Released Tuesday morning, is the latest dispatch from the , a data project led by a team of researchers at Dartmouth, Harvard, Stanford, and the testing group NWEA. In two studies released last year, the consortium unearthed in high-poverty areas since 2020, along with resulting from billions of dollars in federal assistance to K–12 schools. 

This week’s update comes on the heels of a disheartening publication of test scores from the National Assessment of Educational Progress, often referred to as the Nation’s Report Card. While some had hoped that results from that exam would provide reason for hope, only minimal progress was made in fourth-grade math; reading scores were actually worse than in 2022, the nadir of the pandemic. 

Thomas Kane, a professor of economics and education at Harvard, compared the sustained learning loss of the last few years with “the tsunami following the earthquake” — a destructive after-effect that has almost entirely resisted remediation efforts by local, state, and federal authorities. Struggling students, in particular, have fallen further behind their higher-performing peers, he observed.

“Given all the money that’s been spent, and the fact that students already lost ground between 2019 and 2022, you would have expected that there would be some bounce-back in reading,” Kane said. “But no, actually. Students continued to lose ground, especially at the bottom end.” 

While NAEP offers state-by-state comparisons, along with the results from several dozen major urban districts, the Scorecard group combines those figures with local testing data for 35 million students across 43 states, allowing the public to chart the trajectories of individual districts since 2019. 

Across the country, Kane and his collaborators calculate, just 11 percent of students in grades 3–8 are currently enrolled in districts where average reading levels exceed those measured in 2019; 17 percent are in districts where math knowledge is higher than the last pre-pandemic year. Set against the continuing fall in literacy, a slight rebound in math scores — about one-tenth of one grade level since 2022 — represents most of the good news. 

In relatively poorer communities, that silver lining is almost entirely accounted for by federal ESSER funds, which totaled $190 billion between 2021 and 2024. The report indicates that those grants prevented an even greater freefall in learning, while noting that “there were higher-impact ways to use the dollars” to speed student recovery.

Rebecca Sibilia is the founder of , a research and advocacy group that advocates for more and better-designed resources for schools. A frequent critic of the quality of school finance data, she said the breakneck pace at which ESSER dollars were appropriated and distributed made it virtually impossible for them to be maximally effective.

“We absolutely have research that shows money matters, and helps us understand how money matters,” she said. “ESSER was not constructed in a way that aligns with that research.”

Michael Petrilli, president of the right-leaning Thomas B. Fordham Institute, called the Scorecard study “devastating.

“We already knew that the bottom had fallen out for most states, but now we see how hard it is to find districts bucking the terrible trends,” he wrote in an email.

‘Two kinds of bad news’

Perhaps the most alarming trend of the period bridging the COVID depths of 2022 and the present day has been a substantial rise in educational inequality. 

By sorting thousands of school districts according to their number of students eligible for free or reduced-price lunch (a commonly used proxy for poverty), the Scorecard researchers found that academic recovery over the last two years has proceeded much more quickly in affluent areas.

In nearly one-third of all low-poverty school districts, math performance has been restored to the pre-pandemic status quo; the same is true in just 8 percent of high-poverty districts. In all, over 14 percent of the richest districts (i.e., those where household income is higher than in 90 percent of other places) have returned to 2019-era learning in both math and reading, compared with less than 4 percent of the poorest districts. 

A similar dynamic has been apparent in NAEP scores going back more than a decade. While the 2010s saw gradually declining results on average, the highest-scoring students tended to make some progress in each administration of the exam. Meanwhile, their struggling classmates experienced much larger reversals. Since 2013, the disparity in fourth-grade reading performance between kids at the 90th and 10th percentiles, respectively, grew by 14 points; the divergence in eighth-grade math grew by 16 points over that decade.

Stanford sociologist Sean Reardon, who leads the Scorecard project alongside Kane, said the widening gaps make it clear that the task of general academic recovery must be accompanied by a special focus on students who are at risk of never getting back on track. 

“There’s two kinds of bad news between the NAEP results and ours,” Reardon said. “One is the disappointing lack of recovery, and even continued decline, in reading. Those average trends are disappointing, but they’re compounded by the fact that the negative trends are worse for the kids in the highest-poverty districts.”

The worrying class bifurcation is apparent from coast to coast, but Kane specifically identified achievement gaps in his home state of Massachusetts. There, the well-to-do Boston suburbs of Lexington and Newton have either surpassed their academic performance of a half-decade ago or have very nearly dug themselves out of the hole. 

