Post-pandemic scores on Nation’s Report Card slip more in states Kamala Harris won easily
States are the “laboratory” of democracy, opined Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis. That laboratory swung into action when states introduced substantially different policies as Covid-19 swept across the country in early 2020. In some places, schools closed their buildings and switched to remote learning for a year or more, while in others the school door reopened by the start of the fall. Surprisingly, school closures and other social distancing policies often had more to do with the political coloration of a state or district than with the risk that children and teachers would suffer severely from the virus.
The politicization of school policy proved unfortunate for children. Yet the fact that pandemic mitigation measures were heavily shaped by politics allows one to obtain a rough estimate of their effects on student learning simply by comparing trends in states with varying hues—red, blue, or purple.
Here we use data from the National Assessment of Educational Progress, or NAEP, to compare the pandemic-era learning loss across states grouped by the share of the two-party vote that went for Kamala Harris in the 2024 presidential election. We divide states into three near-equal categories (see table) and give them the conventional colors for Republican, Democratic, and swing states. We consider trends in student performance from spring 2019 to 2024 on each of the four tests that NAEP regularly administers: 4th- and 8th-grade reading and math. We take into account variation in student demographics across states and over time by relying on adjusted NAEP scores published by Matthew Chingos and Kristen Blagg at the Urban Institute.
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Michael T. Hartney is a faculty member in the department of political science at Boston College and an adjunct fellow at the Manhattan Institute. Paul E. Peterson is a Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution and Senior Editor of Education Next, a journal of opinion and research.
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