Research

To make up for pandemic-related learning losses, many U.S. public school districts have increased enrollment in their summer school programs. We assess summer school as a strategy for COVID-19 learning recovery by tracking the academic progress of students who attended summer school in 2022 across eight districts serving 400,000 students. Based on students’ spring to fall progress, we find a positive impact for summer school on math test achievement (0.03 standard deviation, SD), but not on reading tests. These effects are predominantly driven by students in upper elementary grades. To put the results into perspective, if we assume that these districts have losses similar to those present at the end of the 2022–23 school year (i.e., approximately -0.2 SD), we estimate summer programming closed approximately 2% to 3% of the districts’ total learning losses in math, but none in reading.

Advanced courses prepare high school students for college material and the associated exams provide a low cost way to earn college credit. The College Board’s Advanced Placement (AP) program is the most common in the United States, with about 40 percent of graduating seniors taking at least one AP exam in recent years. However, these opportunities are not equal across high school students due to variation in school offerings and potentially limiting exam fees. We examine the effects of two state-level policies designed to provide greater access to this program: the first mandates a minimum number of AP courses to be offered in each high school and the second waives exam fees for all students for at least one exam. Our event study and two-way fixed effect estimates suggest that mandating the provision of AP courses raises the percent of high school graduates taking AP exams by 4 to 5 percentage points, while exam fee waivers increase participation by about 1.5 percentage points. At the same time, pass rates fell after implementation of the two policies, indicating that marginal exam takers are less proficient on the exams. We find both policies have minimal effects on the percent of graduates who passed at least one AP exam or on the number of passing exams per high school student.

The COVID-19 pandemic sharply reduced student test scores, and ESSER-funded academic interventions largely failed to recover those losses. Yet few researchers have examined whether these interventions affected students in ways beyond test scores. We use rich longitudinal data from Guilford County Schools (GCS) to document trends before and after the pandemic in attendance, suspensions, disciplinary referrals, and course grades from 2016-17 through 2023-24. All non-test outcomes worsened in GCS after the pandemic, widening pre-existing gaps by race and school poverty level. We also estimate how participation in GCS’s tutoring and summer school in 2021–22 and 2022–23 affect these non-test outcomes. Students who participated in recovery interventions showed improved attendance and discipline in the following year. Effects varied across interventions: summer school robustly improved attendance the following school year, while tutoring improved discipline in one year (2021–22) and attendance in the other (2022–23). These results demonstrate that academic interventions support students on dimensions beyond traditionally measured academic performance and contribute to recovering student engagement and well-being.

It is now well established that the COVID-19 pandemic had a devastating and unequal impact on student achievement. Test score declines were disproportionately large for historically marginalized students, exacerbating preexisting achievement gaps and threatening educational and economic inequality. In this paper, we use longitudinal student-level NWEA MAP Growth test data to estimate differences in test score declines for students at different points on the prepandemic test distribution. We also test the extent to which students’ schools and districts accounted for these differences in declines. We find significant differences in learning loss by baseline achievement, with lower-achieving students’ scores dropping 0.100 SD more in math and 0.113 SD more in reading than higher-achieving students’ scores. We additionally show that the school a student attended accounts for about three-quarters of this widening gap in math achievement and about one-third in reading. The findings suggest school and district-level policies may have mattered more for learning loss than individual students’ experiences within schools and districts.