What Can We Do About Pandemic-Related Learning Loss?

June 19, 2023

Remote school was devastating for many students. In Richmond, Virginia, a plan to switch to a year-round calendar brought promise and pushback.

Angela Wright became the principal of Fairfield Court Elementary School, in Richmond, Virginia, in the fall of 2020, but she didn’t meet her students until a year later. At the start of the pandemic, Richmond had moved all of its twenty-two thousand students to remote learning. By the time they returned to the classroom, in September, 2021, after every other school district in the state, it had been eighteen months since they’d been inside a school building.

For Wright, the posting at Fairfield Court was the culmination of a steady rise: from instructional assistant to teacher to assistant principal to principal. When her father saw her first monthly paycheck as a teacher, he asked, “Is this for a week?” “He said, ‘Are you sure this is what you want to do?’ ” she recalled. “I said, ‘Yes.’ When you see kids light up, when you see that they get it, when you see kids who were tier three or lower rise to the top . . .”

Wright had previously been a principal in a rural school district, but after arriving in the Richmond system she settled for being an assistant principal for a few years. “Coming into an urban school district, I wanted to step back and take a look at their structure, their processes,” she said. Now she was eager to tackle the challenges facing the student body, which was almost entirely Black. Many of the students lived in an adjoining public-housing development, also called Fairfield Court. But Wright, in her first year, could offer guidance only at a remove. She dropped in on virtual classrooms, where students logged on from their beds or from crowded kitchen tables; often, they were not able to log on at all, because the concrete walls of their home interfered with a Wi-Fi signal. “Sometimes it was just, ‘Oh, it’s not working today,’ ” she told me.

When the students returned to the school building, Wright found that their needs were far greater than she could have imagined. Research released by Harvard and Stanford last fall found that Richmond’s fourth through eighth graders had lost two full years of ground in math and nearly a year and a half in reading. Even more apparent was their difficulty with basic interactions—fifth graders hadn’t been in person since third grade; second graders, since kindergarten. “Socialization with each other was huge. How to be around each other—those are building blocks for ages six to ten,” Wright said. “There was a whole retraining—what does it look like when you and another student disagree? They had missed that, not being in the building.”

Richmond is a particularly stark example of what education researchers say is a nationwide crisis. Student learning across the country, as measured by many assessments, has stalled to an unprecedented degree. Researchers have pointed to a number of causes, including the trauma experienced by children who lost family members to covid, but the data generally show that the shortcomings are the greatest in districts that were slowest to reopen schools. They also show that the falloff was far greater among Black and Hispanic students than among whites and Asians, expanding disparities that had been gradually shrinking in recent decades. “This cohort of students is going to be punished throughout their lifetime,” Eric Hanushek, an economist at Stanford, said, at a conference in Arlington, Virginia, in February. He presented findings demonstrating that the economic consequences of pandemic-related learning loss could be far greater than those of the Great Recession.