Our nation’s schools are failing to teach our children to read, and a new report shows that the learning loss began more than a decade ago, well before COVID-19. Fortunately, the same report found that some districts have reversed the decline through tried-and-true teaching methods. Now we need the political will to implement those reforms nationally.
The Education Scorecard, issued by Harvard’s Center for Education Policy Research and Stanford’s Educational Opportunity Project, uses data from the Department of Education’s National Assessment of Educational Progress to track educational achievement at the school-district level going back decades.
While it is well known that students across the country suffered severe learning loss because of COVID shutdowns, the Education Scorecard reports that the learning recession actually began in 2013 and, in reading, accelerated before the pandemic. Specifically, the report found that the average annual loss in reading between 2017 and 2019 was just as large as the loss sustained during COVID and the subsequent shutdowns from 2019 to 2022.
The Education Scorecard blames the pre-COVID slide in reading scores on the dismantling of test-based accountability that had been in place for decades. Pushed at the federal level by President George W. Bush and initially embraced by President Barack Obama, standardized testing forced school districts to confront which schools were properly teaching students and which were not. As a direct result of this accountability, reading skills improved dramatically during this era, and racial disparities shrank.
Unfortunately, teachers unions then led a backlash against standardized testing, forcing Obama to largely abandon the initiative at the federal level during his second term. Democrats in many districts also began weakening their disciplinary policies in the name of “equity,” causing delinquency to rise. These two factors, the abandonment of testing and woke disciplinary policies, started the reading recession long before COVID hit.
Not all schools are continuing to fall behind. An educational recovery has begun in states that have embraced comprehensive “science of reading” reforms, including Indiana, Kentucky, Maryland, Minnesota, Mississippi, Louisiana, Tennessee, and the District of Columbia. These states saw their reading scores rebound between 2022 and 2025. States that have refused to embrace the science of reading reforms, including California, Georgia, Hawaii, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, New Jersey, South Dakota, Washington, and Wisconsin, have seen their reading scores either continue to fall post-COVID or stagnate at pandemic-era levels.
Absenteeism also remains stubbornly high post-COVID, further driving learning loss. Before the pandemic, 15 % of students were chronically absent in a given year, a rate that rose to 30% in 2021-2022 because of COVID shutdowns. That number has since fallen to 23%, which is progress, but still not a return to pre-pandemic levels.
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School choice is essential, and conservatives should continue fighting to give parents the power to send their children to the school that best serves them. But we cannot write off the millions of children whose parents choose — or have no practical alternative to — their neighborhood public school. Conservatives need a serious agenda for public-school success, one that pairs support for students with real accountability for educators. Abandoning public schools would mean surrendering them to teachers unions and ideological activists who too often use classrooms to push anti-American propaganda. Conservatives should fight not only for school choice, but also for high-quality public education for every child.
The Education Scorecard shows that we know what works. What is missing is the political will to enforce it. The formula is straightforward: phonics-based reading instruction, race-blind discipline, regular testing, and real accountability. Mississippi and other states have defied the recent national decline by embracing reforms that deliver results. Republicans should take those successful models seriously and bring them to every state they govern.