Just a few miles away, however, in the working-class cities of Everett and Revere, the average student is floundering more than a year behind the pace set by similarly aged students just five years ago. In Lynn, one of the most troubled school districts in the state, elementary and middle schoolers are two years behind in math and over 1.5 years behind in reading.

The report includes from relatively disadvantaged communities (including Union City, New Jersey, Montgomery, Alabama, and Natchitoches Parish, Louisiana) that had made significant strides back to normalcy. But the typical such district still faces years of work to regain what was lost. 

Joshua Goodman, an economist at Boston University, said that education leaders needed to guard against the sense that emerging gaps simply represented the “new normal.” If he’d been told in 2020 that children would still be scuffling to this extent by the middle of the decade, he said, he would have been shocked and disappointed. 

“I think I implicitly believed that, once the pandemic receded and schools reopened, the normal operation of kids’ lives would somehow cause them to bounce back,” Goodman recalled. “I don’t know if I was just being naive or not thinking it through properly, but this is a very grim result.”

Meager return from COVID funds

The dour note struck by observers is largely related to the meager returns of Washington’s relief efforts. 

Previous work from the Education Recovery Scorecard has pointed to a modest bump in student performance that followed an infusion of billions of dollars to states and districts. But that upward movement didn’t come close to reversing the full extent of COVID’s damage; for that, researchers estimated, hundreds of billions of dollars more would be needed.

With federal funds now expired, and no new federal appropriations on the horizon, ESSER’s final impact can begin to be measured. For every $1,000 spent per student between 2022 and 2024, the authors estimate, math scores increased by roughly .005 standard deviations (a scientific measure showing the distance from the statistical mean). 

In comparison with other policy changes in education, Kane and Reardon showed, this is a fairly small figure — just a tiny fraction of by schools that adopted the Success for All reform model, for example, or those that followed the implementation of high-dosage tutoring programs. 

Kane said the relatively freewheeling structure of ESSER funds — states were only required to spend 20 percent of the aid on programs specifically aimed at lifting student achievement — meant that many expenditures were not efficiently targeted at the schools and students of greatest need. The small payoff could serve as a warning to Republicans reportedly the Department of Education and disbursing its various revenue streams to states to spend freely. 

“This is an example of bypassing federal regulators, or even bypassing state regulators, and giving all the money directly to school districts,” Kane argued. “We just saw what happens: Some school districts will figure out how to use the money well, but others won’t.”

Referencing widely circulated papers by school finance researchers Kirabo Jackson and Eric Hanushek, Sibilia said the general case for spending more on K–12 schools was sound. But ESSER money was sent out the door quickly, often to districts that didn’t serve large numbers of needy students. While spending it, district leaders had to make fast decisions with incomplete information.

The simultaneous and temporary explosion in districts’ budgets had led to a concurrent increase in shoddy vendors for services like tutoring and professional development. No matter the amount of money that Congress might have awarded, she added, the effects of ESSER would have been dampened by the limited supply of high-quality providers.

“There are a few researchers in the country that are dogmatic in saying that money, no matter how it’s spent, will give you a positive return,” Sibilia said. “But I think 95 percent of the people studying money in education will tell you that spending is only as good as what you can buy.”

But the social scientists who authored the research argue that federal dollars could have been spent in ways that would have helped scores bounce back faster. The per-dollar returns of ESSER, the Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief Fund, measure up poorly in comparison with those of previously studied efforts to boost achievement, from reducing class sizes to implementing more rigorous curricula.

Dan Goldhaber, the lead author of and the director of the , said he believed the crisis conditions of the pandemic made it “hard to spend the ESSER funding in thoughtful, effective ways.”

By his own estimate, 35% of the math recovery achieved during the 2022–23 school year was directly attributable to ESSER funding. Fully 87% of English recovery was credited to ESSER, though he found that gains in that subject were statistically insignificant. Still, he said, that upward movement was limited. 

“Candidly, I think the impact was small, and there are some reasons why it wasn’t larger,” Goldhaber said. “Only 20% of ESSER money was even earmarked for learning loss, and I don’t think there was a lot of oversight of whether that 20% was well spent.”

The findings offer a split verdict on the post-COVID academic recovery, while somewhat strengthening the case that putting more resources into schools can elevate their results. The advances measured in both studies are virtually identical not only to one another, but also to earlier, wide-ranging estimates of the impact of additional money on schools.

ESSER was one of the best-known and longest-lasting pillars of Washington’s pandemic response. Years after stimulus checks and free nasal swabs stopped arriving in the mail, many districts are still spending down the aid they received through the program. The last of the supplemental aid will not expire until this September, four years after schools first began to reopen for in-person instruction.

