During the pandemic, Lauren Bauer’s second grader attended a learning pod, a small group of students organized by parents outside of school. The group also included kindergartners.
Bauer noticed that the older students in the pod seemed to struggle with the disruptions more than the younger ones.
Parents had higher expectations of the older students, Bauer says. Kindergartners could just play all day without severe long-term consequences, but the older students were supposed to be learning material that would set them up for the rest of their lives, she adds.
Now, more than a half-decade out from the pandemic, she’s still thinking about that. And students are still struggling. National assessments have returned historic declines in performance in math and English for K-12 students.
But it would be a mistake to think that the pandemic affected all students in the same way.
Bauer, who’s a fellow at the Brookings Institution, a Washington, D.C.-based think tank, believes that there’s a perception that the pandemic was worse for younger students. She’s never fully shaken what she saw in the pod, and now she says she has evidence to back the feeling up. That’s because a recent report from The Hamilton Project at Brookings found that the older a student was when the pandemic hit, the bigger the performance decline following the pandemic closures.
So students who were in fourth grade when the pandemic hit — and likely enrolled in ninth grade this school year — fared worse than students who were in kindergarten back then and now in fourth grade.
Evidence of Absence
Recovery rates from the pandemic have varied.
While some districts have more or less returned to normal, many schools are still recovering from the learning gaps created by the pandemic, researchers note on calls with EdSurge. Worse, the federal recovery dollars have elapsed, leaving schools with fewer resources.
Nationally, it’s not going well. The most recent results from NAEP, known as the “nation’s report card” — delivered with delays amid recent government staff cuts that impact analysis of education data — returned falling scores in reading and math. Those drops were substantial across student groups, revealing a rise in inequality with low-performing students in “free fall,” though experts note these downtrends predate the pandemic. This seemed to confirm previous results from NAEP also showing historic declines in student performance, which some worry will have long-term career impacts.
The latest report from Brookings looked at students who were in kindergarten through seventh grade during the 2019-2020 school year, tracking their learning trajectories since then. Researchers collected proficiency rates from state agencies with an eye toward following groups of students across time, says Eileen Powell, senior research assistant at The Hamilton Project. They ran “counterfactuals” to figure out exactly how much the pandemic had hurt these students.
It exposed declines in both English and math, reinforcing what other assessments have shown, the researchers report. Math revealed deep declines and large gaps when compared to the prepandemic trend, which the researchers speculate could be due to the complexity of the subject matter and the way it builds upon previous concepts.
The report was accompanied by an interactive dataset, showing how the pandemic impacted “learning trajectories” for students, which the researchers say they will continue to update.
Bauer thinks her research suggests it’s important not to focus too much on the youngest students when trying to boost learning postpandemic, she says. Older students, such as those currently in middle school and high school, really need support as well, she notes.
It may also show that changing assessments hasn’t affected declining scores.
Across the country, states are exploring how to update their assessments, trying to get more precise data to help with academic recovery in the wake of the health crisis. At least 13 states are exploring whether to swap traditional standardized tests with testing that occurs throughout the year, according to the think tank Center for American Progress. Some states — for instance, Florida, Texas and Montana — have already embraced this approach. Advocates argue that these tests provide a more measured, accurate barometer of learning, since they don’t rely on a single test result.
But assessment changes can be controversial.
Several states have even come in for criticism for lowering proficiency rates for students in their postpandemic assessments. For instance, Oklahoma, Alaska and Wisconsin have been accused of altering assessment standards in a way that makes it difficult to discern how students are recovering.
The Brookings report accounted for states that have altered their assessments, the researchers say. They found that COVID-19 is swamping any attempts by states to artificially boost proficiency rates, Bauer says. In other words, states may be accused of gaming or cheating these tests, but even if they are, it’s not working: “Learning loss is so substantial that even making the tests easier is not doing what it used to.”
