The Harvard economist behind the Education Scorecard says the ‘Learning Recession’ is more than a COVID problem—it’s at least a decade old

When the National Assessment of Educational Progress published its 2022 report, the conclusion seemed clear: COVID-19 had devastated American students. Test scores in reading had dropped five points for nine-year-olds between 2020 and 2022—the largest single decline since 1990. Math scores fell seven points over the same period, another historic drop. The pandemic, most agreed, had triggered a “learning recession.”

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But a sweeping new education report suggests the real story started much earlier—and COVID may have been more accelerant than cause.

The Education Scorecard, conducted by researchers from Harvard, Stanford, and Dartmouth, tracks K-12 academic performance across most states. The latest edition of the report, published earlier this month, found reading scores are down in a whopping 83% of schools, while math scores are down in 70% of them.

“The pandemic was the mudslide that followed seven years of erosion in student achievement,” Tom Kane, an economist and education professor who serves as the director of Harvard’s Center for Education Policy Research, said in a press release. “The ‘learning recession’ started a decade ago. … The recovery of U.S. education has begun. But it’s up to the rest of us to spread it.”

What is the Education Scorecard?

The Education Scorecard, now in its fourth year of publication, is put together by education experts at some of the nation’s most highly regarded universities. Kane, for his part, has studied education and student achievement for decades. He also served as the senior economist for labor, education, and welfare policy issues in the Clinton administration and has in recent years published peer-reviewed studies on everything from curriculum reform in the “Common Core” era to whether video evaluations were helpful for measuring teacher performance.  

The most recent deflated reading and math scores reported by the Education Scorecard are the culmination of a downward trend that began in 2013, Kane explained in an interview with PBS. Around this year, several factors started to emerge that correlate with students’ struggles. 

First, was the increase in smartphone use among young people. A Pew Research study found that by 2022, the number of teens who said they were online “almost constantly” had roughly doubled from the 24% who said the same between 2014 and 2015. Phones have now become a key issue for schools because of how distracting they can be for students. 

Some school districts across the country have moved to ban phones in the classroom, with mixed results. In Texas, the Dallas Independent School District earlier this year banned phones during school hours and saw library checkouts jump by more than 200,000, a 24% year-over-year increase. While 37 states as well as Washington D.C. have either banned or restricted phones in the classroom, a working paper published in the National Bureau of Economic Research earlier this month found that test scores haven’t yet seen a noticeable change as part of these efforts.

Harvard

Kane has said the debate over smartphones’ effects on learning go beyond school. Constant phone use at home could also be contributing generally to students’ lower achievement in school. 

“It’s not just through distracting kids in class. It’s about how they’re using time outside of school. It’s about sleep disruption. It’s about missing homework. It’s about just doing less reading in general,” he told PBS. 

Another potential cause for the multiyear slide prior to the pandemic could be less adult accountability for children’s academic results. While the No Child Left Behind law passed during President George W. Bush’s tenure in the early 2000s built in repercussions, including the replacement of administration and staff, if schools didn’t meet rigorous testing standards, this changed under President Obama. By 2013, the Obama administration had started granting waivers to the consequences of the No Child Left Behind law, and in 2015 Congress replaced it entirely with the Every Student Succeeds Act, which expanded schools’ success metrics beyond test scores and gave more authority to each state to design its own academic standards.

Around the time these changes started in 2013, the “school districts learned that nobody was looking over their shoulders in terms of student achievement,” Kane said in an interview with NPR. 

To be sure, the learning recession during COVID affected more than just test scores. When schools closed and students were sent to online classes, absenteeism rose, with 30% of all students chronically missing classes, nearly double the pre-pandemic rate, according to a study by the Annie E. Casey Foun­da­tion. Mental health problems linked to isolation also jumped, with about 37% of high schoolers reporting poor mental health, according to a 2021 survey by the Centers for Disease Control. 

Still, there is some evidence in the latest Education Scorecard that academic performance is reversing its downward trend. From 2022 to spring 2025 the majority of states improved their math scores, with only five states failing to make meaningful gains. Reading scores across many states continued to stagnate or further decline, but some stood out, including D.C., Louisiana, and Maryland.

This may be attributed to school districts approaching reading education in a different way. Rather than emphasize a “whole language” approach where students are encouraged to guess words based on visual images, some states have adopted a “science of reading” approach that emphasizes phonics by having students sound out letters to form words.

All seven of the states that saw reading gains, as well as Washington D.C., adopted this phonics-based approach, according to the Education Scorecard. This included Louisiana, one of the poorest states in the U.S. 

The state is one of the most committed to a phonics-based reading approach. In 2019 it adopted Act 108, which required phonics-based literary materials in schools as well as screening for young students. It also banned “three-cueing systems” which some teachers used in order to encourage students to guess words from context.

Its efforts have paid off. Louisiana ranked second among all states and D.C. that were surveyed for reading growth and was the only state in the country to surpass its 2019 level for reading, according to the Education Scorecard. 

Kane did not respond to a request for comment.

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

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