(Just The News)—The majority of Texas students haven’t recovered from learning losses due to COVID-era lockdown policies and so-called virtual learning programs. The average student achievement in Texas remains over half a grade level below 2019 levels in math and almost one third of a grade level below in reading, according to an analysis published by the Education Recovery Scorecard.
According to its analysis of Texas school districts, Texas ranked 31st among states in terms of recovery in math and eighth in reading between 2019 and 2024.
“Average student achievement in Texas remains over half a grade level below 2019 levels in math (.51 grade equivalents) and almost one third of a grade level below in reading (.31 grade equivalents). In other words, the loss in math achievement in Texas is equivalent to 51% of the progress students typically make annually between grades 4 through grade 8,” CEPR explains.
The analysis found 88% of students are enrolled in school districts whose average math achievement in 2024 remained below their own 2019 levels. Slightly less, 84% of students are enrolled in school districts whose average reading achievement remained below 2019 levels.
The scorecard is a collaboration between the Center for Education Policy Research at Harvard University and The Educational Opportunity Project at Stanford University. CEPR has reported on learning losses in reading and math and academic recovery measures in districts nationwide for three years.
The analysis is different than one published by the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), which addresses changes in average achievement by state, because it combines NAEP scores with district scores on state assessments to provide a more extensive description of the change in local communities statewide.
The report breaks down achievement by district in downloadable charts and maps. In some school districts like Arlington and Aldine, the average student remains a full grade equivalent below their 2019 mean achievement in math. In Klein and Conroe ISDs, students nearly recovered to 2019 levels in mean reading and math; Frisco ISD students surpassed their 2019 mean in reading and nearly recovered in math.
Nationally, no state improved its math and reading NAEP scores; more than 100 districts exceeded their scores pre-COVID-era lockdowns. Of the top 100 districts, states with the most recovered were Alabama (19), Louisiana (13), Texas (12), and California (11), according to a list of 100 recovered school districts.
Houston area districts ranked among the top in the state and nationwide, according to the list.
Spring Branch ISD in Houston ranks third best in the country for recovering in math and reading. Magnolia ISD, north of Houston, ranks 15th best nationwide; Angleton ISD, south of Houston, ranks 31st. Other Texas districts in the top 100 were Lubbock-Cooper ISD, Southside ISD, Nederland ISD, Pine Tree ISD, Somerset ISD, Gilmer ISD, Raymondville ISD and Hillsboro ISD.
Chronic absenteeism was a primary factor in learning losses in Texas and nationwide. In Texas, 26% of students were reported for chronic absenteeism in 2022 and 21% in 2023 up from 11% in 2019, according to the report.
As of spring 2024, the average U.S. student nationwide remained nearly half a grade level behind pre-COVID-era lockdown policies in achievement in math and reading. Students today “are even further behind in reading than they were in 2022,” the report found.
Achievement gaps also widened nationwide due to COVID lockdown learning losses. High-income districts were nearly four times more likely to recover than low-income districts, the report found.
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Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.
