BATON ROUGE — Louisiana's education system has topped another study of academic improvement two weeks after The Nation's Report Card gave the state top marks.

The new study, Harvard and Stanford's Education Recovery Scorecard, ranked Louisiana first in the nation for reading and second for math when comparing statistics from 2019 and 2024. Louisiana made gains while other states fell, continuing trends from last year's study.

The study also showed Louisiana as the only state where the average student has completed academic recovery to pre-pandemic levels.

It also suggested Louisiana’s investment in pandemic funding did contribute to the academic recovery, especially when targeted at academic efforts such as summer learning and tutoring. The study also noted the previously reported decrease in the growth in chronic absenteeism in many school systems in Louisiana. 

The study, in its third year of reporting, measures the pace of academic recovery measures of school system-level student growth in reading and math.