America’s high schools face a growing crisis: Millions of students who entered ninth grade in the fall of 2020, at the height of the pandemic, are set to graduate this spring, with little hope of recovering from the learning loss incurred while schools were shut. Simply put, they’re running out of time.

Since the start of the pandemic, the academic performance of high school students has been abysmal. In 2022, average scores on the ACT exam were the lowest in 30 years; this year’s results were even worse. Barely 20% of students met college-readiness benchmarks in all four areas tested — English, math, reading and science — and 43% met none, up from 35% in 2018. Other data show broad declines in reading and math proficiency, while the number of students receiving failing grades has soared. In Houston, the country’s eighth-largest public school district, as many as half of high school students have flunked at least one course since the start of the pandemic, compared to one-third in 2019.

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