Alabama schools have found themselves in an unfamiliar spot in national rankings, with good news all around this week.

First, the Nation’s Report Card showed Alabama students held their own while other states fell precipitously.

Next, an analysis of state tests from Harvard and Stanford showed Alabama and some of its school districts led the nation in learning gains from 2019 to 2022.

The new analysis, called the Education Recovery Scorecard, allows communities to see what happened, achievement-wise, from 2019 to 2022. Researchers stitched together NAEP results and state test results to create a common scale to compare the impact of the pandemic on learning among all school districts nationwide.

With Alabama school districts ranking at the top nationwide, we thought you’d like a way to access the information for yourself. Researchers did not include rankings on the website.

For those interested in where their school district landed compared to 3,700 school districts in 29 states and the District of Columbia, check out the table below or click this link. It takes you to a table of Alabama school districts and each school’s progress (gains or losses). Ranks from 1 to 500 are included for math and English language arts (ELA). Rankings beyond 500 are noted by “NR” (not ranked).

The math change and ELA change columns are sortable and show the number of grade levels of change for all students tested from 2019 to 2022. A positive number indicates a learning gain above grade level. A negative number indicates a loss of learning. A “1″ means a gain of one grade level.

Piedmont City Schools, for example, ranked number one in the nation – yes, the nation – for math gains for all students from 2019 to 2022. The number that landed them at the top was 1.24, (in the “math chg” column in the table above) which indicates grade levels of change. For Piedmont, it means a student in third grade in 2022 scored 1.24 grade levels higher than a third grade student in 2019, before the pandemic. That’s a lot of learning according to researchers.

The Scorecard website contains a lot of information. We’ve simplified a way to get to Alabama-specific information: click the link (“chart” or “map”) in the table below to find your school district among the nationwide pool.

For those wondering about how researchers joined the various datasets – all states use different state-level tests – here’s how Sean Reardon, Director of the Stanford Education Opportunity Project described it in simple terms:

“We use the state assessments to compare the performance of districts within a state. And then we use the results of the NAEP assessment to measure the differences in performance between states. We stitch those two sets of results together to enable us to make comparisons among all districts in the US.”

Full methodology is available at this link.

The analysis, released Friday, currently has district-level data for Alabama, 28 other states and the District of Columbia. That’s more than 3,700 districts nationwide. Researchers are adding states as those results are released.