San Francisco kept most of its public school students out of classrooms for nearly a year and a half after the pandemic struck in March 2020. When schools fully reopened in August 2021, the district had lost 5,000 students, and those who remained had fallen behind.

Every spring since 2015, students in grades 3 through 8 and grade 11 take the Smarter Balanced assessments in English and math, the state's primary measure of whether students are meeting grade-level standards. An analysis of those results shows that two-thirds of San Francisco public schools have not recovered academically, and that the district as a whole has recovered less than the state.

The disparities are stark. More than 80% of the city's poorest schools now post worse outcomes than they did before the pandemic. At Hillcrest Elementary, where 90% of students are low-income, roughly four in 10 students were at grade level in 2019. This year, fewer than one in 10 are.

The school board has made boosting educational outcomes its top priority, but the data illustrates the scale of the challenge facing the district. The setbacks are not evenly distributed: schools with large numbers of low-income students are further behind than the district average, a pattern that raises questions about how recovery resources are targeted and whether the students hit hardest by remote learning are getting the support they need.

The findings come as the district continues to grapple with the fallout from the pandemic, including enrollment losses that have strained budgets and reshaped school communities. For families in the hardest-hit neighborhoods, the test scores are a measure of how much ground remains to be made up.