Notably, however, both papers project that American students will not have returned to their pre-COVID learning trajectories by then, and that the cost of a full restoration could amount to hundreds of billions more. With no sign of any further assistance coming from Congress, that bill will need to be picked up by states — if it is paid at all. 

In the meantime, ESSER’s backers can point to real, if incomplete, progress.

Stanford sociologist Sean Reardon helps lead the , which released a second study on Wednesday. In an interview, he noted that the federal cash injection was the equivalent of of the country’s annual K–12 spending, spread over multiple years. While it might have been used more efficiently to stem further learning loss, he added, both national and state leaders were simultaneously focused on goals like reopening schools and alleviating the severe emotional distress that many children are still facing.

“One can certainly imagine ways to spend the money that would lead to even more learning gains,” Reardon said. “But that wasn’t entirely what was on policymakers’ minds when they sent out the money.”

‘A huge missed opportunity’

To pinpoint the impact of additional money on COVID-era learning, the two studies take advantage of differences in how the federal funding was awarded to individual districts.

The total ESSER expenditure was fueled by three laws setting aside $13 billion in March 2020, $57 billion in December of that year, and a further $122 billion the following March. Because there was no data showing where learning loss was most concentrated at that time, dollars were allocated to school districts based on their pre-pandemic grants from Title I, the Department of Education’s main program benefiting disadvantaged children.  

But not all districts received comparable amounts, even if they served similar numbers of needy students. Instead, governing Title I — including rules that ensure small states receive minimum allotments, as well as larger sums being granted to states with higher per-pupil spending — introduced significant spending gaps between different schools. Those disparities were significantly magnified as each new emergency funding bill was passed, said Harvard economist Thomas Kane, Reardon’s co-author. 

“With the second two ESSER packages, the federal government was essentially pushing $175 billion through pipes that were meant to handle $16 billion in Title I,” Kane said. “So what might have been a $500 or $600 difference per student in Title I dollars became a $5,000 or $6,000 difference in ESSER funding per student.” 

Both Goldhaber and the Education Recovery Scorecard team accessed standardized test results from the Stanford Education Data Archive, which compiles student scores from different local exams to allow for cross-state comparisons. In each of their studies, $1,000 in ESSER spending per student was found to raise math scores by 0.008 of a standard deviation (a scientific measure showing the distance from a statistical mean).

In the world of education research, an improvement of that size is considered small: something like one-tenth of a medium-sized effect. But the average conceals substantial variation across different states, and many school districts received much more than $1,000 per student. 

As an example, Reardon, Kane, and their collaborators identified 704 districts in which over 70% of students were eligible for free and reduced-price lunch — a commonly used proxy for poverty — then compared the results for those that received unusually large ESSER allocations (more than $8,600 per pupil) to those that received much less (less than $4,600 per pupil). 

The differences were striking. The working-class district of Brockton, Massachusetts was awarded $3,224 per student from the second and third ESSER funding bills, and its students’ math achievement improved by the equivalent of .06 grade levels between 2022 and 2023; but in Dayton, Ohio, per-pupil funding increased almost three times as much ($11,444), and math scores jumped by a factor of 10 (.65 grade levels).

Goldhaber argued that figures like those cast considerable doubt on the proposition that the U.S. government’s emergency relief to schools was mostly wasted.

“One of the ideas that’s out there is that we spent $190 billion and got nothing,” he said. “I don’t think that’s the right answer.”

Yet he also voiced disappointment that neither Washington nor states had directly measured what kinds of ESSER spending (tutoring programs or school renovations, improved ventilation or increased staffing) were correlated with higher performance. Despite its huge cost and high stakes, Goldhaber concluded, ESSER was simply “not designed to learn from what districts do.”

“To my mind, that makes it a huge missed opportunity. We can see that there are pretty big differences across states and districts in the degree of catch-up.”

‘Who’s going to pick up the reins?’

While the studies can shed little light on the most successful aspects of ESSER, they will be collectively seen as a major contribution to the research on school finance reforms. This is true both because of the scale of the government’s intervention — perhaps the single greatest natural experiment on the effects of windfall cash on schools that has ever been attempted — and the consistency of the papers’ results. 

Not only do the findings of both studies mirror one another, they also hew closely to those of , published in January, that gathered the results of dozens of previous experiments in increased school funding. That paper also pointed to an average test-score increase of about .032 standard deviations per $1,000 spent over four years, or roughly .008 annually.

Marguerite Roza, head of Georgetown University’s finance-focused Edunomics Lab, called the coinciding findings “reassuring.”

