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Pandemic-era disruptions to schooling resulted in academic setbacks for many students. To help students catch up, school districts nationwide are implementing a range of academic recovery interventions. In this paper, we use multiple data sources to evaluate the impact and implementation of academic recovery interventions in four school districts during the 2021-2022 school year. Our estimates suggest the interventions failed to reach the expected number of students and had little detectable impact on students’ test scores. Interviews with district officials highlight a host of challenges districts faced during the 2021-2022 school year. Considering the overall scale of pandemic learning loss, our results raise urgent questions about the adequacy of academic recovery efforts relative to students’ needs. The results also have implications for how districts might respond to disrupted learning in the future (e.g. in the wake of natural disasters).

Summer learning loss is a perennial concern for educators and parents alike. However, researchers have recently questioned whether summer learning loss is just a statistical artifact driven by how achievement is measured across the school year. In this study, we empirically investigated a plausible critique of summer learning loss research, namely that students do not put forth their best effort on the fall test compared with the spring test. While we cannot conclude based on our findings that students do in fact lose ground during the summer, we did not find evidence that seasonal differences in test effort are a main driver of summer learning patterns estimated with MAP Growth assessments.