Several big-city school systems – Birmingham, Charleston County (S.C.), Dallas, and Nashville – are reporting improved performance on recent state assessments. And two of those districts, Birmingham and Dallas, show performance levels higher than pre-pandemic levels.

The Dallas Independent School District reported significant gains in reading – surpassing pre-pandemic results of 2019 – on the state exams known as STAAR (grades 3-8). The district also reported gains in math from 2021, ranging from plus-5 to plus-12 percentage points for all students (though not matching pre-pandemic performance).

In addition, gains for black and bilingual students were significant with the effect of showing movement toward closing the academic achievement gap impacting those student groups versus their white peers.

Dallas trustee Dustin Marshall described the gains in Dallas as “the most encouraging data I’ve seen in a long time,” according to the Dallas Morning News.

In Dallas, former deputy superintendent Susana Cordova described test results this year as “a dramatic rebound” from declines in math and reading last year. She cited several factors, including that all students were on campus last school year. She told D Magazine that the district put “a very explicit focus on African American students, particularly in schools that have a high concentration of African American students.”

The district also deployed teaching and learning experts to schools that showed the greatest slide during the pandemic. There they met with students in small group instruction. There also was more focus on social and emotional learning, and the district’s new approach to limiting suspensions keeps students in the classroom with greater frequency.

Across Texas, students showed a 9 percentage-point improvement over 2021 in reading. State education commissioner Mike Morath cited a new state mandate requiring local districts to provide tutoring for students who did poorly on the state assessments the previous year. The Texas law, passed in 2021, mandated 30 hours of extra instruction in subjects a student failed on the STAAR exam.

The tutoring work “is having broad-based effects,” Morath told the News. Still, he said, more effort is required to recover from the impact COVID-19 has had on mathematics.

In Birmingham City Schools, the year-over-year gains in reading – a 9 percentage-point increase – showed the district to be among the fastest growing districts in third-grade reading in the state, according to Jermaine Dawson, academic and accountability officer of the district.

“The district is continuing to put in place the efforts that we started last year to be able to move this needle,” in terms of reading gains, Dawson said, according to the WBRC news site.