Yet she also noted the “wildly expensive” cost of sending operating aid to states that was not specifically dedicated to learning recovery. According to Goldhaber’s calculations, the government would need to spend an additional $450–$650 billion to fund a full return to levels of academic achievement last seen in 2019; Reardon and Kane tallied a likely cost of just over $904 billion. 

Whether or not those figures represent the true price tag, Roza said, states that intend to replace federal dollars should be more consistent in disbursing them and more stringent about what they pay for.

“Why repeat the same strategy given how unevenly the dollars were distributed and how uneven the effects were on districts and states?” Roza asked. “Given what we know now, any new federal dollars for recovery should probably be structured differently.”

But in Kane’s view, that recommendation may be too optimistic. With just a few months left before the deadline to spend ESSER funds, he observed, too few state authorities had even committed to picking up the torch of learning recovery. 

“In most states, there hasn’t even been a discussion started about what the state role will be now that the federal money is running out,” he said. “Our results are basically saying that there was a positive effect, but it wasn’t enough. Now who’s going to pick up the reins?”

It was the year that Dr. Anthony Fauci, America’s most prominent public health authority, declared that the country was “,” as COVID case rates plummeted from their Omicron highs. By the fall, President Biden was with that sentiment, noting that most people had laid down their masks and returned to something like normal. 

And around the possibility of winter surges in American schools, the most visible hallmarks of the COVID era have at last receded. The lurching progression from in-person to virtual classes is over, following an explosion of school exposures last winter. Mask mandates, social distancing, and endless disinfectant wipes are also predominantly a thing of the past, with virtually all children approved to receive vaccines. 

But in terms of the pandemic’s impact on education, it’s still only the end of the beginning. With each month, new findings emerge revealing more about what remote instruction did to learning and how families reacted. The potentially lifelong shadow the virus has cast over K-12 students — from how babies develop speech to what today’s adolescents will earn decades from now — is largely mysterious. 

Previous editions of this list have covered the wider world of education policy and research: issues like school financing, choice, accountability, and testing. This year, The 74 is focusing exclusively on the lessons of the COVID era — one that is now passing from the scene — and the questions that remain in its wake.

Here, laid out in charts, maps, and tables, are 14 discoveries that changed how we think about schools in 2022.

The scope of learning loss

By the end of last year, a steady trickle of research had already begun to reveal the harm wrought by prolonged school closures and the transition to virtual instruction. But this fall brought the most definitive evidence yet of the scale of learning lost over more than two years of COVID-disrupted schooling: fresh testing data from the National Assessment of Educational Progress, sometimes called the Nation’s Report Card, pointing to severe declines in core subjects. 

The unprecedented drop in math scores, which fell by an average of eight points for eighth graders and five points for fourth graders, was especially disturbing. But reversals in literacy were also notable, with sizable increases in the number of students testing below even the “basic” level of reading proficiency. What’s more, the results affirmed dismal findings from NAEP’s “Long-Term Trends” test — an earlier version of the exam that has been administered since the early 1970s — showing that the pandemic set back nine-year-olds’ performance in math and reading to levels last seen two decades ago. 

“We’re seeing a lot of that very long-term progress completely erased over the course of a couple of years,” said Dan Goldhaber, a University of Washington professor, of the long-term results.

As many experts warned, additional research has also made clear that the academic damage of COVID was not shared equally. NWEA, the nonprofit testing group whose MAP exam has proven an invaluable assessment tool throughout the pandemic, released a study in November indicating that already-wide achievement gaps in elementary classrooms have grown between 5 and 10 percent in the last few years. Those disparities grew, NWEA analysts specified, because of slumping achievement among struggling students. 

College entrance exams contributed yet another dispiriting perspective, with average scores on the ACT slipping below 20 for the first time since the presidency of George H.W. Bush. Only about one in twelve test-takers from low-income families met standards of college readiness across all of the test’s four subjects.

In 2022, researchers, educators, and the public discovered the full extent of what COVID did to K-12 learning. 2023 will provide a test of how quickly that learning can be restored — and how seriously we are approaching the problem.

The geography of remote learning

Multiple studies have identified a strong association between academic backsliding and time spent in remote learning. And while different states and districts switched back to in-person instruction at different speeds, a disturbing commonality emerged: The least-advantaged kids were usually the slowest to return to the classroom.

co-authored by experts at NWEA, the CALDER Center at the American Institutes for Research, and Harvard’s Center for Education Policy Research used data from over 2 million students to show that — whether in states that reopened schools relatively quickly, like Florida, or those that stayed remote much longer, like Virginia — schools serving the highest proportions of low-income students spent the most weeks remote during the 2020–21 academic year. Notably, however, the socioeconomic gaps in exposure to virtual teaching were much larger among the group of predominantly blue states that tended to reopen more hesitantly. In those states, high-poverty schools spent more than two additional months in Zoom classrooms than low-poverty schools. 

