The 2024 National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) revealed a sobering reality for most of the nation: public school students had not achieved the post-pandemic recovery that policymakers and educators hoped for. While fourth-grade mathematics scores rose slightly, reading scores declined to their lowest level in decades. Data from NWEA’s MAP assessment in 2025 tells a similar story—mathematics achievement is gaining ground but remains below pre-pandemic levels, while reading achievement has stagnated.
Yet one state stands as a notable exception: Louisiana. It’s the only state in the nation to have achieved gains in both fourth-grade reading and mathematics on NAEP between 2017 and 2024. Over the past two testing cycles in 2022 and 2024, Louisiana has led the nation in reading growth and ranked in the top five for mathematics growth. These gains are particularly remarkable given Louisiana’s socioeconomic context. According to the Annie E. Casey Foundation, Louisiana is tied with Mississippi for the highest child poverty rate in the nation as of 2024. Furthermore, Louisiana ranks 39th nationally in per-pupil spending, providing approximately $13,000 to $13,500 per student—roughly $3,500 less than the national average.
We contend that Louisiana’s impressive achievement gains are driven by the deliberate, systemic actions undertaken by the Louisiana Department of Education (LDOE) over the past few decades and, particularly, starting in 2012. In this paper, we examine those actions through the lens of the “state capacity crisis” and the ideas within the “Capacity Agenda” recommended by Pahlka and Greenway.
We focus on four actions LDOE undertook to improve K-12 academics, drawing on Narechania’s experiences as LDOE’s Assistant State Superintendent for School Improvement and Kaufman’s research studies in Louisiana:
- Establishing a clear vision for end-user (i.e., student) experience and the implementation chain to achieve it, with a focus on ensuring adoption and use of high-quality instructional materials;
- Restructuring the SEA to align with the state vision;
- Clearing out the noise and focusing all carrots and sticks on making the right choice for kids the most simple and easy choice for districts, schools, and teachers; and
- Creating feedback loops to help school systems improve.
Julia Kaufman is currently serving as a senior research and director of the Education and Employment Program at RAND. Kunjan Narechania is CEO of Watershed Advisors. The views, opinions, findings, conclusions, and recommendations contained herein are the authors’ alone and not those of their respective organizations.
We discuss ways in which these actions are closely aligned with particular aspects of Pahlka and Greenway’s “Capacity Agenda,” including massive staff reorganization, elimination of procedural obstacles to reform, and an emphasis on measurement and feedback loops to make decisions. We argue that these actions have decluttered and clarified the goals for local education agencies and, thus, created more consistent instruction across the state, leading to steady increases in achievement over time. Importantly, LDOE’s transformation did not occur overnight. The reforms required a strong foundation of accountability policies and goals for academic improvement starting in the late 1990s, alongside unwavering focus on improving students’ learning experiences in service of raising test scores. This approach demanded buy-in at every level—from classroom teachers to state legislators—and a shared commitment to alignment and coherence across the system.
Before examining Louisiana’s work in greater detail, we should establish the policy context in which LDOE operated and trace the historical developments that dictated where SEAs should focus their time and energy. We first describe the rise of a compliance orientation in state education agencies (starting around 1965), followed by the subsequent shift toward performance management (1990–2015). Understanding this history illuminates why Louisiana’s actions represented a meaningful departure from traditional state agency practice and carved a new path for the state.
