Report: Draconian School Closings During COVID Caused Students to Lose at Least Half a Year of Learning

A new report finds that America’s school kids have lost at least a half a year of learning and study due to the radical COVID lockdowns and constant school closings.

The study, Harvard’s Education Recovery Scorecard, was recently published by Harvard’s Center for Education Policy Research.

According to the center’s faculty director, Thomas Kane, “The pandemic was like a band of tornadoes that swept across the country. Some communities were left relatively untouched, while neighboring schools were devastated.”

Some of the findings include:

• Six percent of students were in districts that lost more than a year of learning in math, while 3% were in districts in which math achievement actually rose.
• The pandemic widened disparities in achievement between high- and low-poverty schools.
• The quarter of schools with highest shares of students receiving federal lunch subsidies missed two-thirds of a year of math learning, while the quarter of schools with the fewest low-income students lost two-fifths of a year.

Per Just the News,

The new research also includes data on federal recovery dollars received per district and the Education Department’s 2022 National Assessment of Educational Progress, more commonly known as “The Nation’s Report Card.”

The map includes data from 29 states and Washington, D.C.

“One of the things we found is that even within a district, there is variability,” said Sean Reardon, professor of poverty and inequality in education at Stanford University and director of the Educational Opportunity Project. “School districts are the first line of action to help children catch up. The better they know about the patterns of learning loss, the more they’re going to be able to target their resources effectively to reduce educational inequality of opportunity and help children and communities thrive.”

In response to the findings, Education Secretary Miguel Cardona said: “The latest Nation’s Report Card results must serve as a call to action to revisit our existing plans and scale up proven academic recovery strategies such as ensuring a robust and qualified teacher and leader workforce. … While the recent data is alarming, catching our students up to the 2019 achievement levels is a low bar. We must aim higher. Our students should be leading the world.”

Just the News has much more, but who is surprised by any of this?

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