Girls fell further behind in math during, after pandemic
Leading sociologist says emotional, family, social disruptions likelier cause than school closures.
It’s no secret that the COVID-19 pandemic was a seismic event for the nation’s schoolchildren.
But the disruption wasn’t evenly distributed. And scholars are only now beginning to understand the differential effects.
Sean Reardon, a renowned sociologist of education and inequality at Stanford, brought one such pattern to campus last week: Girls’ math scores suffered more than boys’ during and after the pandemic, and lower-income girls now face steeper “gender gaps” in math than do those in more affluent communities, all for reasons that are less than completely clear.
The public seminar was held last Tuesday evening by the Center for Education Policy Research. It was a homecoming for Reardon, who earned his masters’ and doctorate at Harvard Graduate School of Education (HGSE) in the 1990s.
At a packed lecture hall in HGSE’s Longfellow Building, Reardon previewed unpublished results developed alongside two of his graduate students, Sadie Richardson and Sofia Wilson. They’re based on an ongoing analysis of the nation’s educational recovery from COVID-19, conducted at Stanford’s Education Opportunity Project, where Reardon is faculty director.
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