Something popped into my head this morning that reminded me of the golden rule of student testing: Always disaggregate by race.
So I did. I took NAEP reading scores for 2019 and 2022 and then added an estimate for 2023 from a Harvard/Stanford report earlier this year. Here's the result for 4th grade:
Everyone except Asians dropped during the pandemic and only made up a fraction of it in 2023. But now let's look at 8th grade:
Except among white students, losses were minuscule and had recovered almost entirely by 2023.
As I've pointed out frequently, score changes among young students often wash out. Scores for older students are more reliable. I would have checked 12th graders if the data was available.
In any case, the takeaway here is that reading ability has probably recovered almost entirely from the pandemic except among white kids, who are dragging down the average.
Why? One thing to always keep in mind is that the pandemic drop wasn't due to remote learning. The evidence is pretty clear that the effect of remote learning was quite small. It was something else that caused most of the problem, and it seems to have affected white kids the most.
FOR WHAT IT'S WORTH: If you look at SAT scores by race you see something similar: Scores dropped for some but not for others. However, the SAT is self-selecting and the data isn't recent, so you probably can't make much of it.
By how much are the scores below the average?
These big changes from 2022 to 2023 seem unbelievable.
Also, doesn't it seem strange to you that black scores have actually increased by 2.1 in 2023 when negative impact from the pandemic among whites was only 4?
And finally, given that white parents are more likely to have a non-working parent at home and higher education levels, doesn't it seem strange to you that the impact of the pandemic would be worse on white kids?
I wonder how significant changes of this magnitude in scores are. Maybe these are just random fluctuations?
I was saying at the time that for all the dire predictions about the negative effect of school closings if you look at the academic achievement of those students 20 years from now it won't even register as a blip.
My thoughts exactly. Why are people losing their minds over what amounts to about one-third of a year? Does anyone think that that can't be made up? And even if they don't, is one-third of a year really significant to these students longer-term? Seems like much ado about nothing.
Doesn't look significant, especially when looking at both grade levels. Random variance. Split everything up and youre bound to find one group that's up and one that's down.
Run this by first name and the Michelle's might have exceeded their priors while the Chase's are way down. But it means nothing.
Test prep culture definitely fell apart for a year or two. Other, more important things were going on. But now we can get back to the true purpose of school: sports and teaching kids how to take tests.
This made me lol. But yeah, if it's a test prep effect that'd certainly confirm some of my biases.
Now now. Schools teach more valuable skills than just sports and test taking. For example, it’s where I learned to sit calmly and mostly quietly for 7-8 hours a day, even if you have nothing to do or lots of obviously pointless tasks to do… which apparently is an Essential Skill in every white collar job that forced their employees to return to the office post pandemic instead of just letting them continue working from home.
Other measures show significant long lasting harm.
https://www.gse.harvard.edu/ideas/news/23/05/new-data-show-how-pandemic-affected-learning-across-whole-communities
Yeah - "remote learning had no impact" is one of his stupidly chosen, tenaciously adhered-to positions. Hard to square with his "remote work is less productive" position.
Since the pandemic I've noticed a local drop in standardized test participation, especially among better-off white families. While schools may have to test kids, individual kids can't be forced to take the test. It is possible that we're seeing a change in who gets tested.
I don’t know what’s going on with the scores but I’ve thought, since COVID, that the school experience was a big uncontrolled study of home schooling. My conclusion has been that it works for a select few families but doesn’t work for most.
Why? Many if not most families rely on two incomes. And some families simply don’t have the attention span or interest in schooling their kids to be successful.
Meanwhile one political party is working diligently to undermine our public schools.
I'm lost here. What is the baseline for this chart?
It's worth noting that the charts compare two different groups of students. The 2022 fourth-graders lost their third-grade year to covid closures; the 2023 fourth-graders lost their second-grade year. I have no idea how much that distinction matters, but it suggests caution in drawing conclusions from year-over-year "changes."