ON AN UNSEASONABLY balmy March afternoon in Westbrook, Maine—a suburb of Portland, the state’s largest city—parents gather outside of Congin elementary school to collect their children. Before the pandemic five years ago, when schools here and across America shut down, Congin was middling, ranked by test scores in the 50th percentile of all primary schools in the state. Since then it has sunk to the 30th percentile.
