More than four years after the onset of COVID-19 and despite millions of dollars in emergency funding, student learning loss is a major problem.
New research from NWEA, a nonprofit research organization, shows that students entering high school are a full year behind academically, a disappointing but unsurprising development to experts who have been tracking progress, or lack thereof. from him.
“We were hoping we could bring a story of more recovery, or some recovery, but our results this year are remarkably similar to what we saw in the 2023 school year, and the evidence really suggests that the recovery is largely stagnant, and that is because students, although they are making progress, are doing so at rates below pre-pandemic averages, so we are not seeing much recovery,” said Karyn Lewis, director of research and policy partnerships at NWEA.
Across nearly every grade level, NWEA found the gap widened between pre-COVID and post-COVID test scores, averaging 36 percent in reading and 18 percent in math.
On average, students will need an additional 4.8 months of instruction in reading and 4.4 months in math to recover pre-pandemic numbers.
“I’m certainly not shocked,” said Morgan Polikoff, an associate professor of education at the University of Southern California. “I think the kind of subtle details of individual studies vary in terms of how far behind we are, how far behind we are, how much the catch-up differs by grades and whether it’s more or less in reading or math, but the trend The general view from many different studies is that we are still behind. At most we recovered a fraction of what was lost, and I think most studies also show that students from historically disadvantaged groups were worse off or didn’t recover as much.”
The NWEA data came from the grades of 7.7 million students last spring, in grades three through eight.
Younger students are recovering slightly better, only needing an additional 2.2 months in reading and 1.3 months in math to reach pre-COVID levels.
“If we don’t meet expectations in earlier grades about what students should know, it will be very difficult for them to interact with new content that builds on what they already expect to have mastered, and that will be challenging for students,” Lewis said.
Low test scores despite $200 billion in federal pandemic funding for schools have worried experts, with some arguing that interventions were delivered ineffectively or that money was spent recklessly.
Districts spent “a large amount of money in ways that were effective but not effective enough to close these achievement gaps. Things like tutoring, which I believe by all accounts are effective, but they didn’t reach all the students needed or weren’t as intense or well-planned as they should have been,” Polikoff said.
“Without really radical intervention, I’m not surprised we haven’t recovered,” he added.
Angela Morabito, a spokeswoman for the Freedom Defense Institute, said the Biden administration should have required that all pandemic funding go directly to combating learning loss.
“I have yet to hear a good explanation for why only 20% was needed. Therefore, much of the money was used on things that were adult priorities rather than what was best for students. So the results here – the students did not recover – are not surprising,” Morabito said.
Faced with pandemic conditions, schools have spent federal funds on everything from updating HVAC systems to increasing mental health resources and raising teacher salaries in an effort to improve retention.
Lindsay Dworkin, senior vice president of policy and government affairs at NWEA, said pandemic money for schools was originally designed for public safety first and to bring students back to schools, leaving learning loss second. , as individuals did not know how big the impact would be. the problem would be back in 2020.
“At the time the money started flowing, we didn’t have the same understanding of how deep the disruption to learning would be, what it would look like, and for which children,” she said, adding that schools “didn’t have enough time” to implement new programs. of learning loss “to really see the maximum effectiveness of what a large-scale intervention could look like.”
Chronic absenteeism has also increased since the arrival of the pandemic, with an analysis from the American Enterprise Institute showing it increased by 14 percent between 2018 and 2022.
The Economic Advisory Council states that 27 percent of declines in math scores and 45 percent of declines in reading can be attributed to chronic absenteeism.
“I also think we need to look at the context in which students find themselves. We know that chronic absenteeism rates are still quite high in relation to pre-pandemic trends and so we should not expect, of course, that students will not be in the classroom as often as we would like them to learn, but they will not learn. at the pace we would like,” said Lewis.
This story originally appeared on thehill.com read the full story
