While most things have returned to normal after the disruptions of the pandemic, Utah is still behind in the classroom. The Education Recovery Scorecard says students have lost a lot of ground in reading compared to before the pandemic.
That echoes the same message as the recent Nation’s Report Card, which shows students are not performing as well as they were in 2019. The Education Recovery Scorecard, however, includes national data from that report, state test results and results for individual districts.
The scorecard is a collaboration between Harvard University's Center for Education Policy Research and The Educational Opportunity Project at Stanford University.
It says Utah students were more than half a grade level behind in reading in the spring of 2024 compared to achievement levels before the pandemic. That means students would need to learn 125% of what they normally learn two years in a row just to catch up. They fared a little better in math, as they’re only about one-quarter of a grade level behind compared to 2019.
Still, Utah is ahead of most states in some ways. It ranks 5th in terms of recovery in math between 2019 and 2024. In reading recovery, it’s a different story. Utah is ranked 37th. Compared to national learning loss averages, the state lost less ground in math but more in reading.
Average math scores for third through eighth graders went up slightly between 2022 and 2024, but they’re still nowhere near where they were in 2019. In reading, Utah scores have continued to fall since 2019. The report says students lost almost as much ground between 2022 and 2024 as they did between 2019 and 2022.
One of the report’s authors, Tom Kane, faculty director of the Center for Education Policy Research at Harvard University, said one bright spot in Utah’s report is the Wasatch County School District. Wasatch is the only district that in 2024 was ahead of where it was in 2019 in reading achievement. It is also ahead of where it was in 2019 for math.
“Wasatch is almost a whole grade equivalent above where they were in 2019 in math and about a half a grade above where they were in reading,” Kane said.
Wasatch also stood out as a positive outlier in the 2022 Education Recovery Scorecard.
Like other states, Kane said higher-poverty districts in Utah have lost more ground and have been slower to catch up. Wealthier districts, like Park City, are back or almost back to 2019 learning levels.
Some districts stood out for more concerning reasons.
Kane said Ogden, Logan City and Tooele County school districts aren’t recovering as well as districts with similar poverty rates. And in Logan, Granite and Tooele school districts, achievement levels in math are almost three-quarters of a grade level behind where they were in 2019.
Kane said he is more concerned about Utah’s literacy data than the math results.
Similar to other states, Utah has spent millions of dollars to implement “science of reading” reforms in recent years to dramatically improve how kids are taught to read. This latest report tells Kane that some of the policies are working and others aren’t. He said states have to work collaboratively to figure out what is most effective.
Utah is also focusing its program on the earliest grades, K-3. However, as Kane noted, the “losses that we're seeing aren't just in the early grades.”
Kane said a lot of the COVID education recovery focus has been on what learning was lost during the height of the pandemic when schools were shut down.
“The fact that the losses continue imply that either there was a trend happening before the pandemic that has continued, or that some new challenges are coming up since the pandemic.”
One of the new challenges, Kane said, is increased student absenteeism.
Before the pandemic, Utah’s absenteeism rates were about the national average. In 2019, roughly 14% of Utah students were chronically absent, missing more than 10% of the school year. That rose to 28% in 2022 and declined slightly to 24% in 2024.
“The thing with absenteeism is it doesn't just affect the kids who are absent, it affects the other kids in school,” Kane said. “When there's a different group of kids absent every day, the teachers are constantly trying to reteach material and review and keep everybody up to pace. It is just a juggling act.”
Kane said lowering absenteeism is something all adults could help schools with. He said community leaders, elected officials, cultural institutions and other groups could try to engage kids more at school and share the importance of daily attendance.
“Getting absenteeism rates down ought to be a shared goal in Utah.”
According to national polls, Kane said most parents overestimate how well their children perform in school. Families may hear about pandemic-related learning loss but often assume their child is doing fine.
“Parents still haven't grasped that we're talking about their kids, not everybody else in Utah,” Kane said.
It’s impossible to say what the future will look like, but based on the past Kane predicts there will be serious negative consequences to this loss, like making less money in their lifetime.
“Unless state and local leaders step up now, the achievement losses will be the longest lasting — and most inequitable — legacy of the pandemic.”
