Pandemic widens achievement gaps

NICK EICHER, HOST: Coming up next on The World and Everything in It: a math problem.

American students are falling behind in math compared to five years ago and compared to other countries.

WORLD asked a few experts why. Reporter Mary Muncy brings us the story.

BRIAN GALVIN: It's a lot more than any one classroom teacher can be expected that help students with

MARY MUNCY: Brian Galvin is an executive at an online tutoring program. It makes personalized learning plans for students struggling with math. It used to cover principles the students should have learned the previous year, but they’re finding that now, they consistently have to go back two grade levels.

GALVIN: Math is the ultimate building block skill

He says it’s like Jenga: If a student is struggling with mixed numbers in fifth grade, it may be because they didn’t master finding common denominators in third grade.

GALVIN: You take the Jenga tower, and all of a sudden you get that shaky foundation because we pulled out a few boards.

That gets discouraging for students, and it gets worse as the student has to learn new concepts that require mastery of the previous ones.

GALVIN: There's a level of I don't get it. I don't understand why I don't get it, I'm just always going to be behind. So I think there's a little bit of like compound hopelessness in maybe a lot of students.

In other subjects, like history, students don't have to know about the American Revolution to get a good grade on a test on the Civil War. Or they can skate by in literature because books rarely need last year’s books for context.

GALVIN: Very few people say, ‘I'm not a science person, I'm not a reading person,’ but it's just part of our lexicon: ‘I'm not a math person.’

The National Center for Education Statistics administers a math test to about 650,000 students worldwide every four years. This year, it tested fourth and eighth graders.

The results? Since 2019, those students’ scores dropped about 3 percent, taking our ranking among other participating countries from the top 25 percent to just above the middle of the pack.

GALVIN: COVID really had a perfect storm.

Widespread reliance on virtual classrooms and distance learning spanned two different school years, and when students returned, a lot of teachers didn’t.

GALVIN: You had more substitute teachers, and so less continuity in teachers understanding, you know, exactly where a student was, and being able to give that personalized attention and all that context.

But COVID isn’t the only factor. The data suggests the drop in math scores is not across the board.

NAT MALKUS: One of my main concerns is the opening gap between the top scorers and the bottom scores.

Nat Malkus is an education fellow with the American Enterprise Institute.

MALKUS: So the gap between the 90th percentile of scores and the 10th percentile definitely opened up dramatically in fourth grade over the pandemic, because the lower scoring students, their scores dropped dramatically. The upper scoring students, they stayed pretty much where they were.

In other words, those struggling with math already before the lock downs are really struggling now. Malkus says the pandemic definitely contributed to the drop, but…

MALKUS: We actually see declines in these scores going back 12 years or so on average.

And that gap between the highest achievers and the lowest achievers is widening.

MALKUS: When you take a careful look over time at the scores, I think there's more than just the pandemic going on.

Explanations vary from increased cell phone use to the end of No Child Left Behind. But Malkus says it’s complicated.

MALKUS: There's a bunch of stories that do sort of hit somewhere in this 2012, 2013 timeline, which actually could explain this, which one of them it is, I can't, you just can't identify from these test scores.

Other academic tests show a similar decline, and the results from a different national test will come out in the next few weeks. It’s called the National Assessment of Educational Progress, but educators refer to it as the Nation’s Report Card.

That one happens every two years so it’s already captured a post-pandemic number in 2022. Malkus hopes that it’ll show math scores dropped after the pandemic but have remained steady, but he’s not sure. He does expect to see a widening achievement gap.

For now, Malkus believes the pandemic slump is reversible as schools get back to some of their normal routines and invest in tutoring services like the one Galvin provides.

GALVIN: It's kind of a terrifying thing to think, ‘hey, you know, my kid is part of this trend that they're so far behind.’ But if you can find, you can diagnose, you know, their their core reasons for their struggles. It becomes really tangible.

Reporting for WORLD, I’m Mary Muncy.

WORLD Radio transcripts are created on a rush deadline. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of WORLD Radio programming is the audio record.