Four Years Later, How are Students Doing?
This report examines the state of education recovery in LAUSD four years after the COVID-19 pandemic began. Titled 'State of Recovery in Los Angeles Unified: Four Years Later, How Are Students Doing?', it provides an in-depth analysis of student performance data and district strategies. In the first Educational Recovery Now report (March 2021), early data revealed devastating impacts on Los Angeles students from school closures and the pandemic.
Publicly available reports and data from LAUSD (attendance, literacy benchmarks, survey data 2016-17 to 2022-23), the California Department of Education (graduation, college-going, CAASPP 2016-17 to 2022-23), and the U.S. Dept. of Education/NCES (NAEP reading 2013-2022). District-level data from the Education Recovery Scorecard (Stanford Educational Data archive). Chronic absenteeism = % missing 15+ days, by grade/race/SES. Early literacy (K-5) via DIBELS; secondary learning loss via CAASPP ELA/math; national comparisons via NAEP. School Experience Survey provided teacher/student/parent feedback.
The sections below pull out the major points from the full report — the data, the examples, and the context behind the findings.
Stanford University’s Education Recovery Scorecard found that, nationally, students lost more than half a year of learning between the start of the pandemic and 2022, recovering only about a third of their math loss and a quarter of their reading loss the following year. Los Angeles Unified fared better than most: math achievement dropped just under a third of a grade level from 2019 to 2022 (0.27 grade levels) but gained a significant portion back by 2023 (0.16 grade levels), leaving the district only about a tenth of a grade level below where it started. In reading, students lost almost no ground during remote learning but slipped over a tenth of a year further behind the national average in 2022–23.
Less loss and a faster rebound do not mean the district has caught up. Because Los Angeles Unified students were already testing below their peers in other large districts before the pandemic, LAUSD remains roughly a year behind the national average in reading and nearly 1.4 years behind in math. Superintendent Alberto Carvalho called the district’s improvements “quite stunning,” yet the report is clear that substantial ground remains to be recovered.
| District | Math | Reading |
|---|---|---|
| San Francisco | −0.05 | −0.11 |
| San Diego | −0.09 | −0.24 |
| Elk Grove | −0.24 | −0.03 |
| Long Beach | −0.77 | −0.25 |
| Los Angeles | −1.38 | −1.09 |
| Fresno | −1.94 | −1.95 |
Education Recovery Scorecard Project. Figures are grade levels relative to the 2019 national average.
The story of recovery varies sharply from one student group to another. Younger students, students of color, low-income students, and English learners were more impacted and have struggled more to recoup their losses. Among eighth graders, just 39% were on track in reading and 24% in math in 2022–23; Black and Latino students were on track at less than half the rate of Asian and white students, and English learners struggled most of all, with 1% or fewer meeting either standard. Among eleventh graders, only about one in five met the math standard and one in two the reading standard.
Attendance and well-being tell a parallel story. Chronic absenteeism — missing at least 15 days of school — skyrocketed on the return to campus, peaking near 45% before improving to 37% in 2022–23, still far above the steady 16% seen before the pandemic. In 2021–22 it was students in grades K–5 who carried the highest rate, at 47%. On the district’s student survey, satisfaction and well-being have declined since the return to in-person learning, even as students report feeling closer to their peers.
College-going has followed the same downward trend. Once close to 60%, the share of graduates enrolling in college within a year of graduating fell to just one in two in 2021 and 2022, with a gap of almost 30 percentage points across race/ethnicity groups — 78% among Asian students versus 49% among Latino students as of 2022.