Nationwide, post-pandemic academic recovery keeps moving forward, though not quite fast enough to erase the learning loss studied extensively and spotlighted frequently.

In early 2024, the Center for Education Policy Research at Harvard University and The Educational Opportunity Project at Stanford University released its collaborative district-level analysis of pandemic learning recovery, tracking results from the 2022-23 school year. Data indicated students in 17 states were still stuck more than a third of a grade level behind 2019 in math. Fourteen states stalled at that level in reading.

The rebound news isn’t all negative, though, at least here in Tennessee.

In the data cited, Tennessee emerged as one of just a few states with scores that improved by more than a third of a grade level in a single year.

Tennessee’s academic recovery was “among the most robust measured in any state,” the report stated.

Only two school districts nationwide were highlighted in the report’s score card for implementing successful strategies to improve student outcomes. One of those districts: Tennessee’s Metro Nashville Public Schools.

“Tennessee has been a leader since the beginning of the pandemic,” says Dr. Thomas Kane, faculty director of Harvard’s Center for Education Policy Research and one of the study’s co-authors.

Data that MNPS director Dr. Adrienne Battle highlighted in a message to staff and families, celebrating the study’s findings:

• MNPS ranked third among the top 100 districts in math growth.

• MNPS ranked sixth among the top 100 districts in reading.

• MNPS was one of two large urban districts that ranked in the Top 10 for both math and reading.

“This did not happen by accident,” Battle said during a February news conference. “A lot of planning and a lot of strategic thinking and a lot of very skillful execution of those strategies made it happen.”

On the list of strategies cited by the researchers at Harvard and Stanford: free summer learning camps mandated by the state and initially implemented in 2021. Metro Nashville Public Schools’ version, Promising Scholars, started registering students for its 2024 session in January.

Both Battle and Nashville Mayor Freddie O’Connell nodded to the impending end of federal Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief funding later this year, and the concerns parents and educators might have that programs and positions contributing to Nashville’s academic growth might sunset when that funding does.

“We are at the end of that one-time federal funding opportunity, but we know the needs of our students won’t end there,” O’Connell says. “And that is why we have worked, and my administration has worked closely with Dr. Battle and her team and the school board to ensure that unlike a lot of the rest of the country, we don’t face a cliff, but rather we have worked to build a bridge for ESSER.”

“We know that we still have plenty of work to do,” Battle says, “and no one has slowed down in pursuing our goals. In fact, this recognition nationally just gives us more momentum to continue that great, hard work.”