How Education Became a Victim of COVID Shutdowns

We have seen so many changes and suffering since the COVID pandemic hit two years ago. The shutdowns destroyed businesses, people lost their homes, suicides and drug overdoses increased, and crime skyrocketed. But what about our children’s education? Well, the newest report from the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) doesn’t look too promising. In fact, it paints a grim picture.

Education Falling Behind

NCES conducted a study on the long-term trend for nine-year-old students on the subjects of reading and mathematics to see where the achievement level was during COVID online learning.  It reported that reading scores were the lowest in 30 years, and for the first time in the history of testing by the NCES, mathematics had seen a decrease. Daniel McGrath, the acting associate commissioner of NCES explained, "These are some of the largest declines we have observed in a single assessment cycle in 50 years of the NAEP [The Nation’s Report Card] program. Students in 2022 are performing at a level last seen two decades ago."

The organization’s commissioner, Dr. Peggy Carr, said the report is the “first nationally representative report comparing student achievement from before the pandemic to now.” Furthermore, the Department of Education (DOE) reported that:

"Average scores for age 9 students in 2022 declined 5 points in reading and 7 points in mathematics compared to 2020. This is the largest average score decline in reading since 1990, and the first ever score decline in mathematics."

The Education Scores and Gaps

There was a difference between students from suburban schools compared to city schools. For those attending suburban areas, there was an eight-point decrease in reading scores, whereas city students remained unchanged between 2020 and 2022, according to the Nation’s Report Card. Further disparities were revealed among demographic subgroups. In math, black students had a 13-point decrease, Hispanics lost eight points, and whites had a five-point decline.

“It’s not just the drops,” said Dan Goldhaber, from the Center for Analysis of Longitudinal Data in Education Research [CALDER] at the American Institutes, “it’s where we’re seeing the drops in math and reading tests, and they’re disproportionately at the bottom of the test distribution. So the pandemic is reversing a long-term trend of narrowing achievement gaps. That’s particularly bad, to my mind.”

Students who took the long-term trend assessments this year were asked how they received their education during the COVID pandemic. Of those questioned, 70% of nine-year-olds reported remote learning with only 19% claiming not to have experienced online learning between 2020 and 2021. Another 11% couldn’t remember if they’d had to attend school via computers.

Diving deeper into the NAEP results, of the 70% of nine-year-olds that attended school online, those who performed in the top percentile had more access to electronics, quiet study areas, and teacher interaction:

75th Percentile

• 83% had access to computers, laptops, and tablets “all of the time”

• 43% had access to the internet “some of the time”

• 45% had a quiet place to work “some of the time”

• 45% had a teacher available to help them “every day or almost every day”

• 23% had someone to help with schoolwork “about once or twice a week”

Below 25th Percentile

• 58% had access to computers, laptops, and tablets “all of the time”

• 26% had access to the internet “some of the time”

• 30% had a quiet place to work “some of the time”

• 26% had a teacher available to help them “every day or almost every day”

• 15% had someone to help with schoolwork “about once or twice a week”

Just how much education have children lost during the pandemic? A quick review of the results shows that fewer students reached the performance set for the test’s benchmark than two years ago. For example, in math, nine-year-olds’ scores for “numerical operations and basic problem solving” fell from 44% to 37% this year; in the “beginning skills and understanding” category, the scores fell from 86% to 80%; and even for “simple arithmetic facts,” the scores fell, albeit only one percentage point from 98% to 97%.

“It’s clear that COVID-19 shocked American education and stunned the academic growth of this age group of students,” Carr observed. “We don’t make this statement lightly.”

Was it worth closing the schools during the pandemic for a disease that reportedly didn’t affect children that often? The US is already behind several other countries, and now children have been set back even further. Did it really take just two years to erase two decades of educational progress? According to Goldhaber, that is exactly what happened:

“A bit of a hidden story in education, when you look at a swath of 40 or 50 years, is the progress that students have made — and the disproportionate progress that historically marginalized students have made. We’re seeing a lot of that very long-term progress completely erased over the course of a couple of years.”