#  Post-COVID Learning Losses 

 





July 17, 2023

 

 

 *In education, the post-COVID “return to normal” has been anything but straightforward. In fact, striving for a pre-pandemic status quo, Harvard and Stanford experts say, will perpetuate inequality and neglect the pressing educational gaps affecting children.*

 Gale professor of education and economics Tom Kane, director of the Center for Education Policy Research at the Graduate School of Education, and Sean Reardon, E.D.M. ’92, E.D.D. ’97, a sociology and education professor at Stanford University and director of its Educational Opportunity Project, have taken the lead in studying the unequal impact of the pandemic on student learning. Through the [Education Recovery Scorecard](https://educationrecoveryscorecard.org/), a collaboration among researchers from Harvard, Stanford, Johns Hopkins, Dartmouth, and the testing company NWEA (formerly known as Northwest Evaluation Association), they provide the country’s first comprehensive analysis of student learning loss at the district level.

 The Educational Recovery Scorecard was started in the spring of 2021 as the first pandemic-disrupted school year drew to a close, to measure how factors such as remote learning time and federal funding allocation influenced student achievement. Congress had just passed the American Rescue Plan, which, combined with other federal funding for pandemic relief, amounted to a $190-billion allocation for school districts to help students catch up. Despite the funding, there was little federal guidance or even within-state collaboration, and everyone was “left on their own,” according to Kane, and “winging it.” Reardon added, “13,000 school districts do…13,000 different things.” “We were realizing,” Kane said in an interview, “Holy cow, nobody knows how to help students catch up.”

 “It just seemed like nobody was collecting these data” on test scores, school closure duration, COVID-19 death rates, and social media activity, said Kane. “So we said, ‘Okay, somebody’s got to do this. It might as well be us.’” He and his colleagues analyzed these data and many other metrics collected from nearly 8,000 school districts across 21 states, encompassing 26 million elementary- and middle-school students: roughly 80 percent of the United States’ public school K-8 students.

 Read more at [harvardmagazine.com](https://www.harvardmagazine.com/2023/07/kane-covid-learning-losses).



 

 

 



 

 See also:- [ COVID-19 Impact ](/focus-areas/covid-19-impact)
- [ In the News ](/cepr-in-the-news)
- [ 2023 ](/year/2023)
 
 

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