Maryland students made a faster comeback than students in more than 30 states after steep academic declines during the COVID-19 pandemic, according to researchers at Stanford, Harvard and Dartmouth.
Maryland ranks third among 35 states for student growth in reading and fifth in the nation for growth in math between 2022 and 2025, researchers found. The Education Scorecard, released this week, is one of the only apples-to-apples comparisons of student achievement across school districts, regardless of which assessment a state uses.
Researchers measured only how fast state test scores are rising in grades three through eight, not student achievement levels. Maryland students are still scoring below where they were in 2019. They remain more than half a year behind in learning math and less than that in reading.
Several Maryland school districts were identified among 108 “districts on the rise” nationally because their students’ test scores are rising faster than others in the state. In Baltimore City and Frederick and Worcester counties, scores on both reading and math have risen quickly.
Anne Arundel County and St. Mary’s County were noted for significant improvements in math, and Dorchester County and Harford County for reading improvement.
The Eastern Shore’s Somerset and Queen Anne’s counties are significantly behind other districts in gaining ground in reading since the pandemic.
“We’re making progress, real progress,” said Tenette Smith, the chief academic officer at the Maryland State Department of Education. “There’s a long road to go. There’s much more hard work that we have to do to ensure that we are providing every kid in the state a quality educational experience.”
The Education Scorecard is a collaboration by Thomas Kane at the Center for Education Policy Research at Harvard University, Sean Reardon at Stanford University’s Educational Opportunity Project and Douglas Staiger at Dartmouth College. Because of data constraints, the Education Scorecard did not include 10 states.
Maryland also saw a drop in chronic absenteeism, defined as students absent 10% of school days a year, falling from 31.1% in 2022 to 25.5% in 2025.
The state received about $3 billion in federal pandemic relief for K–12 schools, or about $3,400 per student. Gains in the highest-poverty districts, like Baltimore City, were driven by the additional money, according to the scorecard.
Nationally, both high-income and the highest-poverty areas saw gains, but middle-income school districts did not bounce back the same way. Those districts did not receive high levels of federal relief money.
The scorecard also notes that American students began what it terms a “learning recession” in 2013, long before the pandemic. In states across the nation, including Maryland, students are scoring well below their peers a decade ago. There is no definitive research on what is causing the decline, but the scorecard authors note that it coincided with the rise in cellphone use and the accompanying influence of social media.
In 2015, the nation began moving away from the No Child Left Behind accountability system, which placed enormous pressure on schools to increase test scores across all demographic groups. The law required schools to show continuous improvement over time, a goal that was eventually seen as unrealistic.
Baltimore City, where 70% of students are economically disadvantaged, saw faster gains than many school districts with a larger share of higher-income families. It also outperformed other urban school districts in the nation.
The city received substantial increases in funding during the pandemic years, including $700 million in federal funding and $420 million in additional funding over four years from the Blueprint for Maryland’s Future.
City schools also invested in the science of reading earlier than most school districts in the state, invested heavily in tutoring, and saw literacy improve, even before the pandemic. However, the city’s overall scores still lag far behind the state average.
The majority of Maryland school districts embraced the science of reading by 2022, during the period the Education Scorecard tracked for this report. States across the nation that had implemented the phonics-based curriculum saw greater gains than states that had not.
Coaching for reading teachers has also helped propel the growth in Maryland, Smith said.
She said the state is helping to transplant techniques that are working in one school district to others.
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