The Educational Opportunity Project at Stanford University released a longitudinal study last week with some grim findings. The study gathered data from about 68% of school districts in the United States and found that 83% have seen declines in reading proficiency compared to 10 years ago, while 70% have dropped in math. This is true of affluent and disadvantaged school districts, urban and rural school districts, and across all races (though the largest declines occurred in historically underserved communities).
The data is so alarming that researchers are referring to the phenomenon as the “Learning Recession.” There are cycles of systemic reflection in American education, from No Child Left Behind to Race to the Top, and now this new data makes one thing clear: the time for bold action is now.
Locally, the data is even more urgent. Though Tennessee students are back to pre-pandemic math scores and rank top five in the nation in reading and math pandemic recoveries, Memphis-Shelby County Schools tells a different story. According to Education Scorecard (a collaboration of Harvard, Stanford, and Dartmouth researchers), students at MSCS performed an average of 2.37 grade levels behind their peers between 2022 and 2025. The disparity was especially pronounced among low-income, Black, and Hispanic students, though nearly all groups performed significantly below the state average.
These outcomes reflect challenges our local community already knows too well: persistently high chronic absenteeism rates, driven by out-of-school factors such as housing instability, health disparities, food insecurity, and poverty, contribute to longstanding district-wide performance struggles. Coupled with persistent turnover and instability in leadership, financial management concerns, and low school performance, it’s unquestionable that drastic measures need to be taken.
Many will blame COVID for the decline in student achievement, but the researchers are adamant that, while there is no clear-cut reason for the decline, scores began slipping long before 2020. They cite a combination of factors including the easing of federal school accountability measures and the rise of smartphones, social media, and other technology. COVID then added fuel to the declines and accelerated trends in chronic absenteeism. Now, students at one in three school districts across the country are reading a full grade level lower than they were in 2015.
