Covid-19 Pandemic | 20 years of progress in math and reading were destroyed

This year, for the first time since National Assessment of Academic Progress tests began tracking student achievement in the 1970s, 9-year-olds lost ground in math, and reading results suffered their biggest decline in more than three decades.

These declines affect nearly all ethnic communities and all income levels, and are markedly more pronounced for low-performing students. Top performing students (90 to^e percent) registered a modest drop – 3 points in mathematics -, students in class 10th^e The lowest percentage lost 12 points in math, or four times as much.

“I was surprised by the scope and magnitude of the decline,” said Becky G. Carr, commissioner of the National Center for Education Statistics, a federal agency that conducted the test earlier this year. A national sample of 14,800 9-year-olds were tested and compared to results from tests taken by the same age group in early 2020.

High- and low-performing students showed gaps before the pandemic, but today, “the weakest students are falling apart faster,” D.^D Car.

In math, black students lost 13 points, versus 5 points for white students, widening the gap between the two groups. Research has documented the profound effect of school closings on low-income students and black and Spanish-speaking students, as their schools are more likely to pursue distance learning for longer periods of time.

As test scores drop, many 9-year-olds can partially understand what they read, and fewer can infer a character’s feelings from what they read. In math, students may know simple arithmetic concepts, but fewer of them can add fractions with common denominators.

threatening

These failures can have serious consequences for a generation of children who must go beyond basic education in elementary school and thrive later.

“Even as early as grades 1, 2 and 3, students’ test scores are highly predictive of how well they will do later in school and their academic trajectories in general,” said Susanna Loeb, director of Brown University’s Annenberg Institute. Focuses on educational inequality.

The National Assessment of Educational Progress is considered as a benchmark for academic selection. Unlike state tests, it’s standardized across the country, is consistent over time, and doesn’t hold individual schools accountable for results, making it more reliable, experts say.

“a job to be done”

The test results provided insight into one age group: 9-year-olds, who are typically in third or fourth grade. (Additional results for fourth- and eighth-graders will be released later this fall in each state.)

“It’s a test that speaks bluntly and clearly to federal and state leaders about the amount of work that needs to be done,” said Andrew Ho, a Harvard professor of education and an expert on educational testing. Examination Supervising Committee.

Over time, since the test was first used in the early 1970s, reading scores, and especially math scores, have generally trended upward or remained stable.

But over the past 10 years, student achievement has stabilized rather than improved, while gaps between low performers and high performers have widened.

Then came the pandemic, which caused schools across the country to close almost overnight. Teachers conducted lessons using Zoom inAnd students tried to stay home and learn online.

In some parts of the country, the worst disruptions were short-lived as schools reopened in the fall. But in other areas, particularly in large cities with low-income students and students of color, schools were closed for months, and some didn’t fully reopen until last year.

According to Howe, the national tests tell the story of a “decade of progress,” followed by a “decade of inequality,” and then the “shock” of the pandemic, which came as a double whammy.

“It destroyed progress and exacerbated inequality. Now our work is done. »

Vicious circle

He estimates that losing one point on a national test is equivalent to about three weeks of learning. This means that a high-performing student who lost 3 points in math could catch up in just 9 weeks, while a low-performing student who lost 12 points would need 36 weeks, or nearly 9 months, to catch up. Its backwardness is—and always will be—behind its advanced peers.

There are signs that students who have returned to school are learning at a normal pace again, but experts say it will take longer than normal school days to close the gaps created by the pandemic.

Janice K. Jackson, who led Chicago Public Schools until last year and is now a member of the Principals for Change group, representing education and school district officials across the state, said the results should be a “push” to get students back on track.

He called on the federal government to come up with big ideas, citing the Marshall Plan, a U.S. initiative to help rebuild Europe after World War II.

“It’s very dramatic to me,” he said, adding that politicians, school leaders, teachers’ unions and parents must put aside many of the disagreements that have erupted during the pandemic. Unite to help students recover.

This article was originally published The New York Times.