New England's students remain half a year behind, new analysis shows, with few bright spots

Boston Globe

14-02-2025

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In the region's most extreme cases, Maine and Vermont students in grades 3 to 8 are about a full year behind their 2019 peers in reading, after losses compounded between 2022 to 2024. The two northern states experienced the largest drops in reading of anywhere in the country.
Rhode Island students, on the other hand, are best off in the region, but remain a third of a year behind in both subjects. Nationwide, only Louisiana students are notably stronger in either subject than pre-pandemic, with their students up about 0.3 grade levels in reading. Louisiana and Alabama students are also about level with five years prior in math.
The Education Recovery Scorecard
database by researchers at Harvard, Stanford, and Dartmouth was released Tuesday and provides the most comprehensive picture yet of how American students are performing since COVID-19 first disrupted learning. The
analysis uses the gold standard
To convert test scores into grade levels, the researchers measured the gap in average test scores between grades; a Grade 4 student scoring at the average level of a Grade 5 student would be one grade level above average.
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The research showed that higher-needs districts were particularly hard hit by the pandemic and have not closed the gap since.
'The highest poverty districts have fallen behind more than the lowest poverty districts,' said Sean Reardon, a Stanford sociologist who worked on the scorecard.
Persistent declines are widespread at the district level. Across Connecticut, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, and Rhode Island, students in nearly 80 percent of districts remain behind their 2019 peers in each subject. (District-level data are not available for Vermont and Maine.)
Spokesperson Alana Davidson of the Massachusetts Executive Office of Education said Governor Maura Healey's administration is focused on efforts to address learning loss, including increasing education funding, an awareness campaign on the importance of school attendance, and a major investment in early literacy.
'We know that there is more work to be done to help students recover from the pandemic and address learning loss,' Davidson said.
In New England as nationwide, the rare districts where students have recovered are disproportionately more affluent districts such as Lexington, Mass., Little Compton, R.I., and Woodbridge, Conn. Only a few of the region's higher-poverty districts have had students catch up,
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Similar patterns are visible by race and ethnicity, the researchers found, with the pandemic widening pre-existing gaps.
'Not only are districts serving more Black and Hispanic students falling further behind, but even within those districts, the Black and Hispanic students are falling further behind their their white district mates,' Reardon said.
None of the region's largest districts have recovered. In math, declines from 2019 to 2024 range from about one-fifth of a grade level behind in Brockton to nearly two grades behind pre-pandemic levels in New Haven and Lynn.
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The researchers calculated the situation in America's schools would be even more dire without the
'The dollars ... prevented the gaps from being even worse between high-and low-income districts,' Kane said.
Now that those funds have run out, Kane said, states and districts should
Kane also called for
efforts to reduce absenteeism, including public information campaigns. Kane pointed to absenteeism as one of the reasons for ongoing declines, with higher-poverty areas particularly hard hit.
'Mostly, we've left the challenge of helping students to catch up on school district leaders, principals, and teachers' shoulders, but lowering absenteeism is one of the few things that mayors and employers and other community leaders could help with,' he said.
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Kane also urged schools to ensure parents are accurately informed on their children's academic performance, as polls show parents largely believe their children are at grade level.
'Parents aren't going to sign up for summer learning or ask for a tutor in school or agree to an increase in the school year if they're under the impression that everything's fine,' he said.
The researchers
Washington, D.C., and Union City, N.J.
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District leaders pointed to investments including tutoring, teacher training, and a custom research-backed literacy curriculum as key ingredients for the system's recent progress.
In Massachusetts and Boston, on the other hand, test scores have been declining since before the pandemic. Reading scores peaked in 2017 and math scores in 2013; the state's students are now about a grade level behind their peak in both subjects. But with the state's students still posting the best scores on the Nation's Report Card, Massachusetts learners remain about half a year ahead of the 2019 national average. Boston students are about a grade level behind that mark.
'Our recent NAEP scores show fourth-grade performance nearing pre-pandemic levels, validating our three-year investment in equitable literacy and high-quality materials,' said Boston Superintendent Mary Skipper in a statement.
But older students continue to face learning loss, she said.
'The FY26 budget addresses this with increased literacy investments across all grades, plus intensive math tutoring, and a new high-quality math curriculum for our middle and high schoolers,'
Skipper said.
Material from the Associated Press was used in this report.
Christopher Huffaker can be reached at