How can US students recover from pandemic learning loss?

The Covid-19 pandemic continues to take a toll on American education. New test results have revealed "the single largest drop in math in 50 years" among the nation's 13-year-olds, The Washington Post reported. Reading scores also suffered. The news is being treated as an emergency by education officials. "We really need to be concerned about what is happening here," said one expert.

Fallout from the nation's sudden shift to remote schooling in 2020 is still being felt in the classroom, Fortune reported, even though most students returned to in-person learning two years ago. "The 'green shoots' of academic recovery that we had hoped to see have not materialized," said Peggy G. Carr, commissioner of the National Center for Education Statistics. "There are signs of risk for a generation of learners."

The scores are just the latest evidence of pandemic-era learning loss. One survey in May revealed that students in grades 3 through 8 lost the equivalent of a half-year of math education during the pandemic, Yahoo News reported. More troubling are the racial disparities: "The less wealthy and white a community was, the more likely it was to suffer pandemic loss." Will American students — and their test scores — ever recover?

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What are commentators saying?

"The last two years have been an endless avalanche of data showing how disastrous 'remote schooling' was," wrote Timothy P. Carney at the Washington Examiner. It's not just test scores: Mental health, absenteeism and crime have all risen among American kids in recent years. But the dropping test scores and the widening racial gap should be the final straw for parents — the teachers unions and politicians who kept schools closed should be held accountable. "Everyone who loves children should still be angry about this," Carney wrote. "The closers ruined children's lives."

"But school closures are only part of the story," Tom Kane and Sean Reardon wrote at The New York Times. Test scores have declined more in locations with higher death rates, and less in communities with high voting and high census response rates. Regardless of the cause, though, "the overall effect has been devastating." So what should be done? It's time to get students more tutoring and classroom time in order to catch up. "In many communities, students lost months of learning time. Justice demands that we replace it."

"Reversing this crisis will require a historic investment," the Washington Post editorialized. In fact, that investment is already being made: Congress has appropriated hundreds of millions of dollars to help schools and states recover from the pandemic. Some of that money should go to "high-dosage tutoring" — a dose of individualized instruction for several hours each week — to help students get back on track. The time to start is now: "The longer schools dawdle in catching them up, the less chance they have of succeeding."

What's next?

All that federal money is being put to use on a variety of strategies, Chalkbeat reported, including "summer school, small-group tutoring, and hiring more teachers and other staff." But it isn't yet clear which approaches have been or will be successful: One analysis suggests that less than 10% of students in large districts have participated in the new tutoring programs. This means that education officials are still feeling their way forward. "There is nothing in this data that tells us what is working," said one.

One possibility: Year-round schooling. Chalkboard Review reported that the state of Washington is experimenting with a "Balanced Calendar Initiative," using the federal funding to subsidize 40 school districts to expand the typical school year from about 180 days of instruction to 220 days. With the traditional calendar, students "continue to fall further behind their counterparts," said one advocate. Expanding the school year "provides opportunities for students who need additional instructional days."

There is a possibility that today's students won't fully recover what was lost during COVID, ProPublica reported. "This cohort of students is going to be punished throughout their lifetime," said Eric Hanushek, a Stanford University economist. The only thing schools can do now is move forward, said one Virginia official. "We should be looking at it as where we are now," she said, "and go from there."