Harvard economist and study co-author Thomas Kane observed that the greater prevalence of remote learning among poor students, who are already less likely to succeed academically than their better-off peers, could be an additional driver of achievement gaps for years to come. In an interview with The 74, Kane said that the academic recovery interventions planned by school districts were “nowhere near enough” to compensate for COVID’s toll.

“Based on what I’m seeing, most districts are going to find that students are still lagging far behind when they take their state tests in May 2023,” Kane said.

But was the public convinced by the reams of detailed and well-intentioned research on the results of online learning? Public polling suggests that the answer is ambiguous. At least — albeit one conducted before much of the research on learning loss was released — indicated that Americans prioritized curbing the pandemic’s spread over keeping schools open.

Poorer districts lost the most

Few doubt that some amount of learning loss is linked to the hasty and unplanned adoption of remote instruction. How much is still ambiguous, however. released in October — devised by Harvard’s Kane and the eminent Stanford sociologist Sean Reardon, among others — leveraged a combination of state test scores and federal NAEP results to deliver a granular, district-by-district overview of the pandemic’s academic impact.

While the researchers found that academic performance in predominantly in-person districts held up much better than mostly remote districts within the same state, they also stipulated that school closures were not “the primary factor driving achievement losses”; some states that spent much of the pandemic open as usual, such as Maine, sustained far greater score declines than those that saw widespread closures, such as California. And beyond the question of remote-versus-in-person, it is clear that districts with greater concentrations of poor students experienced the worst academic effects over the last few years.

In districts where 70 percent or more of students qualified for free or reduced-price lunch, average math performance fell by 0.66 grade levels. By contrast, in districts where fewer than 39 percent of students qualified for free lunch, only 0.45 grade levels of math achievement were lost. Above all, the ultra-local look at test scores showed a startling amount of variation in how different school districts experienced the same event; in reading, almost 15 percent of all students were enrolled in districts where achievement actually grew during the pandemic.

Enrollment fell as families fled 

The pandemic left an impact on schools far beyond its blow to student achievement. Due to a combination of public dissatisfaction, increased mobility, and economic upheaval, families withdrew from their public schools in unprecedented numbers — as many as 1.5 million during the 2020–21 school year, or about 3 percent of all public K-12 enrollment, according to a 2021 report from NCES.

Further scholarly investigation has unearthed the important role that learning modality played in that flight. According to a comprehensive report from the conservative American Enterprise Institute, the districts that spent the most time remote throughout the first pandemic school year lost at least 500,000 more students than they would have if they had stayed open during that time. And in the period that followed, fewer students returned than did to districts where campuses mostly operated in-person. 

The findings suggested that widespread loss of students was not just “pandemic-related; it was pandemic-response related,” Nat Malkus, AEI’s deputy director of education policy, told The 74’s Linda Jacobson. 

Meanwhile, enrollment trends detected this spring by the data company Burbio showed that major urban districts continued losing students through the 2021–22 school year. Only a handful of states examined by the organization during that time saw an enrollment increase of more than 1 percent compared with the previous year.

The youngest weren’t spared

While we’ve gained a better empirical understanding of how K-12 students’ lives and learning trajectories were altered by COVID, it will be years before we fully grasp the ways in which the youngest Americans were affected. But a provocative study of child development and language acquisition has already given cause for alarm.

Using LENA “talk pedometers” — a that measures the number of spoken interactions occurring in the vicinity of young children, as well as their own vocalizations — researchers at Brown discovered that babies born after July 2020 produced fewer vocalizations and demonstrated slower verbal growth than comparable children born before 2019. The younger group of babies also experienced slower growth of white matter — subcortical nerve fibers that facilitate communication between different regions of the brain — perhaps the result of hearing fewer words spoken and engaging less often with their caregivers. 

If the cognitive development of young learners was slowed by the extraordinary social isolation imposed by daycare closures and lockdowns of public spaces, it will produce unavoidable consequences for schools in the next decade.

Old before their time

Even as social and intellectual growth was apparently slowed for some infants and babies, psychologists warn that the compounded stress of the last few years may have harmfully accelerated the maturation process for older kids.

A slew of surveys highlight newly elevated levels of student stress, the product of public health worries, economic anxiety, and even domestic abuse. But a recently published offers proof that those factors actually changed the neurobiology of some adolescents. Examining MRIs of 128 matched subjects — half measured before and half after the pandemic began — a team of psychologists found that the group assessed after COVID demonstrated higher “brain age” than their chronological age and experienced faster growth in the amygdala and hippocampus, areas of the brain that regulate fear, stress, and memory.

