Pandemic learning loss

The role played by distance education.

Nine-year-olds lost the equivalent of two decades of progress in math and reading, according to an authoritative national test. Fourth and eighth graders also saw dramatic declines, particularly in math, with eighth-grade scores dropping in 49 of 50 states.

Data come from the National Assessment of Educational Progress, a rigorous examination that assesses thousands of children across the country and is overseen by a research arm of the United States Department of Education.

Today, I'll break down the factors that drove these declines and explain an important trend that helps show why these results are sobering.

Role of distance learning< p class="css-at9mc1 evys1bk0">First, to answer one of the most common questions I hear as an education journalist: How effective is remote learning? responsible for these setbacks? The answer is both simple and complicated.

At the basic level, there is good evidence and growing consensus that extensive remote learning has harmed students . Some state test results from 2021 help show the damage. In Ohio, researchers found that districts that remained entirely remote during the 2020-21 school year experienced declines up to three times greater than those in districts that primarily taught students in-person. /p>

More recently, national test scores capture both initial academic declines and any recovery, and they offer some nuance. While there was a notable correlation between distance learning and declining math in fourth grade, for example, there was little to no correlation in reading. Why the gap? One explanation is that reading skills tend to be more influenced by parents and what happens at home, while math is more directly affected by what is taught at school.

So remote learning doesn't tell the whole story. What else does? In a sophisticated analysis of thousands of public school districts in 29 states, researchers from Harvard and Stanford universities found that poverty played an even bigger role in educational decline during the pandemic.

"The poverty rate is very predictive of how much you've lost," said Sean Reardon, a Stanford education professor who helped lead the analysis.

A comparison of two neighborhood schools in California, one richer and the other poorer, illustrates this point. Cupertino Union, a school district in Silicon Valley where about 6% of students are entitled to a free or reduced lunch (a marker researchers use to estimate poverty), spent nearly half of the 2020 school year- 21 remotely. Merced City in the Central Valley, where nearly 80% of college students qualify for free or reduced lunch, according to the Harvard-Stanford analysis.

Yet, despite rough spending During the same time spent taking distance learning courses, students in the wealthier Cupertino district actually gained ground in math, while students in poorer Merced City fell behind. Although the overall declines in student performance have been marked, the averages mask even deeper differences between groups of students. For example, black and Hispanic students, who started behind white and Asian students in fourth-grade math, lost more ground than those groups during the pandemic.

Notably, the gap is also widening between the country's top performers and the lowest performers who have the most difficulties.

This gap, due to the decline in the lowest performing students...