Should we relax about COVID-19 learning losses?

Since school buildings shuttered across the country in mid-March, some in education have warned that we need to take dramatic steps to address the lost learning time.

Others have argued that the learning losses may be exaggerated, and that school shutdowns didn’t actually set students back all that far academically.

So which side is right? Let’s start with some math. If you assume that schools were closed from March 15 to June 1, that works out to a typical loss of 55 days of learning, which sounds like a lot. However, most districts offered remote learning during that time. According to surveys conducted by the EdWeek Research Center, teachers estimated they were delivering, on average, about three hours of instruction per day, or about half as much as usual. Thus, if remote classes started right after schools closed their doors, and if they were more or less equivalent to in-person instruction, then in truth, students lost only about 27.5 days of learning.

But wait, there’s more. Many districts were scheduled to take a spring break, and since students would have been out of school anyway, those days shouldn’t count as lost learning time. For that matter, spring testing would have cut into instructional time, as well. Really, then, the pandemic cost students something like 20 days of learning, not 55. Plus, we’re talking about the last few months of school here, which is not exactly the most academically rigorous part of the year. In short, we shouldn’t worry so much about COVID-related learning loss. We should just let the kids have as much of an ordinary summer break as they can, and then regroup in the fall. Right?

Now let me give you the counterargument.

Strip away some of the assumptions in the best-case scenario and take a close look at the research into the learning time that was lost to COVID in the spring, and you’ll see just how dire the consequences really are, especially for historically disadvantaged students.

First, let’s start with the quality of the remote learning that students actually received. Research has consistently found that online courses are less effective than courses delivered in person. That’s true even in the best of cases, when the courses are explicitly designed for remote learning, and when the students (usually adults or high school students) voluntary sign up for them. However, COVID-19 abruptly forced the nation’s 13,000 school districts (including 100,000 schools, 3.5 million teachers, and 54 million students) into a virtual learning environment.

Take a close look at the research into the learning time that was lost to COVID in the spring, and you’ll see just how dire the consequences really are, especially for historically disadvantaged students.

Second, let’s consider the amount of online teaching and learning that was offered. As noted above, teachers reported delivering about three hours of remote instruction per day, or half as much as they typically delivered in person. That’s just an average, though. In fact, some teachers provided more than three hours of instruction per day, and others — particularly in high-poverty districts — provided less. Further, student attendance and participation also varied widely. For example, the Center for Reinventing Public Education found that less than half of school districts took attendance or required teachers to check in with their students, and affluent districts were twice as likely as high-poverty districts to offer live instruction. Even under loose definitions of “attendance,” many districts struggled even to connect with students.

Among students from low-income backgrounds, disproportionate numbers lacked reliable access to computers, the internet, a quiet spot to study, or support services they normally receive face-to-face. According to a nationally representative survey from the University of Southern California, 88% of families earning $150,000 or more reported that their child had some form of live interaction with a teacher after the shutdowns began, but that was true for just 63% of families earning less than $25,000 a year. Data from Harvard University’s Opportunity Insights Economic Tracker found that students in high-income zip codes made more progress in online math courses during school closures than they had in prior months. In contrast, students from low-income zip codes spent 25-35% less time engaged in math class during the shutdown. In short, this is no time to relax about students’ academic progress.

To calculate the amount of learning loss that students typically experience during time off from school, the nonprofit assessment firm NWEA recently compared the spring and fall scores of 5 million students who took the organization’s widely used MAP Growth test in 2017-18. Extrapolating from that data, NWEA projected that due to this spring and summer’s long layoff, students could return next fall with as little as 50-70% of the math and reading gains they would have made in a normal academic year.

Similarly, in a 2007 study of the effects of snow days on Maryland schoolchildren, researchers found that the time off resulted in significant learning losses, especially for younger students. Studies have shown dramatic learning losses when children miss school due to natural disasters, as well. For example, test scores fell significantly in Thailand after severe flooding in 2011 forced schools in some provinces to close. In the aftermath of a major 2005 earthquake in Pakistan, the children of well-educated mothers were found to have suffered no educational impacts at all, but the children of less-well-educated mothers showed substantial losses.

Further, interrupted schooling can have serious academic consequences over the long term, affecting students’ progress even after they return to school. In the early 1980s, for instance, a wave of teacher strikes in a number of Argentinian provinces caused primary school students to miss an average of 88 days, or about 7% of their total learning time for the year. Years later, researchers found that those students had lower high school and college completion rates, completed fewer years of education overall, and had lower employment rates and earnings. The negative effects even continued across generations: Once the strike-affected children grew up and had children of their own, the children of the strike-affected children were more likely than their peers to be held back in school.

These studies may paint a picture that feels too pessimistic for the current moment. However, the evidence suggests that this spring’s forced experiment in distance learning did not go well, and the lost learning time is likely to have significant short- and long-term effects on academic achievement, especially for the youngest and most disadvantaged students. Rather than urging the public to relax, federal, state, and district policy makers should be racing to come up with serious plans to help our children catch up on the learning they’ve lost.