From The Harvard Gazette:
A new report on pandemic learning loss found that high-poverty schools both spent more weeks in remote instruction during 2020-21 and suffered large losses in achievement when they did so. Districts that remained largely in-person, however, lost relatively little ground. Experts predict the results will foreshadow a widening in measures of the nation’s racial and economic achievement gap.
The report was a joint effort of the Center for Education Policy Research at Harvard University, the National Center for Analysis of Longitudinal Data in Education Research at the American Institutes for Research, and NWEA, a nonprofit research and educational services provider. It analyzed achievement data from 2.1 million students in 10,000 schools across 49 states and is the first in a series that will be tracking the impact of catch-up efforts over the next two years.
The Gazette spoke with economist Thomas Kane, Walter H. Gale Professor of Education and Economics at Harvard Graduate School of Education and center faculty director, about the findings. The interview was edited for length and clarity.
Q&AThomas Kane
GAZETTE: What is the magnitude of students’ learning loss due to the pandemic? Which school districts have been the most affected?
KANE: We found that districts that spent more weeks in remote instruction lost more ground than districts that returned to in-person instruction sooner. Anyone who has been teaching by Zoom would not be surprised by that. The striking and important finding was that remote instruction had much more negative impacts in high-poverty schools. High-poverty schools were more likely to go remote and their students lost more when they did so. Both mattered, but the latter effect mattered more. To give you a sense of the magnitude: In high-poverty schools that were remote for more than half of 2021, the loss was about half of a school year’s worth of typical achievement growth.
GAZETTE: What is the percentage of students who have experienced learning loss in the U.S.?
KANE: There are 50 million students in the U.S. About 40 percent, or 20 million students, nationally were in schools that conducted classes remotely for less than four weeks, and 30 percent, or 15 million students, remained in remote instruction for more than 16 weeks. In other words, about 40 percent spent less than a month in remote instruction, but about 30 percent spent more than four months in remote instruction. It is the dramatic growth in educational inequity in those districts that remained remote that should worry us....
....MUCH MORE
The report, May 2022 (36 page PDF)
The Consequences of Remote and Hybrid Instruction During the Pandemic
