In hindsight, a lot of people overestimate how many schools were closed during the pandemic. In reality, about half were fully open for the 2020-21 school year and upwards of 90% for the 2021-22 school year. And yet, the evidence so far suggests that kids fell behind considerably anyway and haven't made up any ground this year.
I'm not familiar with NWEA, but they take a fresh crack at this topic using the results of the MAP Growth reading and math test given to 6.7 million students. Here's the basic result:
Elementary school students are about 2-3 months behind their pre-COVID selves, while middle-school kids are more like 4-6 months behind. What's even worse is that in the current school year they appear to be falling even further behind:
The authors are pessimistic:
Addressing these gaps will take sizable and sustained effort....While many districts are offering academic programs this summer, these programs are typically offered to a small share of students and do not include enough additional instruction to catch up the average student....As such, it will be next to impossible for districts to build in the additional schooling time necessary to allow for student recovery before the expiration of ESSER funds next year
The New York Times has a similar take:
Research suggests that high-dosage tutoring — which pairs a trained tutor with one to four students, at least three times a week, for a full year — can produce gains equivalent to about four months of learning. But it is expensive and difficult to scale. A federal survey in December found that just 37 percent of public schools reported offering such tutoring.
I really seem to have guessed wrong about this. I believed, basically, that kids are resilient and would make up any lost learning in pretty short time. That may still happen, but it sure hasn't happened yet. The NWEA research is consistent with the most recent NAEP test scores, which make it clear that students have sustained substantial and persistent declines in learning thanks to COVID.
The amazing thing is that scores fell, both in states that closed schools for long periods and states that insisted on reopening them as soon as possible. It's almost as if... the pandemic itself, and all the fear/stress of living through it, caused kids to fall behind and not necessarily the fact that schools were closed?
Nah, that can't be it, because Teachers Are Selfish And Don't Want To Work and also We Need Teachers Because We're Tired Of Watching Our Own Kids All Day.
That sounds like a cope response. An alternative interpretation is that even the shortest duration break in school patterns is long-term disruptive.
Regardless of the politics of the issue (and of course both sides are scrambling to "prove" that their suggested school response was "correct") I'd say the more important fact is just how unbelievably incompetent the "educational" establishment is. We pay phenomenal amounts to train teachers, some of which goes into supposed education *research*, but here was a very basic question: "what will the response be across various groups of kids to having formal education broken for a few months" and they did a pathetic job of answering that question, substantially worse, as far as I can tell, than the sorts of answers provided by economists to similar sorts of "response to a shock" questions.
Which raises the issue of why I should trust, or care, about anything these people say anywhere at anytime...
Kevin is willing to own up to his failure: "I really seem to have guessed wrong about this. I believed, basically, that kids are resilient and would make up any lost learning in pretty short time. That may still happen, but it sure hasn't happened yet."
But Kevin is not an education professional. When will the education profession own up to this failure and, more importantly, what it implies for how little they appear to know about what does or doesn't matter for teaching?
In order to find out what "what will the response be across various groups of kids to having formal education broken for a few months" you would have to expose a serious number of kids to exactly such a break. This would be highly unfair to the test kids, analog to clinical trial of a new drug with no previous trials in animals.
Good luck with finding parents who would sign ump their kids for this! I would be careful with throwing words like "incompetent" around.
There are a variety of ways to study this sort of thing, including natural experiments, and cross-country comparisons. Randomized control trials are not the only possible mechanism.
But there is an even larger issue which is that if the field had any body of theory worth a damn, this is the sort of thing it would be able to predict...
An alternative interpretation is that even the shortest duration break in school patterns is long-term disruptive.
Uh huh. Like how summer break is 2.5 months long every year, longer than schools were closed for covid in many states, and yet somehow isn't blamed for the same kind of learning loss. There was something about this particular disruption that made it more disruptive, and I'd argue it might have been "oh my God, we all might die" fear in 2020 combined with "oh my God, the store has no more [toilet paper, chicken nuggets, whatever]" stress in 2021-22. It'll work itself out eventually. I mean, London survived an entire generation of kids being shipped away from their parents while bombs were falling from the sky, and they weren't written off as Total Irredeemable Educational Basketcases by the rest of society. Perhaps if we don't completely freakout about this crop of kids being a year or two behind Where They're Supposed To Be, and just let the ones who really need it - to gain admission to college, let's say - stay in school penalty- and cost-free an extra year (grade 13, like in some Ontario schools?), it will be OK. A lot of K-12 learning is just socialization, and that is something that even people homeschooled their whole lives manage to get eventually so they can blend into greater society.
