One story dominates today: the annual Education Scorecard from researchers at Stanford, Harvard, and Dartmouth — titled "From Learning Recession to Learning Recovery" — showing reading scores fell in 83% of U.S. school districts over the past decade, and that the slide started in the mid-2010s, not in 2020. The Associated Press (in partnership with Chalkbeat and AL.com), NPR, and The New York Times all have versions worth your time, and The Times also has an interactive district lookup tool.

A few things stood out to me. The "learning recession" framing is going to stick because it captures both the duration and the policy demand, and the report itself is direct that the slowdown coincided with the dismantling of test-based accountability after the NCLB waivers began in 2012. A word of caution on what comes next: the report points to two co-occurring factors, accountability rollback and rising social media use, but it is careful that neither is causally established. We're in a moment of real ed-tech backlash, as Education Week reported last month, with bills to limit classroom screen time now moving in at least 17 states. The risk is that "social media" gets collapsed into "technology" and that thoughtful classroom tools — assistive tech for special education, adaptive practice platforms, dynamic curriculum — get treated the same as the consumer apps competing for kids' attention outside of school.

The bright spots are instructive on what comes next: every state that improved reading scores from 2022 to 2025 (Louisiana, Maryland, Tennessee, Kentucky, Indiana, Mississippi, Minnesota, and DC) had implemented at least seven elements of comprehensive "science of reading" reform, while none of the states with fewer than seven saw any reading growth. Attendance is the other lever — the authors estimate that if absence rates had returned to pre-pandemic levels, recovery would have been meaningfully larger across every income tier. The 74 has a useful companion piece tracing the losses back to 2013, and Chalkbeat has a complementary story on the four Detroit strategies actually working — with attendance front and center.

Higher ed had a heavy day too — a 20% drop in new foreign undergrads (Bloomberg), a sharp Inside Higher Ed piece on the 30-year arc of GOP estrangement from higher ed, and NYU student leaders objecting to Jonathan Haidt as their graduation speaker.

— Thomas

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