As we approach the one-year mark since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, evidence is mounting that students are experiencing massive learning gaps due to the disruption. Many states are responding.
Earlier this month, Mike DeWine, the governor of Ohio, called for all school districts to have a plan in place by April 1 to address COVID-19 learning loss. Michigan’s schools chief called for lengthening the school year, arguing that “students and staff need more days coming out of the pandemic.”
A new brief released by the Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty looks at learning loss across Wisconsin, factors that made some groups more prone to the loss than others, and what to do about it. It seems that the most basic solution is simply to get children back in school.
In the spring, the Wisconsin Legislature mandated that school districts report the percentage of the curriculum that they were able to complete during the spring semester. Completion rates varied greatly across districts, with some reporting full completion and others reporting as low as 61% completion. On average, school districts across the state failed to complete about 13% of the curriculum. WILL dug deeper and found that the only factor that significantly predicts learning loss is the number of low-income students, who often struggled to access online resources during the pandemic.
Education researchers know how to quantify learning loss. Additional time out of school has been shown to lower the lifelong earning potential of students, who will forever be in “catch-up” mode. WILL applied these methods to the data from Wisconsin, resulting in an economic cost to the state of more than $7 billion from the spring semester alone. This not only represents a loss of future personal income for students currently in school, but also potentially to Wisconsin and the federal government through lost tax revenue. Even more importantly, it represents lost life opportunities for a generation that is being failed by the public education system.
It is important to note that this is a very conservative estimate of the long-term costs. Just because schools got through a percentage of the curriculum does not mean that students learned at the same rate as they might have in a traditional setting. Emma Dorn, a global education consultant for McKinsey & Co., estimates at a national level that when the school year is complete, students will have “lost about nine months of learning in mathematics.”
Moreover, learning loss likely continued to an even greater extent in the fall and spring semesters as learning stayed mostly virtual. Because the lost learning is likely to be greatest among low-income students who already struggle to catch up, the negative effects of learning remotely will likely be compounded for them, putting them that much further behind in the pack.
Dorn and others at McKinsey put out a national study in December that examined the learning loss resulting from the pandemic. They found that although much has improved since the spring, “Black and Hispanic students continue to be more likely to remain remote and are less likely to have access to the prerequisites of learning — devices, internet access, and live contact with teachers. Left unaddressed, these opportunity gaps will translate into wider achievement gaps.”
As similar data become available in other states, it will be possible to quantify the national picture about how much lost learning will cost the nation. But for many locales, it is becoming obvious that we have a serious problem. Even big-city mayors in Chicago, San Francisco, and New York have pushed back against attempts by teachers unions to stifle reopening efforts. Yet in Wisconsin, Milwaukee Public Schools, the state’s largest and most impoverished school district, doesn’t plan to return to in-person instruction until April and hasn’t received any flak from the mayor or governor.
It is vital that teachers begin to see themselves as essential workers and step up to the plate just as doctors, nurses, and grocery store clerks have done. And it is imperative that policymakers look beyond the short-term political interest of keeping the teachers unions happy. Otherwise, the long-term social and economic consequences for students will reverberate throughout the nation for decades.
Will Flanders is the research director at the Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty.
