A new report by researchers at Stanford and Harvard shows that U.S. students achieved historic gains in math and reading during the 2022-23 school year, the first full year of recovery from the pandemic.
The report, which measures the pace of academic recovery during the 2022-23 school year for school districts in 30 states, finds that students recovered about one-third of the original loss in math and one-quarter of the loss in reading. These gains significantly exceed what students would be expected to learn in a typical year, based on past trends.
Students in one state, Alabama, returned to pre-pandemic achievement levels in math, while students in three states reached 2019 levels in reading. But students in a majority of the states in the study remain more than a third of a grade level behind pre-pandemic levels in math, and students in almost half of the states are that far behind in reading.