American school children have lost two decades of progress in reading and math skills, largely because of remote schooling during the worst of the pandemic. That’s according to a report released today by the National Center for Education Statistics.
The study looked at the test scores of 9-year-olds across the country, finding that most declined five points in reading and seven points in mathematics, compared to 2020. It’s the first real data on the pandemic’s effects on education.
Natalia Mehlman Petrzela, author of “Classroom Wars: Language, Sex, and the Making of Modern Political Culture,” says she was expecting this to some degree — but that doesn’t make the news any less impactful.
“Given what schools have looked like for the last few years during the pandemic, I am not surprised. But I will say that I gasped when I opened the news this morning because the reversals are so strong and so intense.”
The educational losses happened across the board, but they weren’t distributed equally. While the top 10th percentile of students dropped two points in reading and three points in math, the bottom 10th percentile dropped 10 and 12 points, respectively.
“Kids who were poor and already having a tough time learning — [they] lost much more extremely than kids who were already doing better,” says Petrzela. “So that's going to exacerbate educational inequality in this country in a way that's even more severe than I anticipated.”
These disparities were also apparent between racial groups. Black students lost an average of 13 points in math, while white students lost five points.
“School closures perpetuated inequity in really important ways,” says Petrzela. “It is a real problem for racial justice here that we're seeing losses for Black students.”
She says one major concern is that kids who have experienced learning loss will feel disengaged from school, even if they receive the necessary interventions to reverse it.
“That kind of disengagement in academics, even if you maybe have those supports, can lead to even more severe problems — dropping out, not going to college, not graduating high school down the line,” says Petrzela.
One option to reverse this loss is having kids spend more time in school over the summer or in extended day programs. But Petrzela says she hesitates to recommend this for every community, since students need to find social and emotional fulfillment in other parts of life, as well.
She feels a little more hopeful that changes to the curriculum could help students catch up. For instance, a holistic model that combines the intuitive “balanced literacy” teaching method with traditional phonics could help kids make faster gains in reading.
“We are, I hope, going to see a lot of attention and investment and remediation for what's going on, but also with a kind of refresh,” she says.