How to Overcome Pandemic Learning Losses

After years of pandemic upheaval, American primary and secondary education finally looks normal again. Students are back in school, mask mandates are gone, and report card grades are at pre-pandemic levels. In September, federal emergency funding for pandemic learning recovery ended, seemingly turning the page on the crisis.

But standardized tests tell a different story. The average American student remains nearly half a grade level behind in both math and reading, according to an analysis of scores by researchers at Harvard’s Center for Education Policy Research, Stanford’s Educational Opportunity Project, and Dartmouth College. Students are now further behind in reading than they were in 2022, when many were still learning remotely. And achievement gaps between high- and low-poverty districts have widened.

“There are a lot of students who are still way behind,” says Thomas Kane, Gale professor of economics and education and a member of the research team. Even though federal funding has run out, “we need to find ways to preserve those things that have been proven effective, like tutoring and summer learning.”

The latest Education Recovery Scorecard (ERS) offers a detailed look at pandemic-era learning loss, combining National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) scores with state test data from more than 8,000 districts. The ERS has shifted how policymakers and communities assess education, moving beyond national and state trends to reveal student performance at the local level.

Those district-level data highlight setbacks and gains often obscured in broader analyses of aggregated data. Alabama, for example, stands out as the only state where fourth-grade math scores now exceed 2019 levels. Yet beneath that statewide average, more than a third of students attend districts where math achievement remains below pre-pandemic levels. Such insights can help school leaders and policymakers target recovery efforts where they’re needed most.

“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,” Sean Reardon, a professor at Stanford’s Graduate School of Education and another ERS researcher, said in a news release. “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.”

What Worked—and What Didn’t

Federal relief funds, totaling $190 billion, prevented a bad situation from becoming worse, the report found, boosting math and reading scores in high-poverty districts by about 10 percent of a grade level. But where the money went mattered. Detailed data from California’s Department of Education showed that districts that invested in “academic catchup”—such as tutoring and summer school—achieved the biggest gains, while those that directed funds into general improvements to math education saw less impact.

That’s no surprise, Kane says: the clearest way to remedy lost learning time is to increase learning time. “We can’t just ask teachers to talk faster,” Kane says. “You can’t double the amount of learning without increasing instructional time.”

Many districts relied on federal funding to pay for such academic catchup efforts. With those funds exhausted, the report urges states to find new ways to support these interventions. One option is to use federal Title I funding, which provides additional dollars to schools with high percentages of low-income students. Three percent of these funds can go toward “direct student services” like tutoring—but so far, only Ohio has set aside money for such efforts. “More states ought to be using their authority to target these dollars,” Kane says, “on things like summer learning and high-dosage tutoring.”

Barriers to Recovery

When extra learning time is made available, another challenge is persuading families to opt into it. After the isolating difficulties of the pandemic, there is little appetite for asking children to spend more time in summer school or tutoring sessions. Complicating the challenge, parents tend to underestimate how far behind their children are in school—largely because classroom grades have remained stable. “Teachers don’t want to take this out on kids, but the result is that parents have the wrong impression of what’s actually happening,” Kane says. “If a parent thinks everything is fine, they may not sign up for summer learning, they may not ask for tutoring.”

One solution, the report suggests, is direct outreach about students’ performance by teachers. Although many states send home standardized test results that flag below-grade-level performance, researchers say a conversation with a teacher is far more effective than a letter in a mailbox. “It’s a very hard message to deliver,” Kane says. “So I think it has to be a district policy or a state policy requiring teachers, when they have evidence that a student is behind grade level, to inform parents.”

Another way to increase classroom time is to decrease absenteeism. During the pandemic, absenteeism rose across the nation, with the most dramatic increases concentrated in high-poverty areas—and ERS researchers found that higher absenteeism was associated with slower recovery. Addressing the problem, Kane says, will require an effort beyond schools that engages employers, community leaders, and transportation officials.

Successful Approaches

Although much of the country remains behind, a few school systems bucked the trend: about six percent of students are enrolled in districts that have fully recovered in both reading and math. ERS researchers reached out to these districts to understand what worked.

Ector County, Texas—where 75 percent of students receive free or reduced-price lunch—is among those successful systems. There, school leaders relied on solutions including outcomes-based tutoring, which meant they only had to pay the tutoring company if a student showed improvement. In Alabama’s DeKalb County, leaders focused on teacher training and met three times a year to review student achievement data. More details on these two and other successful counties are accessible at the ERS website.

These success stories are as transformative as the ERS’s ability to highlight struggling districts, says Cory Turner, an education reporter at NPR. The NAEP has long provided a high-level look at national and state education trends. But “one of the most exciting things for me about the Education Recovery Scorecard is that it gives us an opportunity to really go out into the country, into individual states and school districts and communities and even school buildings,” he says, “and ask, what are you doing right here? Tell us about it and let us share it.”

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Read Harvard Magazine’s “Making Schools Work,” a profile of Thomas Kane, Gale professor of economics and education, a leader in deploying data to improve K-12 schooling, forthcoming in the March-April 2025 issue (online February 14).