Why Kids Are Far, Far Behind in School

One-fifth of American students, by our calculations, were enrolled in districts that remained remote for the majority of the 2020–21 school year. For these students, the effects were severe. Growth in student achievement slowed to the point that, even in low-poverty schools, students in fall 2021 had fallen well behind what pre-pandemic patterns would have predicted; in effect, students at low-poverty schools that stayed remote had lost the equivalent of 13 weeks of in-person instruction. At high-poverty schools that stayed remote, students lost the equivalent of 22 weeks. Racial gaps too: In the districts that stayed remote for most of last year, the outcome was as if Black and Hispanic students had lost four to five more weeks of instruction than white students had.

By our calculations, about 50 percent of students nationally returned in person in the fall and spent less than a month remote during the 2020–21 school year. In these districts where classrooms reopened relatively quickly, student-achievement gaps by race and socioeconomic status widened a bit in reading but, fortunately, not in math. And overall student achievement fell only modestly. The average student in the quicker-to-reopen districts lost the equivalent of about seven to 10 weeks of in-person instruction. (That losing just a quarter of a typical school year’s academic progress is a relatively good outcome only underscores the dimension of the overall problem.)

What happened in spring 2020 was like flipping off a switch on a vital piece of our social infrastructure. Where schools stayed closed longer, gaps widened; where schools reopened sooner, they didn’t. Schools truly are, as Horace Mann famously argued, the “balance wheel of the social machinery.”

Like any other parent who witnessed their child dozing in front of a Zoom screen last year, I was not surprised that learning slowed. However, as a researcher, I did find the size of the losses startling—all the more so because I know that very few remedial interventions have ever been shown to produce benefits equivalent to 22 weeks of additional in-person instruction.

High-dosage tutoring—which educators define as involving a trained tutor working with one to four students at a time, three times a week for a whole year—is one of the few interventions with a demonstrated benefit that comes close, producing an average gain equivalent to 19 weeks of instruction. One of those leading the charge on tutoring is Tennessee Department of Education Commissioner Penny Schwinn, who is offering matching funds to encourage school districts to launch tutoring initiatives. Tennessee’s goal is to provide high-dosage tutors to 50,000 students a year for the next two years. School systems elsewhere have similar ambitions. The educational-policy think tank Future Ed, at Georgetown University, reviewed the pandemic-recovery plans of thousands of districts and found that a quarter had tutoring initiatives in the works. Last year, Miguel Cardona, the secretary of education, urged schools to return to in-person learning. now the department that he leads should be encouraging (or requiring) districts to update their recovery plans in light of achievement losses. Local school boards should have to show that their recovery programs are plausibly sufficient to cover those losses. When Congress approved federal aid packages for schools, the magnitude of the achievement losses were unclear, and many analysts were preoccupied with potential shortfalls in the state and local tax revenue used to fund schools. Thus, the law required districts to spend only 20 percent of their COVID-relief money on academic recovery; the rest could go to the day-to-day needs of a school district—salaries, curriculum materials, teacher training, facility improvements. But many districts, especially those that were remote for much of 2020–21, will have to spend nearly all of their federal relief funds on academic recovery if they want students to catch up.