Such sped-up aging has historically been seen in cases of household trauma and neglect, and its consequences can include decreased capacity across a range of intellectual functions. Follow-up scans are already planned to assess whether the process has been remediated.

Teachers under strain

Adults in schools have shown their own signs of exhaustion. In a survey of nearly 4,000 K-12 teachers and principals conducted by the RAND Corporation, about one-third said they intended to quit their jobs, a significantly higher proportion than it found during the chaotic pandemic months of early 2021. 

That figure almost certainly doesn’t betoken a future exodus from the profession; educators have historically been much more likely to say they intend to leave than to ultimately act on those plans. But it could mean that large numbers will stay in their jobs past the point of burnout, their effectiveness permanently dimmed. On average, the poll found that the teachers and principals were more than twice as likely to report experiencing frequent, job-related stress than other workers.

Teachers were also twice as likely as comparable adults to say they were not “coping well” with their stress. While the most commonly cited contributing factor was the task of addressing learning loss, some school employees also complained of staff shortages and the difficulty of managing their own childcare responsibilities. 

Social shuffle

It shouldn’t come as any surprise that young adults’ personal relationships, no less than their academic prospects, were fundamentally changed by months spent away from their peers. 

In some ways, those changes were positive: According to a June poll released by Pew, 45 percent of American kids between the ages of 13 and 17 said they felt closer to their parents after two years of disrupted schooling. But sizable minorities also reported feeling less close to friends, classmates, teachers, and extended family, a web of social connections that might have proven vital during a lengthy period of difficulty. 

Somewhat surprisingly for a survey administered over two years after the emergence of COVID, nearly 20 percent of the teen respondents said they had not attended classes exclusively in-person during the spring of 2022 (a time of somewhat elevated virus case rates). About two-thirds said they would prefer a return to entirely in-person schooling in the future.

Future earnings endangered

The downstream consequences of thwarted or deferred academic success are destined to include financial disadvantages; after all, today’s underserved pupils are tomorrow’s underprepared workers. But until the fall release of NAEP, it was difficult to produce a broadly shared measure of American students’ stifled progress. 

With the arrival of those scores, Harvard economist Kane — him again — and Dartmouth professor Douglas O. Staiger immediately calculated a projection of how much potential income could be lost due to diminished math learning among eighth-graders since 2020. Based on the historical correlation between math gains on NAEP and professional earnings growth, the figure they reached was astounding: $900 billion of future earnings, if the declines in learning were to remain permanent for all students in the United States.

“When there are improvements in scores, those kids coming out of school are going to have better outcomes later in life,” Staiger told The 74. “And we can infer from this recent decline that all the cohorts in school now are going to do a bit worse than we expected.” 

The paper was one of a series of analyses focusing specifically on the drop in math knowledge, which appears to have been particularly significant. But the extended disruption to literacy instruction left a substantial mark as well, particularly among students at the beginning of their reading careers. Amplify, a curriculum provider, released data this fall showing that 4 percent fewer second graders and 8 percent fewer first graders are reaching grade-level reading goals than in 2019; meanwhile, almost one-third of third graders were assessed as needing “intensive intervention.”

Those bleak findings echo the results of Curriculum Associates’ i-Ready assessment, which revealed that the percentage of elementary students reading below grade level grew between 2021 and 2022. That subgroup of students, sometimes called the “COVID cohort,” is running out of time to get back on track.

Costs of recovery

The havoc inflicted by the pandemic is now an inescapable fact for schools, families, and public authorities to deal with. But what’s it going to take to surmount the considerable educational challenges and get kids back on track?

The federal government has allocated roughly $190 billion in relief funding to states for that purpose. But , that amount won’t be sufficient to get the job done. The true cost, they say, will fall somewhere between $325 billion and $930 billion, huge sums that include not only the pedagogical resources to restore lost learning opportunities from the last several years, but also the out-of-school interventions that power so much of the academic growth that goes on inside classrooms. 

There is no indication that anywhere near that level of funding — or even any further money at all — is coming. In the meantime, school districts are only required to spend 20 percent of their federal aid on learning recovery. 

Latino students take a hit

Children of all backgrounds were bruised by the effects of shuttered schools, but among them, Latino students are notable for having recently enjoyed sustained academic momentum. As their share of the national student body has increased to nearly 30 percent, they have also seen rising achievement scores and post-secondary outcomes compared with their parents’ and grandparents’ generations.

