Credit: Unsplash/CC0 Public Domain A new analysis of student test scores reveals that American schools were in a "learning recession" for seven years before the COVID-19 pandemic, with student test scores in math and reading on a steady decline since 2013. This reversal ended two decades of progress, according to Sean Reardon, the Professor of Poverty and Inequality at Stanford Graduate School of Education, whose data forms the backbone of the new research. "From the early 1990s through 2013, public elementary and middle school students' math and reading skills improved dramatically—by more than two grade levels in math, for example," said Reardon, faculty director of The Educational Opportunity Project. "That shows that we can improve our public schools and equalize educational opportunity. But we haven't been doing much of that for the last decade." This stall and reversal is one of the findings of the new report , "From Learning Recession to Learning Recovery: Understanding the Sources of U.S.…