Students across the United States remain nearly half a grade level behind in reading, according to a new report from researchers at Harvard University, Stanford University, and Dartmouth College, who warned the country is now facing a yearslong “learning recession.”
The study, which analyzed state test scores for students in grades three through eight across more than 5,000 school districts in 38 states, found that academic achievement had already begun to decline years before the COVID-19 pandemic disrupted classrooms nationwide.
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“The pandemic was the mudslide that had followed seven years of steady erosion in achievement,” said Thomas Kane, a Harvard professor and researcher on the Education Scorecard project.
Researchers found that only five states and the District of Columbia improved their reading scores between 2022 and 2025. Nationwide, students remain significantly behind pre-pandemic reading levels, while math scores have shown only modest improvement.
Kane said the decline mirrors what economists describe as a recession, when growth turns negative. “That’s exactly what happened in education in 2013,” Kane said. “Achievement growth, which had been remarkable from 1990 through 2013, turns negative in both math and reading.”
The report found reading achievement had already been falling at roughly the same annual rate before the pandemic as during it. Eighth-grade reading scores on the National Assessment of Educational Progress are now at their lowest point since 1990, while fourth-grade scores have dropped to levels not seen since before 2003.
Researchers pointed to two possible drivers behind the downturn: the declining emphasis on test-based accountability in schools beginning around 2013 and the rapid growth of student social media use.
“There are at least two reasons to think that social media may have played a role,” Kane said, noting that students with the heaviest social media usage tend to fall at the lower end of achievement rankings. He also pointed to similar declines in countries including Canada, Germany, and the Netherlands.
The study found recovery since 2022 has been “U-shaped,” with the wealthiest and poorest school districts seeing the greatest improvements while middle-income districts lagged.
“The highest income districts presumably had their own funding and lots of parental involvement,” Kane said. “But the other group was the highest poverty districts that got a lot of federal aid during the pandemic.”
Districts in the middle, where between 30% and 70% of students receive federally subsidized lunches, saw the slowest recovery rates, according to the report.
Researchers estimated that recovery in the poorest districts was driven almost entirely by federal pandemic relief dollars.
“There would have been no recovery in the highest poverty districts if there hadn’t been federal pandemic relief,” Kane said.
The report also found that states implementing “science of reading” reforms, which are evidence-based literacy policies focused on phonics and structured reading instruction, showed the strongest gains in reading recovery.
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States including Louisiana, Tennessee, Kentucky, and Mississippi posted improvements between 2022 and 2025, while states without similar reforms largely failed to improve.
Researchers additionally warned that high absenteeism rates continue to slow recovery efforts and called on federal and state governments to invest in research on absenteeism, literacy reforms, and the effects of social media on academic performance.