COVID put that progress on pause, according to from the advocacy organization UnidosUS. After leaping from 71 percent to 82 percent over the last decade, the on-time high school graduation rate for Latino students fell slightly in 2021. Worse still, the rate of college enrollment for Latino freshmen shrunk by 7.8 percent between the spring of 2020 and 2021. That figure bounced back somewhat over the next academic year — along with rates of college-going for most Americans — but still fell below the pre-pandemic norm.

The particular stumbles experienced by Latino kids have explanations that both precede the pandemic and are directly linked to it, the report found. Long before 2020, Latino households were less likely to report having a computer or high-speed broadband in the home. Meanwhile, Latino students were disproportionately likely to be enrolled in low-income schools, which were themselves more likely to stay remote longer during the pandemic.

Explosion of absenteeism

Along with the surge of full-on disenrollment from schools, a shocking number of K-12 students spent the last few years missing day after day of instruction. Just how many days of absence is difficult to know precisely, however, because of ambiguities in the way attendance figures were collected during the COVID era.

An released this fall indicated that over 10 million students were chronically absent (i.e., missing over 10 percent of the school year) in 2020–21. That would be an increase of more than 25 percent relative to the pre-pandemic norm, but from Johns Hopkins University and the nonprofit group Attendance Works, it is also very likely a serious underestimate. Because of challenges in knowing which students “attended” all of their virtual lessons (versus simply logging into Zoom and then logging off, for instance), statewide absence counts in the NCES figures sometimes vary widely from district-level reporting.

Based on the early release of more detailed 2021–22 figures from California, Connecticut, Ohio, and Virginia, the authors wrote, it is reasonable to predict that as many as 16 million kids were chronically absent last school year, a doubling of the pre-pandemic number. 

The teacher exodus that wasn’t

Were American schools plagued with teacher absences this year, or not? It was a question that captivated news sources, but also divided education experts, because it contained an even thornier question within it: If the supply of teachers remains mostly steady, but demand for them spikes, are they truly at a deficit?

In spite of widespread fears that veteran teachers were quitting in huge numbers as a reaction to the pandemic, no mass departure ever took place, according to a paper by Brown economist Matt Kraft. Turnover actually fell slightly in the summer of 2020 and stayed within the typical annual range the next year. But weak hiring during the first few months of the pandemic may have contributed to higher-than-usual vacancy rates, perhaps triggered by fears of Great Recession-style budget cuts that never materialized.

In fact, a windfall of federal cash followed instead, leading districts to add new jobs in late 2020 and 2021, and the resultant hiring spree has indeed made candidates for teaching positions hard to find. But even that phenomenon isn’t true everywhere, since numbers differ widely across state lines. According to a paper released this summer, Mississippi’s rate of vacancies per 10,000 students is more than 68 times higher than that of Utah. 

Hopeful signs

As the long legacy of COVID grew clearer, research in 2022 gave the education world plenty of reasons to worry. But it has also contributed some hopeful signs of renewed progress in schools. 

The good omens aren’t popping up everywhere, but some are to be found in state-level testing, which has resumed around the country after being suspended for at least the first pandemic year. According to Tennessee’s state exams, the number of students meeting or beating grade-level reading standards rose from 29 percent in 2020–21 to over 36 percent in 2021–22. In all, more than three-quarters of the state’s school districts reported reading scores higher than were seen in the pre-pandemic period. 

“We are seeing this broadly across the state, and across district types — urban, rural and suburban,” Tennessee Education Commissioner Penny Schwinn told The 74’s Beth Hawkins. “We are really, really proud of what our districts have done.”

Several other Southern states have begun to make their turnaround, with Mississippi a particular standout. This of 2021–22 testing data showed average scores in math, English, and science nearing or exceeding 2019 levels, while performance on the U.S. history exam skyrocketed compared with 2020–21 (the first in which it had been given). Just as notably, — a state-mandated test that students must pass to progress to the fourth grade — fell by only .6 percentage points between 2019 and 2022. 

The puzzling finding comes from figures released Friday by education researchers at Harvard and Stanford universities. Their new resource, the , compiles test scores from roughly 4,000 schools that serve some in third through eighth grades across 29 states and the District of Columbia. Their work presents the first school system-level analysis of student learning through the pandemic.

Students in urban and suburban schools were 65% and 54% of a school year behind in math, respectively, according to the Scorecard; yet young people at rural schools were buffered somewhat, losing half a year. Meanwhile in reading, where drops were less dramatic overall, rural students fell behind by a third of a school year while urban and suburban students were just 29% and 24% of a year back.

