A version of this story first appeared in WFAE Education Reporter James Farrell's weekly newsletter. Sign up here to get newsletters from WFAE straight to your inbox.
A prominent national education research organization has echoed what’s become a common assessment about the state of American schools six years after COVID: It’s gloomy.
The Center on Reinventing Public Education at Arizona State University released its annual State of the Student report last month. Some of its findings: Only 10.5% of students are in districts that have fully recovered to 2019 math and reading levels, while gaps between high-performing and low-performing students have widened since 2022.
Only one state, Louisiana, has returned to pre-pandemic baselines in both math and reading. And evidence suggests that performance began to slip years before the pandemic, suggesting COVID can’t explain the whole mess.
So what are states doing to address this? Very different things, the authors argue. And that might be part of the problem.
I reviewed the report again after last week’s “blue wave” election results. The Trump Administration is reducing the federal government’s role in education, so states have more control over education policies. The report argues that one result is a state-by-state hodgepodge of policies that are “not only uneven but also partisan” and often follow ideology more than evidence. For example, individual states’ average scores on nationally standardized tests have grown farther apart since 2019.
“We don’t know why this is happening,” the State of the Student authors write. “But we worry that diverging state strategies, driven more by partisanship than by sound strategy and evidence, will make the inequality between states worse. States are taking sharply different approaches to recovery and improvement, with almost no shared evidence base, few guardrails, and no real structure for figuring out which approaches are working.”
That leads to a troubling question: As newly flipped states like North Carolina debate school funding issues, vouchers and the science of reading, will the quality of education increasingly hinge on which party controls which states?
Take reading and math reforms. It’s no secret that red states have built new, evidence-based instructional practices on concepts like the “Science of Reading” with positive results. Education observers often point to the “Mississippi Miracle,” and Louisiana has become a case study in academic growth, too.
States across the partisan spectrum have sought to replicate that success, adopting new science of reading laws and mathematics updates. But, as the report notes, red states are creating more robust reforms.
In reading, the report notes that “literacy reform is bipartisan overall, but how aggressively states implement literacy reform is not.” It found that 43 states and Washington, D.C., have passed “Science of Reading” laws, which draw on extensive research on how children learn to read. But the report found that, on average, red states were more likely to implement policies or infrastructure that support those laws, like mandatory statewide professional development for teachers or the adoption of high-quality curriculum and lesson plans. The report argues that these states are creating more cohesive strategies around literacy.
In math, 18 states and D.C. have enacted similar reform bills since 2022 — 13 are red, three are purple, and only two are blue.
On the other end, the report praises blue states for their focus on student well-being, “the single most active area of Democratic-led policymaking in education.” Since 2022, Democrats have sponsored 72% of 561 well-being-related bills, which include topics like counseling, suicide prevention and school safety.
The report notes that every blue state scored near or above average one ranking of child well-being based on economics, health, education and family life. Blue states are also more likely to gear education toward the needs of diverse learners, the report notes. “This is a real strength that blue states bring to the table.”
While red states are pushing hard on literacy and math reforms, they’re also advocating for aggressive expansion of private school choice through vouchers or tax credits. The report argues those programs lack the accountability measures that would allow policymakers to judge whether they bolster gains achieved through other reforms.
“Families deserve to make meaningful decisions about where their children go to school,” the report notes, “but the evidence that unregulated or poorly regulated choice improves student outcomes is thin.”
Only 13 states have set a measurable, specific statewide goal for students: “If state officials cannot say what they are trying to achieve, they cannot be held to it, nor can schools.” And that means educators and policymakers are having an increasingly difficult time determining what works and what doesn’t, and future policy decisions will reflect the lack of evidence.
“States are operating with fundamentally different theories of what needs to happen to improve education, and both sides of the partisan debate are facing fundamental problems,” the report notes. “How will red states square aggressive instructional reforms with expanding unregulated private school markets funded with public dollars? Can lower-performing red states actually achieve top-performing status without investments in broader child well-being? How will blue states deliver big promises about academic improvement without enforcing evidence-based instructional practice and incentivizing progress?”
They’re questions the report has difficulty answering.