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I was very disappointed with the public school usage of the emergency Covid relief funds. I believe that math, the average public school received $1.3 million of Covid money. Yet, seemingly, very few school used the money for: 1) extra tutoring 2) robust new summer school programs 3) better technology 4) or even new HVAC systems.
Rather, too many school got new sport fields, better lighting etc. Our local high school was written up as they remodeled the faculty lounge area with some of the relief money...
Generally, the Republican response to Covid was horrid. However, the idea that we kept school closed too long to in person learning was, frankly, spot on.
The covid relief money tended to go towards filling in gaps due to delayed maintenance and/or just years of scrimping, e.g. pension funds, etc. The sad thing is that for as much as it was, it really wasn't enough to fund summer programs to bring all kids back in to get them up to speed. Those funds also ended, so any programs set up could not be sustained.
Who would be doing the extra tutoring? Schools didn't have enough people to staff ordinary classes. A lot of teachers got covid.
Apparently, MiddleoftheroadDeadskunk would have you believe that pouring tons of money into a heavily-labor-intensive completely-new project during a time of crisis when most workers were all afraid to be in enclosed spaces with strangers was a totally easy-to-do task that lazy school districts just didn't want to do. Resource constraints - including a lack of warm bodies to actually do the work - doesn't exist in the universe MiddleoftheroadDeadskunk inhabits. (Not sure what he/she/it made of all of 2020-21 though, when it was most obvious that even private businesses pretending All Is Fine lacked enough workers to get everything they wanted done.)
In the public discourse over these test results, i havent seen any mention of the fact that test scores appeared to be declining in the years prior to Covid.
That seems really important. I realize that it makes the story much messier. Perhaps these stories are really about Covid policy and the tests are just a good way to bring the topic up for conversation.
Maybe the resilience takes more than one year to show results.
So, mandatory summer school for everyone*.
*- Except Asians.
From my school experience: Please don't overburden the kids with " high dosage" whatever. Let them be children--even if slightly less accomplished. The most important thing they need ton learn in school is how to learn. The rest of it most of them will forget shortly after leaving school anyway. Just ask your average adult how the US government works....
This. This whole worry about kids falling behind pretends that American adults aged 19-99 recall all/most/much/any of what they learned in K-12 schooling. I don't know about you all, but I meet people every damn day that I'm like "how the fuck did you not learn this in school?" And then I remind myself that the vast majority of grown adults - including myself on most topics - really don't remember anything they learn, unless whatever it is either is (1) required for them to stay employed/functional in life or (2) enjoyable to them for whatever reason. (Lessons on how to ski for example might be retained decades later.)
But everything else you teach them leaks out of their brains somewhere between 12 minutes and 12 months after you teach it to them. (This partially explains why - beyond a need to tick a box - that corporations have annual cybersecurity, sexual harassment, etc. trainings.) The importance of K-12 schooling is basically just teaching people how to learn, how to get along with other people and how to have patience during boring times.
Plus 100 for Austin
How many people could draw all the continguous US states on a blank map and then name the correct capital city of each one? How many people for that matter can correctly name all fifty capital cities, never mind associate them with the correct state.
This wins the thread.
How the fork did children survive WWII?
Perhaps "we" should wait to see the results after a couple of years? Or more.
According to Wikipedia: In 1940 only 50% of young adults had a high school diploma.
Maybe some of the problem has to do with what children learned to do while outside of school that now prevents them from re-engaging. Social media, anybody? Tik-Tok? Video-games?
When I was a public school kid back in the last century (geriatric rant advisory) we had many fewer distractions than kids have today. Every phone was a landline. Dick Tracy's two-way wrist radio was a fantasy. The average kid had no way to take photos and videos all day long. Kids talked to one another in person! Almost no one listened to music with audio earpieces all day. We played games outdoors! Kids mostly did what they were told to do in school. No one brought a gun to school. Etc.