Focusing on math scores, where COVID losses were more stark, Harvard education professor Thomas Kane said his findings are relatively good news for rural schools.

“The average rural district fared better than the average urban district,” he said in an email.

The reasons explaining the trend still remain something of a mystery, added his research partner, Stanford education professor Sean Reardon.

“We haven’t had a chance yet to dig into possible explanations for why we see some difference between rural and urban districts,” he said. 

The Scorecard’s analysis also includes town school districts, which are typically less remote and more populated than rural districts, but further from city centers than suburban districts. Town school systems had drops in math similar to their suburban counterparts and losses in reading slightly less severe than rural districts.

Alex Baum works as director of advocacy and research at the , which supports several rural counties in Iowa and runs a regional . He has not yet seen “clear and convincing data” explaining the differences between rural and urban schools through the pandemic, he said. (Iowa is not yet included in the Scorecard.) But he believes part of the reason for relatively larger drops in reading scores among students who live in more remote locations may be their limited access to outside-of-school learning opportunities.

“With fewer literacy programs, summer learning options [and] libraries, … rural students didn’t have the additional support that urban students had, leading to a larger decline in reading proficiency scores,” Baum said. 

Nancy Mondragon, a classroom aide in Arkansas’s Waldron School District, said the children’s struggles reflected the parents’ economic woes.

“In rural communities like ours, parents were juggling a lot in trying to make a living, and children spent more time on devices,” she said. “The reading loss definitely shows.”

Mondragon is training to become a lead teacher through Reach University, a program working to combat teacher shortages in rural districts. Reach Dean of Undergraduate Studies Kimberly Eckert believes those persistent staffing issues may also be a factor behind literacy losses.

“For reading, where different learner needs demand different interventions, the teacher shortage may be more of the issue here,” she said. “Access to reading specialists in rural communities may have been impacted by COVID, even if schools remained open.”

The length of school closures has been a commonly cited factor in the conversation around missed learning, particularly in math. Schools play an especially large role in teaching students arithmetic, and sparsely populated areas were less likely to shutter their campuses during the pandemic. 

It’s “plausible” that the difference between rural and urban districts’ scores could have hinged significantly on rural systems reopening sooner, said Reardon. But vastly different virtual learning programs from one district to the next and with young people juggling traumatic life-changing events like the death of a caregiver, he stressed that other factors also certainly played in.

“There was a lot happening in communities that shaped the magnitude of learning losses in addition to when schools were open or remote,” he said.

Overall, the Harvard and Stanford research suggests that school closures were not the primary element explaining achievement losses. Though setbacks tended to be higher where schools remained closed longer, there was wide variation in the results. Districts that remained virtual for equal amounts of time often had vastly different learning outcomes, and states and school systems that underwent extended closures in many cases outperformed those that opened sooner for in-person learning.

The Scorecard relies on state test scores for its analysis, but because many states use different exams, the researchers used results from the Oct. 24 National Assessment of Educational Progress to normalize the data so they could make apples-to-apples comparisons. States that have not yet released their test scores are not included in the analysis, including several with large drop-offs in achievement and high rates of school closures during COVID, such as Maryland, New Jersey and New Mexico.

Beyond differences between rural, urban and suburban schools, their research reveals several other key findings on pandemic learning:

• Losses were most pronounced in high-poverty districts compared to more affluent ones. The wealthiest quarter of districts in the sample maintained an extra 21% of a year’s worth of learning in math and 6% of a year’s worth of learning in reading over the most economically disadvantaged quarter. 

“We’ve seen the greatest increase in inequity in our lifetimes over the last few years,” Kane. “Unless we act over the next couple of years, these losses could become permanent and could have long-term consequences for social mobility.”

• Math setbacks exceeded a full year’s worth of learning in the school districts of over a half million students, some 5% of those represented in the analysis. On average, students were behind about a half grade level in math and about a quarter grade level in reading. A small minority attended districts that made gains in math, 2.5%, or reading, 15%, from 2019 to 2022.

• Recovering missed learning will be expensive. In nearly two-thirds of districts included in the analysis, catching students up will likely require investments exceeding the total cash delivered to schools via the American Rescue Plan. (The researchers reached that conclusion by assuming the cost of additional recovered learning will be equivalent to the typical cost of learning during the school year. In other words, catching students up on 25% of a year’s worth of learning will require 25% of a district’s annual operating budget.)

Tequilla Brownie, CEO of TNTP, she sees the new data as a “call to action.”

“It is clear that the problems pre-date the pandemic and, therefore, we should not confine ourselves to solutions that present a path back to pre-pandemic levels of proficiency,” she said.