Students nationwide have rebounded after pandemic. But not in Oregon. Consequences could be severe
Students around the country have shown promising signs of rebounding from the COVID era’s massive disruptions to learning, according to a first-of-its-kind multi-state analysis by researchers at Harvard and Stanford universities.But not in Oregon.
Unlike in the 29 other states studied, Oregon students as a whole have failed to regain either reading or math skills, researchers found.
The state’s elementary and middle school students remain an average of about two-thirds of a year behind in reading compared to pre-pandemic levels and three-fourths of a year behind in math, the study found. That’s roughly two to three times the deficit faced by students nationwide, the study found.
Those dispiriting results come despite a $1.6 billion infusion of federal pandemic aid to the state’s 197 school districts. That money will run out in eight months, and most Oregon school districts have already spent most of it with little to show for it.
The learning deficits are worst in the poorest pockets of the state, but many comparatively wealthy Portland-area suburban districts have yet to show much bounce-back.
Districts had almost complete leeway to decide how to spend their federal funds. Without parameters from the state or federal government, Oregon districts often chose to pay for online academies, to preserve staff despite enrollment drops and other initiatives that have yet to translate into measurable learning rebounds.
That matters, not just for students and their success in school, but more broadly for Oregon’s economy, crime levels and broader measures of well-being, researchers say.
“The initial [academic] losses in Oregon were among the largest in our study,” said Thomas Kane, faculty director of the Center for Education Policy Research at Harvard University and a co-author of the study, which used state test scores from 2019, 2022 and 2023 and triangulated them against scores on a national exam given in all states in 2019 and 2022. In Oregon, Kane said, “We saw very little evidence of improvement between 2022 and 2023, whereas most states did.”
What went wrong?
Oregon’s poor performance cannot be fully explained by the fact that the state had some of the nation’s longest school closures. Students in California and Washington, where schools were closed for around the same length of time, have shown academic rebounds in math and slimmer continued losses in reading than Oregon.
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