I think we are witnessing the collapse of the Republic, which has grown decadent, tech dependent, and ungovernable (end of rant).
what--play, imagination, story telling, interaction with real people???
Fellow geriatric here. Geriatric rants are as old as mankind. If they could be trusted even us geriatrics would never have been borne...
It seems to me the young generation of now has it harder than we had. Distractions are the smallest part of it: we were able to find plenty of them in our time. Much worse: lots more to learn than we had to, expectations for everybody to "excel", much less freedom than we enjoyed and, worst of all, having helicopter parents. I am feeling sorry for them.
And yet, the present generation of teenagers seems more decent than any in recent memory.
Sal Kahn says AI will solve this problem (see his May 1, 2023 TED talk). So just give all students a ChatGPT account and teach them how to use it well.
When schools reopened they still had to quarantine every time a kid got sick. in practice this meant teachers limited what they were teaching, because 1 kid with covid meant 9 others quarantined for a week. I saw some classes shift to fully remote at times because a kid on the left side of the class getting covid and kid on the right side of the class getting covid meant that 2/3 of the class was home quarantining. Teachers had to reteach so much content once kids came back to class, they couldn't get through as much.
And, no, you can not simultaneously teach kids online and in a classroom. Doing just one is hard enough.
This in itself sounds like an astoundingly long school closure to me:
“In reality, about half were fully open for the 2020-21 school year”
If just half of schools were fully open for the 20-21 school year, that was a major and intense disruption with generational impact.
In my own experience, even adult students began to expect an overwhelming amount of accommodation as a result of the pandemic. And, perhaps out of fear of losing students (and teachers), even colleges and universities (or at least some of them) greatly relaxed expectations regarding things like deadlines, absences, regularity of, you know, actually conducting classes, etc …
So it seems possible to me that a new-ish culture may have set in across most if not all grade levels. And that generally more relaxed culture may not be great for helping students to catch up on whatever they missed.
The longer the pandemic-related accommodation exists, however, the more people get used to it and the harder it becomes to ease students (and teachers) of all ages out of it.
Its all falling apart because everyone is lazy these days! The perennial best way to explain everything.
One more thing: All of this debate is Monday morning quarterbacking.
How much of it was covid and how much of it was all the bs fighting over covid? And all the fighting over race, gender, etc. The kids (esp teens) could be excused for seeing all that and realizing that their actual education is not such a high priority.
Even for "open" schools, Covid was a major disruption. With many kids out (actual covid or know exposure or maybe exposed), teaching online and to the class room, extended school closure because of outbreaks, etc., it was a bit of a mess.
I make a somewhat similar point in my own response, but what I get at is that the major disruptions you mention were long and intense enough to actually alter the "culture" of education.
I'm partly referencing teacher/student accounts that I have read or been told about, and partly commenting from my own experience, but what I'm essentially saying is that the impact from Covid on education is ongoing. Rather than returning to "normal," the educational system may have been warped like some kind of wood left too exposed to the harsh elements.
And that "warping" essentially involves, among other things, an enhanced level of accommodation towards students and a sensitivity to whatever trauma (real or imagined) they may have endured. There will be, as with almost all organizational systems, pros and cons to these accommodations. But with a greater laxity towards things like attendance and deadlines, it almost certainly becomes more difficult to help students (of all ages) catch up on whatever learning they missed during school closures and/or the switch to remote modalities.
Just a caution that this exact same rationale is trotted out through all of history to explain every negative public outcome.
The triggering event and the results or area affected can be swapped in and out, but the cause is always the same. The people have become soft, lazy, too demanding.....
Schoolteacher rant here: WHY SO MUCH TIME SPENT ON TESTING?
I'm not disputing the scores, or the importance of assessing student progress, but do you have any idea how much instructional time is lost to tests like MAP, along with all the other batteries of tests schools use? Add in all the time lost to school sports dismissals, social events, motivational speakers, cell phones, disciplinary issues, it would be interesting to tally them all up. How about some data on that, Kevin?
I'd add that there has been an increasing lack of parental involvement. I don't know much that explains but I'm quite sure it's significant.
Sweden will be a useful test case for many of the questions above.
Prematurely losing 1 million people is going to have ripple effects.