The COVID-19 pandemic has devastated the well-being of poor children, not only by wiping out their schools, but also by eliminating their parents’ jobs, making their families and teachers sick, and adding chaos and worry to their lives.
The extent of the disruption of American children’s education is evident in a district-by-district impact study shared exclusively with The Associated Press.
The research found that the average student lost more than a portion of a school year in math learning and nearly a quarter of a school year in reading, and some district averages slipped by more than double those amounts, or worse.
Online played a leading role, yet students lost a lot of ground even as they returned to schools quickly, especially in math in low-income communities.
“When you have a seizure, the worst effects end up being felt in the less skilled people,” said Stanford education professor Sean Reardon, who collected and analyzed the data with Harvard economist Thomas Kane.
Some educators have opposed the very concept of measuring learning loss after a crisis that killed more than a million Americans. Reading and math scores don’t tell the full story of what happens to a child, but they are one of the only facets of children’s education. Progression reliably measured at national level.
“The effects of testing are not the only thing, nor the maximum,” Reardon said. “But they serve as an indicator of how young people are doing. “
And young people are not doing well, especially those who were most at risk before the pandemic. Knowledge shows that many young people want meaningful intervention, and advocates and researchers say the U. S. wants to do so. The U. S. is doing enough.
Together, Reardon and Kane created a map showing how many years of learning the average student in the district has lost since 2019. His project, the Education Resume Dashboard, compares the effects of a control known as a “national report card” with a local standardized check. partitions from 29 states and Washington, D. C.
In Memphis, Tennessee, where nearly 80 percent of students are poor, students have lost 70 percent of a school year in reading and more than a year in math, according to the analysis. Black students in the district lost one year and one-third in math and two-thirds of a year in reading.
For church pastor Charles Lampkin, who is black, what caught his attention was the effects on his children’s reading. He was reading the Bible with them one night this fall when he noticed that his sixth and seventh graders were suffering with his “junior” Bible. Editions written for a fifth grade reading level. “They couldn’t get over it,” Lampkin said.
Lampkin blames the year and in part on her children being absent from the buildings from March 2020 to fall 2021.
“They weren’t committed at all. It’s nonsense,” he said.
The local school district has set aside an hour a day for intervention this year, when suffering students can get tutoring in small groups, said Memphis-Shelby County Public Schools spokeswoman Cathryn Stout. Students also get tutoring before and after school, and some campuses have started providing categories on Saturdays for students to catch up.
Lampkin said her children got more help.
The number of learning students who have lost, or gained, in rare cases, over the past three years has varied widely. Poverty and time spent on distance learning affected learning loss, and learning losses were greatest in districts that stayed online longer, according to Kane. But neither is the best predictor of declines in reading and math.
In some districts, students lost more than two years of math learning, according to the data. Hopewell, Virginia, a school formula of 4,000 mostly low-income and 60 percent black students, posted an average loss of 2. 29 years of schooling.
“That’s not what we were looking to see at all,” said Deputy Superintendent Jay McClain.
The district began providing in-person learning in March 2021, but three-quarters of students stayed home. “There’s a lot of concern about the effects of COVID,” he said.
When schools resumed in the fall, the virus spread through Hopewell and some of all students stayed home with health problems or quarantined, McClain said.
The pandemic has brought demanding situations unrelated to remote learning.
In Rangoster, New Hampshire, students lost nearly two years in reading, though schools offered in-person learning for most of the 2020-2021 school year. This is the largest decline in literacy among all districts in the study.
The district of 4,000 students, where most are white and nearly a portion live in poverty, had to close schools in November 2020 when too few teachers can show up for work, Superintendent Kyle Repucci said. Students studied online until March 2021, and when schools reopened, many opted to stick with remote learning, Repucci said.
“Academics here were exposed to things they had never been exposed to until much later,” Repucci said. “Death. Serious illness. I work to feed their families. “
In Angeles, school leaders closed study halls for the entire 2020-2021 school year, but students joined each other in reading.
It’s hard to say what explains the other effects in some states. In California, where academics on average remained strong or declined slightly, this may recommend that educators there were more Zoom trained or that the state has made effective investments in technology, Reardon said.
But the differences can also be explained through what happened outside of school. “I think the variation has a lot more to do with things that were out of the control of the school,” Reardon said.
It is now up to American adults to work on the recovery of children. For the government and individual states, advocates hope the recent release of test data may motivate greater urgency to direct investment to students who have suffered major setbacks, whether in education or other support.
School systems are still spending about $190 billion on the federal recovery aid budget, a sum that experts say is addressing the extent of learning loss in schools. They are probably inadequate to cope with the magnitude of their learning loss.
The implications for children’s futures are alarming: Lower verification scores are predictors of lower wages, as well as higher rates of incarceration and teen pregnancy, Kane said.
You don’t have to study at Harvard to convince parents whose children have trouble reading or learning algebra that something needs to be done.
At his church in Memphis, Lampkin has his own tutoring program 3 nights a week. The adults in his congregation, adding a few teachers, help about fifty students with homework, strengthening their skills and training new ones.
“We shouldn’t have had to do this,” Lampkin said. “But you have to lead by example. “
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The Associated Press education team is supported by the Carnegie Corporation of New York. The AP is only for all content.