The average Utah student is performing worse in math than their pre-pandemic peers.
That's according to the latest release of the annual Education Scorecard, a project led by Harvard and Stanford universities.
While Utah made slight gains in third- through eighth-grade math scores between 2022 and 2025, that improvement barely made a dent in the drop it's seen since 2019. According to the scorecard, the average Utah student in 2025 was more than one-quarter of a grade level behind their 2019 counterparts.
Harvard's Thomas Kane, one of the project leaders, put it this way: students in 2025 took the full school year to reach the same math achievement level that students hit by around February in 2019.
"If our children are going to succeed in the economy in the future, we need to make sure they're prepared academically," Kane said.
He said these test scores are leading indicators of how students will fare economically and socially in the future.
Utah ranks 32nd of 38 states included in the scorecard for academic growth in math between 2022 and 2025.
Unlike previous years, the Education Scorecard didn't have comparable reading data for Utah because of changes to the state's test.
Zooming out nationally, the scorecard found declines in math and reading since the mid-2010s. Meaning, the pandemic can't carry all the blame for learning loss in the U.S.
"The problem did not start or end with the pandemic," Kane said. "Four years after the pandemic, and kids are not fine."
However, looking at pre-pandemic math scores, Kane said Utah stands out because it didn't see the same big decline that the nation as a whole did.
"That doesn't mean everything's fine," Kane said. "It's still lower than achievement was in 2019. But not as much lower as the national picture."
The story of change in Utah's math test scores between 2019 and 2025 varies widely across the state. Some districts are bucking the downward trend, and others are falling even further behind.
The Wasatch County School District, for example, has repeatedly been a bright spot in these annual reports. There, students are scoring significantly better in math than they were in 2019 — about a full grade level ahead in 2025.
The researchers identified Wasatch as a "district on the rise" in math, meaning its scores are improving faster than similar districts.
"District leaders describe their core belief this way: the best way to increase student achievement is through increased capacity in adults, and the district has organized itself as a high-functioning professional learning community," scorecard researchers summarized.
Other districts — including Davis, Jordan, Granite and Salt Lake City — have seen a bigger drop than the state as a whole. The average 2025 student math scores in those four districts were more than half a grade level behind their 2019 levels.
Like the phrase 'all politics is local,' Kane said, "a lot of education decisions are local too. And it's evident in this data that depending on local leadership, there are very different outcomes right now."
To illustrate that, Kane pointed to schools with more students eligible for free or reduced-price lunch. Researchers use that as a proxy measurement of poverty. While lower-income districts generally saw a drop in student achievement, some are improving better than others.
When looking at Utah's statewide data, Kane said there are likely multiple causes for the math drop. To him, the most obvious thing the state could improve is reducing absenteeism.
Chronic absenteeism is when a student misses more than 10% of the school year. While that did fall between 2022 and 2025, those rates are still higher than pre-pandemic levels in almost every Utah district.
"Students aren't going to be learning math if they're not in school," Kane said.
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