A new Education Scorecard released May 13 finds reading and math test slumped well before the pandemic, pointing to accountability changes, rising social media use, and chronic absenteeism. The report’s authors urge literacy reforms—and lawmakers’ attention to
Students are being asked to catch up in classrooms that, according to a new national scorecard, were already losing ground years before COVID-19 closures. The stakes are immediate for families watching reading and math scores slide—especially in states where improvement has been slow and uneven.
The Education Scorecard. released May 13. is a collaboration between Harvard University’s Center for Education Policy Research and Stanford University’s Education Opportunity Project. It is the fourth year of the scorecard. and it documents states across the country struggling with declining test scores dating back more than a decade.
The report traces the start of the “learning recession” to 2013. when progress in math and reading stalled before beginning to decline. Nat Malkus. a senior fellow and deputy director of education policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute. called the trend “dramatic” and described it as the “central problem in American education.”.
The scorecard arrives as many people have already been focused on the steep learning loss after the pandemic. But it adds a harder timeline: the authors say the decline started years earlier, crossing racial and demographic lines.
The study’s findings place two forces on the board: a shift away from test-based accountability and a sharp rise in social media use among young people. The report found that “the slowdown in learning coincided with a dismantling of test-based accountability in schools and a dramatic rise in social media use among young people.” It also cautioned that “although it remains unclear whether and how much each factor caused the decline in scores. both are likely candidates.”.
Chronic absenteeism remains another pressure point. The scorecard highlights the issue as a lingering problem that has continued to plague schools since the pandemic. Chronic absenteeism is generally defined as missing 10% or more of the school year. The report says that while chronic absenteeism has declined somewhat since the immediate aftermath of COVID-19 school closures. rates remain high.
For the 2024-25 school year, the report says 23% of students were chronically absent, compared with 15% before 2020.
Alongside those headwinds, the report points to a more actionable path: states that adopted comprehensive literacy reforms are seeing encouraging results, while states that rejected those reforms—or later reversed them—largely are not.
That emphasis shows up in the way Mississippi is described. The scorecard calls Mississippi an outlier amid otherwise bleak student performance trends. It says Mississippi’s test scores were once among the worst in the country. and now the state is often cited as a model for improving student achievement.
The report attributes part of Mississippi’s progress to strengthening teacher training and making sure students could read by third grade. If students couldn’t, the report says they were held back.
The scorecard also points to more than 100 local districts that it says are outpacing their peers in academic gains. Its authors recommend pairing those successful districts with struggling ones so they can share best practices.
For families, though, the timeline is the problem. Meaningful school improvement, the report’s framing makes clear, doesn’t happen overnight—often taking years to show results, even when reforms work.
The scorecard notes that the federal government spends more than $60 billion a year on public education. with little to show for it in student achievement. And as absenteeism rates remain elevated and literacy reforms roll out unevenly. families stuck in struggling public schools are left waiting for progress that may not reach them soon.
That is where school choice enters the picture as an alternative route—one aimed at letting families act now rather than years later. The scorecard says at least 17 states offer universal private school choice programs. allowing families to use state education dollars for the school that best fits their child’s needs. It adds that many of these programs emerged after prolonged COVID-19 school closures frustrated parents across the country.
The Trump administration is also promoting a federal school choice tax credit program passed in last year’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act. The program, the report says, would expand options in states that have long resisted robust school choice.
Under the proposal described in the coverage. individual donors can contribute up to $1. 700 to nonprofit organizations in exchange for a federal tax credit. and families can then apply for scholarships to help cover private school tuition. tutoring and other educational expenses. Governors must opt in; the report says so far. 31 states have signaled they will participate. including several Democratic-led states such as New York and Colorado.
The Education Scorecard paints the learning decline as a long-running issue. beginning in 2013. overlapping with policy changes and shifting student behavior. and persisting alongside chronic absenteeism. In that framing. the policy response can’t afford to be only about what districts can fix slowly—because families are living the consequences now.
Education Scorecard learning recession reading and math scores chronic absenteeism school choice private school choice tax credit One Big Beautiful Bill Act Mississippi literacy reforms teacher training science of reading test-based accountability social media use