addressing the slide in literacy. Whether it is early literacy, improving instructional materials, strengthening accountability or high school redesign, states are where education reform is happening now. What’s been missing is any cross-state effort to evaluate those reforms and spread what’s working. We are launching a new project for states wanting to learn together.”
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
When Congress sent tens of billions of dollars to schools — an unprecedented sum — to battle the coronavirus pandemic, it seemed like reopening campuses was going to be the toughest thing.
The federal government sent nearly $200 billion to U.S. schools in the past few years to help address Covid-era learning challenges. Now the first studies are out showing what the money accomplished—and hinting at what could happen when it goes away this fall.
The federal government invested $190 billion in pandemic aid for schools; the largest chunk, $122 billion, came in 2021 to help students recover. Altogether, it was the largest one-time federal investment in American education, but it came with a major question: Would it work?
America’s schools received an unprecedented $190 billion in federal emergency funding during the pandemic. Since then, one big question has loomed over them: Did that historic infusion of federal relief help students make up for the learning they missed?
Pandemic school closures upended U.S. education. Many students lost significant ground, and the federal government invested billions to help them recover.
Overall, average test scores improved for both poor and nonpoor students in the 15 states for which researchers had economic data. But the improvements were larger for students who were not from poor families. As a result, the gap in achievement based on income grew.
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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