The gains in reading weren’t as impressive, but they were still gains.
Those sustained gains “may be one of the most important social policy successes of the last half century that no one knows about,” said Harvard’s Thomas Cain, one of the Scorecard’s authors. “Racial disparities were also diminishing. We just need to get back on that track.“
In short, many things were right about America’s schools, which makes the decline that began around 2013 “seem more impressive and abnormal,” the report said.
“Especially in reading, test scores were going down four to six years before the pandemic,” says Reardon. “You wouldn’t really know there was a pandemic effect if you just looked at the last 10 or 12 years of test scores. There’s just been a steady kind of decline regardless of the pandemic.”
What might have caused this decline?
The Triggering Scorecard Theories
Scorecard researchers offer two possible explanations for the onset of the learning recession in schools:
1. The demise of test-based accountability: Remember the much maligned federal education law, No Child Left Behind (NCLB)who took a hard-line approach to schools to improve student performance? The law, implemented in 2003, threatened multiple sanctions, including school closures, if students’ test scores did not rise, but its standards were seen by many as more than just unrealistic but unattainable. By 2013, the Obama administration began exempting states from the law’s effects. According to the Scorecard, 38 states received relief in the 2012-13 school year. Congress eventually replaced NCLB with a new federal law that removed the emphasis on test-based accountability.
Around 2013, Kane says, “school districts learned that no one was looking over their shoulder in terms of student achievement.“
Although the Scorecard researchers do not make a direct, causal link between the declines in test-based accountability and student outcomes, it is clear that the nation’s learning recession began around the same time that states and schools recoiled from the punitive effects of NCLB.
2. Students’ use of social media: It turns out that 2013 also marked a period of explosive growth in the use of social media by teenagers. A Pew Research a survey found that in 2014-15, approximately 1 in 4 teenagers said they used the internet “almost constantly”. By 2022, it was almost half of teenagers.
The researchers also point to data from international tests that show lower-performing students are the most serious users of social media. Students who spend more time (7+ hours per day) on social media score lower than students who spend less (1-3 hours). And that gap between the best and worst performers began to widen before the pandemic, not just in the US, but in many other countries as well.
The end of the tuition recession?
The Scorecard devotes significant analysis to what is happening in schools from the end of the pandemic, from 2022 to the spring of 2025. There are signs that the nation’s learning recession may be reversing, albeit slowly.
During that time period, most of the states covered by this year’s Scorecard showed that students made significant progress in math, with Washington the clear winner there. Only five states failed to achieve success in math: Georgia, Idaho, Wyoming, Nebraska and Iowa.
However, reading remains a cause for concern. While the District of Columbia, Louisiana, Maryland and five other states did experience significant improvement between 2022 and 2025, most states continued to stagnate or, as in Florida, Arizona and Nebraska, further declined.
It’s also worth noting that while schools are regaining ground in math and slowly making changes in reading, the decline that began around 2013 has been so sharp and sustained 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 be kind of doom and gloom,” he adds, “but when you look at the period from the 1990s to 2013, we made huge gains. And we actually narrowed the achievement gap between racial groups. That means we can actually improve our schools in ways that also improve equal opportunity. We just haven’t done it in 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. Which means the least-poverty schools, along with the most-poverty schools, saw similar gains in math and similarly small losses in reading achievement. That’s while schools in the middle of the income spectrum, at the bottom of that U, have improved the least in both subjects.
why One theory is that the areas with the greatest poverty received the most aid from Congress in the form of federal dollars for COVID relief — money they could spend on interventions like training and summer school. The districts with the lowest poverty rates received little help from the federal government, but were already in a good financial position. Middle-income counties needed more help but were not eligible for full federal support.
“If it weren’t for federal aid for the pandemic,” Kane says, “we think there would be no recovery on average for the poorest areas.”
The science of the reading effect
There is an important wild card in the effort to improve student reading skills: a movement among states to change their approach to teaching reading to young children from hugging the “science of reading”. As of March, according to Scorecard, most states had passed new literacy laws, including doubling the importance of teaching phonics.
The Scorecard authors note that all seven states (plus the District of Columbia) that made progress in reading between 2022 and 2025 implemented comprehensive science reading reforms. Of the states that had not done so by January 2024, none had seen an improvement. The relationship between these reforms and improved outcomes is not necessarily causal, they caution, but there is clearly a connection.
As most states struggle to increase reading, one district-level success story highlighted by the Scorecard stands out: Baltimore Public Schools. Despite the challenges posed by poverty—most students there qualify for free or reduced meals—Baltimore students make remarkable gains in reading.
Under the leadership of CEO Sonia Brookins Santelises, the district reformed its approach to literacy. It embraced the science of reading even before the pandemic and years before the national wave of state literacy legislation.
When Brookins Santelises took over in Baltimore in 2016, she says she quickly embraced the science of reading districtwide and its emphasis on phonics, as opposed to whole language approachwhich teaches children to guess words using picture cues to text.
“I remember getting the (district) literacy department together. And I said, ‘If you want to do whole language, there are other districts in Maryland that do whole language, and you’re free to go there. We don’t do that in Baltimore City. I respect you, but you cannot stay here. I’ve been furious about it ever since.”
“Kiss your brains!”
The benefits of these changes seem to have been twofold. During the pandemic, the Scorecard shows that Baltimore schools have lost much less ground in reading than schools with similar poverty levels. Then, in 2022, with these practices firmly in place, the city’s reading scores began to rise, erasing pandemic-era losses and climbing back around 2017 levels.
Baltimore’s successful approach to teaching literacy was on full display one recent May morning in veteran teacher Kimberly Lowery’s kindergarten class at Johnston Square Elementary. Lowery sat at the front of a rainbow-colored reading rug and ran through a series of phonics games that her kindergartners 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 ruler. If the children’s laughter and cheers aren’t proof enough that they’re learning, district data shows that by the end of last year, three-quarters of Lowery students were reading at or above grade level.
Lowery told the kids to kiss their brains and asked, “You guys are super-super what?”
The children shouted in unison “Clever!”
“Yes, you are,” Lowery replied.
