Impacts of Academic Recovery Interventions on Student Achievement in 2022-23

The COVID-19 pandemic devastated student achievement, with declines rivaling those after Hurricane Katrina. These losses widened achievement gaps between historically marginalized students and their peers. Three years later, achievement remains behind pre-pandemic levels for many students. This paper examines 2022-23 academic recovery efforts across eight districts, including tutoring, small group instruction, after-school, extended year, double-dose, digital learning, and expert teacher interventions. Across 22 math and reading interventions, most were delivered to fewer students and for less time than planned. We find positive effects for one tutoring program on math scores and two tutoring programs on reading scores, ranging from 0.22 to 0.33 SD. Each of these programs served a very small share of the district’s students and was unlikely to play a major role in district-wide academic recovery. Finally, we find that having an “expert” teacher with high evaluation scores as opposed to a non-expert teacher significantly improves student achievement by 0.06 SD in math and 0.11 SD in reading. While highlighting the promise of intensive academic interventions, our findings underscore the challenges districts face in scaling such interventions to match their recovery needs. The field needs better evidence regarding successful implementation of large-scale interventions.