New Education Scorecard maps district-level learning trends across 40 states

The Education Scorecard, released this week by researchers at the Center for Education Policy Research at Harvard and the Education Opportunity Project at Stanford, compiles National Assessment of Educational Progress and state assessment results to compare reading and math performance at the school-district level across 40 states from 2015 through 2025. The dataset is intended as a multi-year baseline for tracking district progress and identifying patterns that standard national snapshots can miss.

The project combines NAEP trend measures with state testing data to produce district-level comparisons that cross state assessment boundaries. According to the teams behind the scorecard, the aim is to give researchers, education leaders, and policymakers a longer runway of comparable measures to assess gains, setbacks, and recovery paths following widespread pandemic disruptions to schooling.

What the Education Scorecard measures

The scorecard merges two primary sources: the federally administered NAEP and individual state accountability tests. By aligning and standardizing those records across districts, the study creates a ten-year window of reading and math outcomes at the local level. The release includes district-by-district results for 40 states, enabling side-by-side comparisons over time rather than relying solely on single-year national or state summaries.

The underlying dataset covers 2015 through 2025, a period that spans pre-pandemic performance, pandemic-era disruption, and subsequent recovery efforts. The teams note that district-level longitudinal data can reveal heterogeneous patterns — for example, varied recovery speeds across regions, grade levels, or subject areas — that aggregated state or national figures obscure.

How DC policymakers might use the scorecard

For Washington policymakers and local education officials, the scorecard functions as a new analytic input. Think tanks, advocacy groups, and government staff in the District commonly draw on AEI and similar institutions to surface evidence during budget cycles, Council hearings, and school system planning.

A district-level, multi-year dataset can inform where to target interventions, which schools need follow-up study, and how DC Public Schools compares with peer districts in other states that share demographic or policy features.

The American Enterprise Institute, a Washington-based research organization, published a commentary highlighting the scorecard this week and encouraged local stakeholders to incorporate the findings into ongoing policy discussions. AEI’s write-up frames the scorecard as a tool for moving the conversation beyond short-term recovery narratives and toward sustained performance monitoring.

The researchers and AEI emphasize that the scorecard is a piece of evidence rather than a prescriptive plan. District-level measures can help refine hypotheses about which policies correlate with stronger outcomes, but they do not, on their own, prove causation between specific interventions and student achievement changes.

Local officials and advocates in the District should consider the scorecard alongside enrollment trends, staffing data, and programmatic investments to build a fuller picture of factors driving learning outcomes.

Look for state-by-district files and interactive tools from the scorecard teams in the coming weeks as they make the dataset and visualizations available for public use.