Triaging COVID learning loss

The Nation’s Report Card for schools has arrived for the first time since the outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic in the United States. Brace yourselves: The results begin to quantify the learning loss parents had already recognized after living through lockdowns and remote learning. The negative outcomes make clear that a business-as-usual approach won’t recover the ground that students need to regain.

Reading scores among 9-year-olds saw their largest drop since 1990. Math scores fell for the first time in 50 years. These results come from the National Assessment of Education Progress (NAEP), also known as the Nation’s Report Card. During the spring of 2022, a NAEP test designed to show long-term trends in student progress was administered to a nationally representative group of 9-year-olds. The same testing instrument had been used in the spring of 2020, allowing officials to compare this year’s results to pre-pandemic scores.

What they found was a five-point drop in reading and a seven-point drop in math scores over the two years of pandemic disruptions. This was the first decline in math scores since the NAEP long-term trend assessment began in the 1970s. Even more concerning, low-income students fared worse than others and the gap between high- and low-performing students widened.

The survey asked students about their experiences with remote learning and compared the responses of high- and low-performing students. Seventy percent said they had some virtual schooling during the previous year (2020-21). When students were asked if they could tell when they were not understanding a concept in a remote learning environment, only a third of lower-performing students said they would recognize the problem. Asked about how often they were able to reach a teacher for help with schoolwork during remote learning periods, only 45 percent of higher-performing students said that they could do so every day or almost every day, and just 26 percent of lower-performing students said the same.

Clearly, extended school closures disserved students. Now the question is what to do about the results.

The NAEP long-term trend assessment compares students of the same age over time. Scores among 9-year-olds may rebound in coming years as new cohorts of students replace this year’s test-takers. That won’t be cause for relief. Pandemic learning losses threaten to follow today’s 9-year-olds as they age. These children were only learning to read when the pandemic hit, and they missed out on foundations critical to all future learning. They need to recover those lost tools of learning. Students of all ages will need more-than-average gains to meet grade-level expectations going forward.

More than 50 million K-12 students had their schooling interrupted by the pandemic. As Martin West at Harvard’s Graduate School of Education points out, “We have an obligation to help them experience accelerated rather than typical growth going forward.”

During the pandemic, the federal government sent public schools an unprecedented boost of $200 billion over and above their annual appropriations to address these needs, but schools have been slow to spend those funds. When the Los Angeles school board announced four new “acceleration days” for the 2022-23 school year, the teachers union protested and announced a boycott of the first of the four days.

Realities like these have made many parents conclude they can’t wait for the public school system to provide what their children need. New York City public schools have lost nearly 10 percent of their student population during the pandemic—about 100,000 students since 2019. Nationwide, public school enrollment declined by about 1.27 million students over the course of the pandemic. Parents are choosing private school and homeschooling.

But those are parents who can afford to pay for such alternatives. Policymakers should make changes so that parents who don’t have such means have options, too. Arizona set a new standard for parental choice in education this summer by making all students eligible for its empowerment scholarship accounts, which allow parents to direct $7,000 in funding designated for their student to the educational services they select.

While pursuing policy change, Christians can offer immediate help as well. Tutoring and mentoring are more important than ever. Giving to Christian scholarship organizations will provide funds for low-income students to attend the school of their family’s choice. Entrepreneurial ventures like microschools are rethinking educational delivery in ways that can be much more tailored to students’ specific needs.

The lasting effects of extended Covid school closures have the potential to cast a long shadow over the educational experience of a generation of school children. The need for sound initiatives to overcome learning loss is urgent. It’s a situation that calls for Christian compassion, creativity, and perseverance. There is no time to lose.