ON AN UNSEASONABLY balmy March afternoon in Westbrook, Maine—a suburb of Portland, the state’s largest city—parents gather outside Congin elementary school to collect their children. Before the pandemic five years ago, when schools here and across America shut down, Congin was middling, ranked by test scores in the 50th percentile of primary schools in the state. Since then it has sunk to the 30th percentile.
Schools are like complex cellular organisms; when they sicken, there can be multiple causes that are hard to sort out. The parents at Congin say their children are back on track and thriving academically. The numbers tell a less optimistic story, and they align with the latest data from the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), a standardised test known as America’s Report Card, which came out at the end of January. It updated grim findings about covid-19’s ongoing costs, showing that across the country the pandemic has thus far wiped away about 20 years of educational progress.
New research offers a culture-wars twist on this deficit: learning loss during the pandemic was measurably worse in America’s Democrat-leaning states than in Republican ones. A recent analysis by Michael Hartney and Paul Peterson of the Hoover Institution, a think-tank attached to Stanford University, suggests that prolonged school closures during the pandemic bear much of the blame. They found that while NAEP scores declined considerably in every state between 2019 and 2024, pupils in Democratic or evenly-divided states—where school closures lasted for longer—suffered greater declines than those in Republican states.
An analysis by The Economist, using a slightly different methodology, yields similar though less pronounced results (see chart 1). In our analysis, a state’s partisan lean had no significant effect on changes in reading during the pandemic. But in maths the numbers are clear: pupils in Democratic states have fared worse than their Republican-state counterparts.
It is impossible to prove conclusively that school-closure policy affected specific learning results, but the analysis is based on solid evidence. Longer closures meant more remote teaching, which in turn is associated with higher rates of absenteeism. And absenteeism, unsurprisingly, is linked with poor academic performance.
Thomas Dee, a professor of education at Stanford, attributes rising absenteeism during the pandemic to “norm erosion” caused by clunky remote teaching and other factors. “Many students and parents simply began seeing less value in regular school attendance,” he says. His research shows that the districts that kept schools closed for longer (which were disproportionately likely to be poor) saw more chronic absenteeism once they reopened. That would help explain why more Democratic states, where strong teachers’ unions were among those insisting that physical schools must stay closed, tended to see greater drops in pupil performance.
The overall state averages mask some variations. Virginia and Maine, which Kamala Harris won by six and seven points respectively, saw some of the steepest declines in NAEP scores. Yet some states Donald Trump won by more than 20 points—including Nebraska and Oklahoma—also witnessed dramatic declines.
Nor did a state’s learning losses necessarily change the underlying strength or weakness of its school system. States with strong schools emerged upright from the crisis, despite their pandemic-related declines. Weak school systems in the deep South and elsewhere remained weak. This explains why wealthier, well-educated Democratic strongholds like Massachusetts and New Jersey have remained among the country’s top-ranked states, despite the drop in scores their pupils have suffered (see chart 2).
If states’ partisan and school-closure policies show a sometimes patchwork trend, poverty rates correlate clearly with poor performance. Post-pandemic learning loss has been greater in poorer schools, particularly those that had remote instruction for longer. As a practical matter, it was harder to keep teachers, parents and pupils safe from contagion in densely packed neighbourhoods of the Bronx than it was in rural Wyoming, with its small population and ample space.
Chronic absenteeism is now easing somewhat, but for most pupils who have spent prolonged periods away from the classroom, simply turning up again will not be enough. In the wake of the pandemic the federal government doled out some $190bn to help pupils recover, giving school districts broad discretion over how to spend the funds. Districts that invested in academic catch-up—such as intensive tutoring in small groups—recovered better than those that funnelled relief money into capital improvements. Thomas Kane of Harvard University, who has led research on the issue, argues that schools that remained closed for longer “had more of an obligation to spend the federal money on academic catch-up…and they didn’t”, choosing instead to improve buildings.
Federal covid-relief funds have now mostly dried up. Mr Kane argues that states should direct what funds they have to pupil services like tutoring. Yet this won’t happen if officials do not acknowledge the problem. In Maine, the state’s department of education cast doubt on the reliability of NAEP results. In Illinois, where eighth-grade maths scores fell by six points, the superintendent of education framed the outcome as a victory, declaring that the results give “students, educators, and families cause to celebrate”. ■
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