Most Minnesota school districts haven’t recovered test scores after the pandemic

Seventh and eighth grade students work collaboratively on algebra problems in Ailee Reinhardt’s math class at Pioneer Ridge Middle School in Chaska, Minnesota, Sept. 24, 2025. (Photo by Nicole Neri/Minnesota Reformer)

Academic outcomes for Minnesota students have stagnated since the pandemic in both reading and math, with 2025 state assessments showing little change since tests of students in grades 3-8 resumed in 2022.

A Reformer analysis of test scores from 2019 to 2025 found that less than one out of every seven Minnesota school districts have returned to pre-pandemic proficiency rates in either subject since students were pushed into online learning in March 2020. The districts that did recover fully serve only 5% of students in the state and are mostly smaller districts.

Among the 120 districts with at least 1,000 students, just five districts have returned to or surpassed their 2019 proficiency rates in 2025 in either subject.

Nationally, every state is showing worse academic outcomes than in 2019, according to the Education Recovery Scorecard. But unlike Minnesota, some states have started to show students on an upward trajectory.

Using data from national and state assessments in 2024, the scorecard ranked Minnesota students’ pandemic recovery 45th in math and 38th in reading. The report estimated Minnesota students remained about three-quarters of a year behind in math and half a year behind in reading compared to where students were before the pandemic. In other words, a Minnesota fourth grader knew as much as in 2019 as a child halfway through fifth grade in 2025. Similarly, students are still half a year behind in both reading and math nationwide, according to the report.

Some of the top states for academic recovery include Alabama, Tennessee, Louisiana and Mississippi, none of which typically make lists of the best states for public education.

Eastern Carver County School District is one of the few large Minnesota districts where test scores have increased in math. In 2019, 54% of the district’s students were meeting or exceeding state standards in math, which dropped to 51% in 2022. Scores have rebounded and now 56% of students are testing as proficient in math.

Superintendent Erin Rathke and Assistant Superintendent Nate Manaen said that the district’s culture around continuous school improvement — analyzing student data and changing instructional practices to improve student outcomes — is strong.

“It’s important for us to give credit to our teachers. We have excellent teachers that are buying into the curriculum, are looking at data, and making adjustments for our students,” Rathke said in an interview with the Reformer.

The district also focused on accelerating students’ learning after the pandemic, rather than lowering standards.

“Eastern Carver County was really intentional about saying we are not going to water down what learning looks like. And instead, really be intentional about accelerating students as they come back,” Manaen said.

According to Manaen, teachers, principals and district leadership were all focused on making sure that math classes were both rigorous and engaging for students when they returned to in-person learning.

At the middle school level, that meant implementing an instructional model called “building thinking classrooms” that is a form of what’s known as inquiry-based instruction. This entails students engaged in more discussion in math class, solving problems in groups and discussing their strategies. Manaen and Rathke say keeping students engaged in the classroom has been a key to the district’s improvements.

Pillager School District, a small, rural district near Brainerd, was one of the few school districts that saw higher proficiency in both math and reading in 2025 compared to 2019. Ryan Krominga, the director of curriculum and instruction, credits the improvement in part to the district’s manageable size.

Whereas large districts had to coordinate more transportation, food and other logistics during the pandemic, smaller districts “have fewer people to get on the phone with and start to shift things around,” Krominga said. As a result, Pillager was able to return to the classroom on the earlier side, with some in-person instruction starting in the fall of 2020.

In-person instruction is far more effective, especially for the youngest learners, than online.

Another factor was the district’s strategic use of COVID-19 federal assistance money. To support pandemic recovery, the federal government gave K-12 schools $190 billion in financial assistance. Minnesota schools received about $2.6 billion.

States had wide latitude in how to guide districts to use the funds. While some states took a narrow approach, limiting districts to a few strategies, Minnesota took a kitchen sink approach, allowing districts to spend on 18 different strategies.

Some districts, like Minneapolis Public Schools, allocated a majority of their federal funds to giving educators bonuses and raises, and closing their pre-existing structural budget deficit while building up financial reserves, which were also allowed uses.

Early evidence from California shows districts that spent more on academic support have had greater academic recovery.

Pillager School District used part of its federal cash on hotspot technology to keep its students connected in a rural area with spottier internet access. Krominga said that teacher-student connectivity was a priority when thinking of ways to use the funds.

Pillager allocated another portion of the federal funds, which have since run out, to expanding summer school services to all students — three weeks of targeted learning in the morning and summer camp activities in the afternoon, transportation included.

In Minnesota, expanded summer school programs were used to serve about 6% of students, per 2023 data. In contrast, nearly 7% of students in Louisiana received tutoring and 11% of students had access to expanded summer school programs because of federal pandemic aid.

Krominga, who has a 12-year-old son, said he’s hopeful about the future of Minnesota’s education despite a pandemic dip across the state, in part due to revised math standards in 2022 and the 2023 READ Act, which overhauled literacy instruction.

“The training that we’re doing for teachers is having an impact,” Krominga said. “We’re probably a couple years out before we start to see state tests changing.”

Data

All data comes from the Minnesota Department of Education Data Center. We used All-Standards Based Public MCA/MTAS Results files to look at MCA proficiency rates for both math and reading. MCA/MTAS proficiency rates use the population of test-takers as the denominator, whereas North Star proficiency rates use the total population of students, including students in tested grades who did not participate in testing. We chose to use MCA/MTAS proficiency rates to avoid artificially deflating the proficiency rates for schools with low test participation.

Data for total enrollment and percent of students who would be eligible for Free and Reduced-Price lunch under federal guidelines comes from the MDE Students file. Students are eligible for Free and Reduced-Price lunch under federal guidelines if they live in a household below 185% of the federal poverty line, and the corresponding column in our data table is labeled as such. The joined data set (enrollment data and MCA/MTAS data for 2019, 2022 and 2025) can be found here.

As a note, we present the proficiency rates for those three years to illustrate the trends of school districts, not specific student cohorts. The student cohorts for the three years we included (2019, 2022 and 2025) differ, and we did not adjust for changes in student demographics for this analysis. Results for smaller districts are more sensitive to small changes in student performance compared to larger districts, and it’s best to compare results across similar-sized districts.