Parents have become a lot more optimistic about how well their children are doing in school.
In 2020 and 2021, a majority of parents in the United States reported that the pandemic was hurting their children’s education. But by the fall of 2022, a Pew survey showed that only a quarter of parents thought their children were still behind; another study revealed that more than 90 percent thought their child had already or would soon catch up. To hear parents tell it, the pandemic’s effects on education were transitory.
Are they right to be so sanguine? The latest evidence suggests otherwise. Math, reading and history scores from the past three years show that students learned far less during the pandemic than was typical in previous years. By the spring of 2022, according to our calculations, the average student was half a year behind in math and a third of a year behind in reading.
As part of a team of researchers from Harvard, Stanford, Dartmouth, Johns Hopkins and the testing company NWEA — the Education Recovery Scorecard project — we have been sifting through data from 7,800 communities in 41 states, to understand where test scores declined the most, what caused these patterns and whether they are likely to endure. The school districts in these communities enroll 26 million elementary and middle school students in more than 53,000 public schools, roughly 80 percent of the public K-8 students in the country.
We’ve looked at test scores, the duration of school closures, broadband availability, Covid death rates, employment data, patterns of social activity, voting patterns, measures of how connected people are to others in their communities and Facebook survey data on both family activities and mental health during the pandemic.
And to get a sense of how probable it is that students will make up the ground they lost over the next few years, we looked at earlier test scores to see how students recovered from various disruptions in the decade before the pandemic.
Our detailed geographic data reveals what national tests do not: The pandemic exacerbated economic and racial educational inequality.