"High-poverty" schools districts suffered more than others in terms of learning loss during the coronavirus pandemic, according to a new study.
The "Education Recovery Scorecard," a collaboration between the Center for Education Policy Research at Harvard and Stanford's Educational Opportunity Project analyzed the 2022 NAEP scores at a district level. The study showed that achievement losses "were larger in higher poverty districts."
The study revealed that the pandemic "widened disparities in achievement between high and low-poverty schools." Furthermore, the study shows that a "quarter of schools with the highest shares of students receiving federal lunch subsidies missed two-thirds of a year of math learning, while the quarter of schools with the fewest low-income students lost two-fifths of a year."
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Researchers also found that the average public school 3rd to 8th-grade students lost the equivalent of a half year of learning in math and a quarter of a year in reading. The study also showed that within individual states, learning losses were greater in the districts that spent more time in remote instruction.
Despite this, the study concluded that school closures do not appear to be the "primary factor in driving achievement losses" due to achievement loss varying widely among districts that had the same remote-learning experience during the 2020-2021 school year.
"Even in school districts where students were in person for the whole year, test scores still declined substantially on average," said Sean Reardon, a professor in poverty and inequality at the Graduate School of Education and a senior fellow at the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research.
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U.S. Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona responded to the findings by saying, "We must muster the political will at the state and local level to match the urgency and federal investment in our students through the historic $122 billion in the American Rescue Plan."
"The latest Nation’s Report Card results must serve as a call to action to revisit our existing plans and scale up proven academic recovery strategies such as ensuring a robust and qualified teacher and leader workforce, intense and frequent tutoring aligned to high-quality curriculum, and after-school and summer enrichment programming. While the recent data is alarming, catching our students up to the 2019 achievement levels is a low bar. We must aim higher. Our students should be leading the world."
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Reacting to the Education Recovery Scorecard, American Federation For Children Senior Fellow Corey DeAngelis told Fox News Digital "you can thank Randi Weingarten and the teachers unions for these disastrous results."
"They fought to keep schools closed for over a year, holding children's education hostage to secure multiple multi-billion-dollar ransom payments from taxpayers. These union-induced school closures exacerbated already-existing inequalities in the government school system. The most advantaged families had the resources to better adapt to the union-induced disruption, and their children suffered less as a result."
The COVID-19 pandemic’s toll on the learning of kids across the U.S. was revealed through national test scores released Monday that show sharp declines in math and reading.
Math scores saw their largest decreases ever, while reading scores dropped to levels not seen since 1992 for fourth and eighth graders across the country, according to the Nation’s Report Card.
The average mathematics score for fourth-grade students fell five points from 2019 to 2022. The score for eighth-graders dropped eight points. Reading for both grades fell three points since 2019.
Math scores were worst among eighth graders, with 38% earning scores deemed "below basic" — a cutoff that measures, for example, whether students can find the third angle of a triangle if they’re given the other two. That’s worse than 2019, when 31% of eighth graders scored below that level.
Fox News' Stephanie Sorace contributed to this report.
