OPINION:
New research has been released showing staggering learning losses for public school students during the COVID-19 pandemic, which raises key questions about why the losses occurred and, even more important, what parents can do in response.
A recent joint study by Harvard and Stanford universities found that student-learning loss during the pandemic amounted to a quarter of a year in reading and half a year in math, with students in some cities experiencing a 1½-year loss in math.
The learning losses were felt by every student demographic: “Within the typical school district, the declines in test scores were similar for all groups of students, rich and poor, white, Black, and Hispanic.”
In 2021, United Teachers of Los Angeles President Cecily Myart-Cru said there is “no such thing as learning loss.”
She then added, “It’s OK that our babies may not have learned all their times tables.” But is it OK?
The Harvard-Stanford study found that, historically, when students experience sizable learning losses, “evidence shows that they do not bounce back: Affected students recovered 20-30% of the lost ground in the first year, but then made no further recovery in the subsequent 3-4 years.”
Why have these learning losses been so dramatic?
The shutdown of regular public schools is one obvious reason.
The Harvard-Stanford study found that test scores declined more in districts that did not implement full in-person instruction.
Also important, though, has been the disintegration of academic rigor in the classroom during the pandemic era.
As Education Week noted, schools “relaxed grading policies, canceled end-of-year assessments, or directed teachers not to fail students because of work not completed during shutdowns.”
In the midst of the pandemic in 2021, an Education Week survey found that one-third of teachers surveyed said that “the rigor of their instruction had decreased compared to before the pandemic,” while half said that “the amount of homework they assign and the strictness of their grading policies are still more lax than they were pre-pandemic.”
Given the failures of the regular public schools, what has been the response of parents? Not surprisingly, many parents have pulled their children out of the regular public schools and chosen education alternatives.
While regular public school enrollment fell by more than a million students nationwide during the pandemic, charter school enrollment increased by a quarter million.
Parents chose charter schools because charters were often more nimble in pivoting to successful strategies to educate children during the pandemic.
Thus, while regular public schools saw massive declines in student achievement, many charter schools saw performance increases.
At Classical Academy charter school in Southern California, which uses a flexible part home-school, part in-class learning model, 63% of students met or exceeded state standards on California’s 2022 state English test — a 5 percentage-point increase over pre-pandemic 2017.
In comparison, just 47% of students statewide met or exceeded state English standards, which was a 2-point drop from 2017.
Similarly, the charter’s math scores increased during the pandemic, while scores fell in California’s regular public schools.
Other parents have decided to home-school their children.
During the pandemic, the U.S. Census Bureau reported that the proportion of families home-schooling their children had doubled from 5% to 11%, with the rate increasing from 3% to 16% among African American families.
During the pandemic, one African American mother in Detroit told The New Yorker: “Parents are not deciding to take their children out because of COVID. Parents are doing [home schooling] because education has failed children in this city forever.”
Another Black woman told the publication that her daughter was performing two grade levels behind in math while in public school, so she decided to home-school her. As a result, her daughter’s achievement increased to grade level.
The bottom line is that one-size-fits-all public education no longer cuts it for America’s parents. The COVID-19 classroom crash, therefore, may end up being the COVID-19 catalyst to a new and better learning world for our nation’s children.
• Lance Izumi is senior director of the Center for Education at the Pacific Research Institute. He is the author of the 2021 book “The Homeschool Boom: Pandemic, Policies, and Possibilities.”
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