New Hampshire students have made modest progress in recovering from pandemic-era learning losses, but a new national study places the state squarely in the middle of the pack for academic growth, and the news on reading is particularly sobering. According to data from the Education Scorecard released by researchers from Harvard University, Stanford University, and Dartmouth College, reported by New Hampshire Public Radio, New Hampshire students in 2025 are performing slightly better in math but slightly worse in reading compared to 2022, and both remain below where students were before COVID-19 disrupted schooling across the state.
The study, which tracked academic growth nationwide from 2022 to 2025, offers one of the most comprehensive pictures to date of how well states have recovered from pandemic-era learning setbacks. For New Hampshire, the picture is mixed: not a failure, but not a success story either.
A Middle-of-the-Pack Recovery
The Education Scorecard’s methodology tracks the progress individual students make relative to their starting point, rather than simply comparing raw test scores. This approach allows researchers to isolate which states have been most effective at moving students forward, regardless of where they started.
On that measure, New Hampshire falls into the broad middle of the national distribution. The state’s recovery in math has been positive, with students making measurable gains since 2022, but those gains have not been sufficient to bring average performance back to pre-pandemic levels. In reading, the situation is worse: New Hampshire students not only haven’t recovered the ground lost during the pandemic, they have continued to fall further behind since 2022.
This pattern, stronger performance in math than reading, mirrors national trends. Researchers have found that reading recovery has been more elusive than math recovery across most states, likely because reading skill development depends more heavily on consistent, cumulative instruction over years, while math gains can sometimes be made more quickly through targeted intervention.
New Hampshire’s position in the middle of the national pack is consistent with the state’s broader academic profile. Earlier National Assessment of Educational Progress data placed New Hampshire near the top of the nation for raw test scores, reflecting the state’s relatively high baseline. But high baselines don’t automatically translate into rapid recovery, and New Hampshire’s middling growth rate suggests the state has not found a dramatically effective approach to accelerating academic catch-up.
The Income Divide That Complicates the Story
One of the more counterintuitive findings from the Education Scorecard involves income. Nationally, the research found that high-poverty districts and wealthy districts have both made substantial gains since 2022, while middle-income districts have lagged behind.
New Hampshire mirrors this pattern. The state’s lowest-income school districts and its most affluent districts have both shown stronger growth, while districts that fall in the middle of the income distribution have struggled to keep pace. This creates a somewhat unusual picture in which the students most researchers would expect to face the greatest barriers to recovery, those in high-poverty settings, are in some cases outperforming their middle-income peers in terms of academic growth.
Researchers have offered several explanations for this pattern nationally. High-poverty districts have often been the recipients of targeted federal intervention funding, including significant pandemic relief money directed at the highest-need schools. Wealthy districts typically have the resources, staffing flexibility, and parent engagement to respond quickly to academic challenges. Middle-income districts sometimes fall into a gap where they don’t qualify for targeted federal aid but also don’t have the surplus resources of wealthier communities.
In New Hampshire, this income dynamic plays out across a school system that ranges from rural communities with limited tax bases to suburban districts with high property values and correspondingly robust school budgets. The state’s school funding formula has been the subject of ongoing litigation and legislative debate for decades, covered in detail in our look at New Hampshire’s ongoing education reform debate, and the academic growth data adds a new dimension to those conversations.
What It Means for NH Schools Right Now
For parents of school-age children in New Hampshire, the Education Scorecard data raises practical questions about what their children’s schools are doing to address lingering pandemic deficits. The fact that math performance has improved since 2022 is a genuine positive. It suggests that the intensive tutoring programs, extended learning time initiatives, and curriculum changes that many districts adopted in the aftermath of the pandemic are having some effect, at least in math.
Reading is a different story. The continued decline in reading performance since 2022 is particularly concerning for educators who work with younger students, as early reading skills form the foundation for academic success across subjects. Children who don’t develop strong reading skills by the end of third grade face compounding disadvantages as they move through school and encounter content-area learning that presumes literacy.
Several New Hampshire school districts have been moving toward structured literacy approaches in recent years, though teacher pay pressures and staffing shortages have complicated implementation in some communities., a shift backed by research showing that systematic phonics instruction produces better reading outcomes than older, more holistic reading instruction methods. But curriculum adoption takes time, and teacher training on new instructional approaches is an ongoing process. The benefits of these changes may not yet be fully reflected in the 2022-to-2025 data.
Context from Earlier Data
The new Education Scorecard data should be read alongside earlier assessments of New Hampshire’s academic standing. Data from early 2025 showed New Hampshire test scores near the top of the nation on raw performance measures, a reflection of the state’s demographics, educational investment, and pre-pandemic baseline. But those high scores masked the recovery gap: even high-performing states have students who are learning less than they were before COVID-19 upended schooling for several years.
A companion NHPR report from earlier in May examined schools that have made notable gains in test scores, finding that focused leadership, consistent instructional practices, and strong family engagement were common threads among high-performing schools. Those findings offer a roadmap of sorts, but scaling school-specific successes across an entire state system is a persistent challenge in education policy.
Looking Ahead for NH Students
The Education Scorecard data arrives at a moment when federal education funding is facing uncertainty. Changes to federal education programs, including potential adjustments to Title I funding that supports high-poverty schools, could affect the resources available to districts that have relied on federal money to fund pandemic recovery interventions.
At the state level, New Hampshire lawmakers have been engaged in ongoing debates about education funding, school choice policy, and curriculum standards. Civic education has also received renewed attention, with programs like the Mikva Challenge expanding into NH schools to build student engagement with democratic institutions. The question of how to sustain academic recovery efforts without continued emergency federal funding is one that state education officials and legislators will have to answer in the coming budget cycles.
For students in the middle of their K-12 careers, the window for catching up is not infinite. A student who entered kindergarten in 2020 is now in fifth or sixth grade, and the learning disruptions of the early pandemic years are part of their academic biography. Effective intervention in the next few years can still make a significant difference, but the clock is ticking.
New Hampshire’s middle-of-the-pack status is neither a crisis nor a comfort. It reflects a state that, like most of its peers, is still working through the academic consequences of a once-in-a-generation disruption to schooling. The data makes clear that the work is not done, and in reading especially, it may be getting harder.
