It seems like a tale of two school systems.
Washington, D.C., has become the fastest-improving school system in the country, according to a major new analysis of student test scores released last week by researchers at Stanford, Harvard and Dartmouth.
The education dashboard analysiswhich compares more than 5,000 school districts in 38 states, finds that most of the country is stuck in a reading recession — a decline in achievement from a decade before the pandemic. Between 2022 and 2025, only five states and the District of Columbia saw significant progress in reading. The national capital recorded the highest growth of all and also led the improvement in mathematics.
Related: Children are in a ‘reading recession’ as test scores continue to fall
Washington students in public and charter schools gained about two-thirds of a grade level in math and about one-third of a grade level in reading during that period, according to the analysis. One grade level represents about one year of learning, meaning eighth graders in 2025 were about six months ahead in math compared to eighth graders in 2022.
But this progress should not obscure a darker reality.
In 2025, only 26 percent of Washington students met standards in math and only 38 percent were proficient in reading, according to a separate study. report from the DC Policy Center, an independent local think tank. Only 16 percent of high school juniors and seniors were considered college or career ready.
A school system can improve rapidly while leaving most children behind. This contradiction fuels an important political and emotional debate in education: should schools be judged by the number of proficient students or by the progress of students each year?
Critics of public schools take advantage of low proficiency rates.
“Gains of any magnitude are a good thing, but when most students — about two-thirds to three-quarters in D.C.’s case — are not performing at grade level, there’s nothing to applaud,” said Steven Wilson, a former Massachusetts education policymaker and charter school official. “Most students still face system failures. (Wilson’s 2025 book, “The Lost Decade,” criticizes recent school reform efforts.)
Even before last week’s national data was released, Washington school leaders were celebrating progress. Paul Kihn, deputy mayor for education, touted the strength of schools after 2025 annual tests revealed a whopping 3.6 percent improvement in reading and math, similar to grade level increases calculated by the Education Scorecard team. “Our academic achievement is unmatched in the country in terms of growth,” Kihn said in a March 2026 statement. blog post.
Tom Kane, an economist at Harvard and one of the authors of the new Education Scorecard report, explained that there has been a long-standing debate in education over whether to focus on proficiency or growth. In this report, he said, the research team chose growth in order to “combat” what it sees as an overly pessimistic narrative about public education.
“We’re trying to point out that something positive is happening in some of these places,” Kane said. “And I hope that, if we can, rebuild the public’s sense of agency when it comes to public education.”
In addition to highlighting Washington’s growth, the research team also released a list of 108 “neighborhoods on the rise“: school districts where gains in math and reading exceeded those of similar districts in their state. Washington was not included because there are no comparable districts in the city. But its gains are comparable to many districts on the list. And, like Washington, most of these districts still have a large proportion of students below grade level.
In theory, if a district’s achievement continues to rise disproportionately each year, students should catch up and eventually reach grade level. But public school critics like Wilson point out that even if a school system improves by one or two percentage points a year, it may take decades for the majority of students to get a decent education. Meanwhile, students currently in the system are losing out. They cannot wait for this progress. Wilson worries that highlighting a school system in which most children are far behind grade level could mislead the public and potentially lead school leaders to adopt bad policies.
“Let’s take Klieg’s light and transfer it to school systems that educate almost all of their students, rather than a third of their students,” Wilson said.
Wilson cites individual schools or charter school networks, where high percentages of low-income people students have met or exceeded grade level. It is much more difficult to replicate this success with low-income students across a large school district.
Income is an important factor in this debate. If the public and policymakers focus solely on competence, affluent suburbs tend to dominate the results. High-income districts often seem to be the most successful, not necessarily because their schools are more efficient, but because students from wealthier families start far ahead.
This concern has prompted researchers to focus on growth-based measures of academic performance over the past two decades. A widely cited example is research by Sean Reardon, a Stanford sociologist and co-author of this report, who discovered a decade ago that Chicago led the most effective schools in the country based on student growth, even though many students were falling behind their grade level. (Illinois was not among the 38 states in the last analysis due to changes to its state rating, so it’s unclear where Chicago stands at present.)
Yet many parents would probably prefer to enroll their children in a school system where most students are on grade level, even if annual improvements are small or nonexistent, rather than in a school where only a small proportion of students are on grade level but the school is recovering and improving.
Harvard’s Kane agrees that getting more students over the proficiency threshold is also important. For the team’s next Education Scorecard report, the researchers plan to add a new data point showing the share of children who are proficient in teaching compared to other districts with similar demographics.
The disagreement persists because the two measures answer different questions. Growth shows whether students are learning more than before. Competence indicates whether they have learned enough.
This is what makes Washington such a telling case. It shows how a school system can post some of the nation’s biggest gains while falling short of the most basic measure of success: whether students can read and do math at grade level.
Contact staffwriter Jill Barshay at 212-678-3595, jillbarshay.35 on Signal or barshay@hechingerreport.org.
This story about school improvement was produced by The Hechinger reportan independent, nonprofit news organization that covers education. Register for Proof points and others Hechinger Newsletters.
The article America’s Fastest-Improving School System Still Falls Short appeared first in the Hechinger Report.
