The reading gains weren’t all that surprising, but they were gains nonetheless.
These sustained advances “may be one of the most important social policy successes of the last half century that no one knows about,” says Harvard’s Thomas Kane, one of the Scorecard’s authors. “The racial gaps were also narrowing. We just have to get back on that path.“
In short, many things were going well in U.S. schools, making the decline that began around 2013 “seem more surprising and anomalous,” the report says.
“Particularly in reading, test scores were going down four to six years before the pandemic,” Reardon says. “In fact, you wouldn’t really know there was a pandemic effect if you only looked at scores from the last 10 or 12 years. “There’s been kind of a steady decline regardless of the pandemic.”
What could have triggered that decline?
The triggering theories of the Scorecard
Scorecard researchers offer two possible explanations for the beginning of the learning recession in schools:
1. The fading of evidence-based accountability: Remember the much maligned federal education law, No Child Left Behind (NCLB)who took a tough approach with schools to improve student achievement? The law, implemented in 2003, threatened a series of sanctions, including school closures, if students’ test scores did not improve, but many considered its standards not only unrealistic but unattainable. In 2013, the Obama administration began issuing waivers to free states from the law’s consequences. According to the Scorecard, 38 states received aid in the 2012-13 school year. Ultimately, Congress replaced NCLB with a new federal law that deemphasized evidence-based accountability.
Around 2013, Kane says, “school districts learned that no one was watching them in terms of student achievement.“
While Scorecard researchers do not establish a direct causal connection between the decline in test-based accountability and student grades, it is clear that the country’s learning recession began around the same time that states and schools moved away from the punitive consequences of NCLB.
2. Use of social networks by students: It turns out that 2013 also marks a period of explosive growth in teens’ use of social media. TO Bank investigation One study found that in 2014-15, about 1 in 4 teens said they used the Internet “almost constantly.” By 2022, it was almost half of teenagers.
The researchers also point to international test data showing that the lowest-achieving students use social media the most. Students who spend more time (more than 7 hours per day) on social media score lower than students who spend less (1-3 hours) on social media. And this gap, between the highest and lowest performers, began to grow before the pandemic, not only in the United States but also in many other countries.
The end of the learning recession?
The Scorecard devotes considerable analysis to what has been happening in schools since the end of the pandemic, from 2022 to the spring of 2025. There are signs that the country’s learning recession may be reversing, albeit slowly.
In that time frame, most states covered by this year’s Scorecard showed students making significant gains in math, with Washington, D.C., the clear winner there. Only five states made no progress in math: Georgia, Idaho, Wyoming, Nebraska and Iowa.
However, reading remains a cause for concern. While DC, Louisiana, Maryland, and five other states saw significant improvement between 2022 and 2025, most states continued to stagnate or, as in Florida, Arizona, and Nebraska, declined further.
It’s also worth noting that while schools are again, on average, making up ground in math and slowly improving in reading, the declines that began around 2013 have been so pronounced and long-lasting that only one state, Louisiana, has returned to 2019 performance levels in both subjects.
No state has returned to 2013 levels, according to Reardon.
“It’s easy to feel pessimistic,” he adds, “but when you look at the period from the 1990s to 2013, we made enormous progress. And we actually narrowed achievement gaps between racial groups. That means we can improve our schools in ways that also improve equality of opportunity. We just haven’t been doing it for the last decade. But we could do it again.”
The U-shaped recovery
The Scorecard reveals a fascinating phenomenon in schools from 2022 to 2025: a U-shaped recovery. That is, the lowest-poverty schools, along with the highest-poverty schools, experienced similar gains in math and similarly small losses in reading achievement. Meanwhile, schools in the middle of the income spectrum, at the bottom of this U, improved the least in both subjects.
Because? One theory is that the poorest districts received the most help from Congress in the form of federal COVID relief dollars – money they could spend on interventions such as tutoring and summer schools. Districts with the lowest poverty rates received little help from the federal government, but were already well positioned financially. It was the middle-income district that needed the most help but did not qualify for full federal support.
“If it hadn’t been for federal pandemic relief,” Kane says, “we estimate that, on average, there would have been no recovery in the highest poverty districts.”
The science of the reading effect.
There has been a major wild card in the effort to improve students’ reading skills: a movement among states to shift their focus toward teach young children to read by hugging the “science of reading”. In March, according to the Scorecard, most states had passed new literacy laws, including doubling the importance of teaching phonetics.
The Scorecard authors note that the seven states (plus DC) that experienced reading gains between 2022 and 2025 had implemented comprehensive scientific reading reforms. Of the states that had not done so by January 2024, none saw improvements. The connection between these reforms and better outcomes is not necessarily causal, they warn, but there is clearly a link.
As most states struggle to improve reading, one district-level success story highlighted by the Scorecard stands out: Baltimore City Public Schools. Despite the challenges posed by poverty (most students there qualify for free or reduced-price meals), Baltimore students have made amazing gains in reading.
Under the direction of Executive Director Sonja Brookins Santelises, the district overhauled its approach to literacy. hug the science of reading even before the pandemic and years before the national wave of state literacy legislation.
When Brookins Santelises took the lead in Baltimore in 2016, she says she quickly adopted the science of reading district-wide and its emphasis on phonics, as opposed to whole language approachwhich teaches children to guess words using clues from images in a text.
“I remember gathering the [district’s] literacy department. And I said, ‘If you want to study full language, there are other districts in Maryland that do it and you can go there.’ We’re not doing that in Baltimore City. I respect you, but you can’t stay here. I’ve been fierce about it ever since.”
‘Kiss your brains!’
The benefits of these changes appear to have been twofold. During the pandemic, the Scorecard shows that Baltimore schools lost much less ground in reading than schools with similar levels of poverty. Then, in 2022, with those practices firmly in place, the city’s reading scores began to skyrocket, erasing pandemic-era losses and rising back to around 2017 levels.
Baltimore’s successful approach to teaching literacy was on full display on a recent May morning in veteran teacher Kimberly Lowery’s kindergarten class at Johnston Square Elementary School. Lowery sat in front of a rainbow-colored reading rug, running a series of phonics-based games that her kindergarteners seemed to genuinely enjoy.
There was letter-sound bingo, sound-guessing flashcards, and even a visit from a special spelling helper: a toy owl, named Echo, who lives at the end of a measuring stick. If the children’s laughter and cheers aren’t enough of a sign that they’re learning, district data shows that at the end of last year, three-quarters of Lowery students were reading at or above grade level.
Lowery told the kids to kiss each other’s brains and asked, “You guys are super dumb, what?”
In unison, the children shouted: “Smart!”
“Yes, you are,” Lowery responded.
