The post-pandemic educational achievement landscape looked very grim. Test scores in English and math hadn’t been this low in 40 years and class attendance at all levels had never been as bad.
The kids were the “lost generation” as teacher’s unions and Democratic mayors in big cities kept children home and had them rely on “remote learning” to keep up. The idea was a total disaster as the majority of students either didn’t participate in the remote classes or learned little or nothing during the instruction.
It’s been almost two years since most of the nation’s students have returned to class. There are record levels of absenteeism at many schools. And the long-term effects on children’s learning ability — especially young ones — has yet to be measured.
But there are some bright spots in the gloom.
Researchers at Harvard, Stanford, and Dartmouth looked at test scores of third- through eighth-graders from around 8,000 school districts in 30 states. They found that “35% of school districts lost more than half a year of instruction immediately after the pandemic while just 27 percent saw either no change or improved results,” according to Reason.com.
Not surprisingly, the biggest learning losses were in low-income neighborhoods while the biggest improvements were in high-income districts. This wasn’t universally true. There were poor neighborhoods that showed tremendous improvement and rich ones that faltered.
The researchers found that by 2023, students had regained about one-third of their losses in math and about one-quarter of their losses in reading. Of the 30 states studied, only one—Oregon—failed to improve upon its 2022 scores in 2023.
An analysis of the researchers’ data published in The New York Times on Wednesday proposed that how schools spent federal relief dollars played a major role in which schools improved and which didn’t. When the federal government poured $190 billion in a bid to help schools recover after closures, only 20 percent of the funds schools received were required to be used to address learning loss.
What did they do with the rest of the $190 billion they so desperately needed to reopen?
As a result, many school districts devoted the majority of their funds to cover expenses that have nothing to do with student learning—like building new athletic facilities, paying custodial workers, or even building a city-owned birding center. Unsurprisingly, the researchers found that schools that spent a higher portion of their funds on addressing learning loss rebounded better after the pandemic. When the Times interviewed educators at school districts with unusually high score recovery rates, school employees emphasized how their schools focused on spending federal aid money primarily on academics.
The bottom line for these kids is that tens of thousands of them have already fallen through the cracks, and the interruption in their education — mostly unnecessary, according to many studies — could have disastrous effects on their future earning potential.
Those who advocated closing the schools for as long as they stayed shuttered are responsible for creating a new underclass. The problem was compounded when schools refused to spend the gargantuan amount of money they received from the Biden administration on helping their students catch up and spent it on frivolities instead.