A national education research organization gave Tennessee’s school report card an A for its availability of long-term student achievement data.
Tennessee was one of seven states to earn the top grade, according to the report by the Center on Reinventing Public Education, a nonpartisan research group based at Arizona State University. The national study graded states on how transparent their school report cards were in reflecting pandemic learning loss and recovery, as well as on their general usability.
“COVID had these very large impacts on American education,” Morgan Polikoff, an education professor at the University of Southern California who led the research team, said by phone. “I don’t think it’s a hyperbole to say it is the most consequential thing that’s happened in American education in many decades. It had substantial negative effects on achievement. It caused large increases in absenteeism, and we have not fully recovered from that. And so I think, from that standpoint, I think it’s important to track, to make that information public.”
In Tennessee, the percentage of chronically absent students — those who miss 10% or more instructional school days — has risen from 13.1% during the 2018-19 school year to 20.2% in 2022-23. Similarly, the percentage of students testing proficient in math dropped during the first year of the pandemic and has remained below prepandemic highs through the 2022-23 school year.