With news that reading and math test scores saw record drops in the United States during the pandemic, there is fear that this could hurt Democrats. Some are skeptical that closures were a leading cause.
Not only does this argument try to deny every parent’s real-world experience, but it also cuts against the evidence. For instance, Catholic schools outperformed public schools:
‘CATASTROPHIC PERFORMANCE’: YOUNGKIN PLEDGES CHANGES AFTER VIRGINIA MATH AND READING NAEP SCORES PLUMMET
Before continuing, we should recall the vitriol with which public officials and commentators attacked Catholic schools that fought to stay open. My former county health czar, Travis Gayles, tried to close all Catholic, Jewish, and other nonpublic schools in Montgomery County, Maryland, and when parents and schools pushed back, he personally attacked them.
“The Archdiocese of Louisville should be ashamed of itself,” wrote columnist Bobby Nichols in the Louisville Courier-Journal in August 2020. “Opening schools to in-person classes is immoral.” (Nichols, to his credit, admitted he was wrong.)
But this isn’t just a story about Catholic schools. It’s also a story about public schools that opened in fall 2020 versus those that didn’t. And the data suggest that being closed harmed children’s learning above and beyond other factors.
A very simple scatter plot in this article shows that states with more open schools had lower learning losses.
“That relationship is negative (and statistically significant), suggesting that students lost more ground on average where remote instruction was more prevalent,” writes Martin West in the journal Education Next. Again, the percentage of closed schools doesn’t come anywhere close to explaining all the learning loss, but it’s a significant part.
And a 2022 study found that “remote instruction was a primary driver of widening achievement gaps.” Specifically, “The main effects of hybrid and remote instruction are negative, implying that even at low-poverty (high income) schools, students fell behind growth expectations when their schools went remote or hybrid. Specifically, if their schools were remote throughout 2020-21, students in low-poverty schools lost .201 standard deviations relative to expected growth.”
Once again, they found that a significant part of learning loss could be attributed to remote learning.
When you throw in the fact that President Joe Biden’s Democratic National Committee campaigned in part on school closures in the summer of 2020, you can see why there’s fear of conservatives pouncing on this evidence of learning loss.
