Students Are Learning Well Again. But Full Recovery? That’s a Long Way Off.

A new report estimates that it may take students at least three to five years to recover from the pandemic. Federal relief money will most likely have run out by then.

By Sarah Mervosh of The NY Times. Excerpts:

"After the coronavirus pandemic sent a jolt through the American education system, interrupting the learning of millions of children, a new report offers a glimmer of hope: By the end of the last school year, many students had returned to a normal pace of academic growth for the first time since the pandemic began.

Still, the pace was not nearly fast enough to have made up for steep pandemic losses.

At this rate, elementary school students may need at least three years to catch up to where they would have been had the pandemic not happened, and middle school students may need five years or more, according to the report released on Tuesday by NWEA, a nonprofit organization that provides academic assessments to schools. Researchers examined the results of math and reading assessments for more than eight million students in approximately 25,000 schools. The report did not look at high schools."

"Recovery is expected to take the longest for groups that were most affected by the pandemic, including low-income students and Black, Hispanic and Native American students. Research has found that extended remote learning was a primary driver of lost learning, widening racial and economic gaps during the pandemic. High-poverty schools tended to spend more time learning remotely, as did Black and Hispanic students."

"students at high-poverty schools that stayed remote for more than half of the 2020-21 school year lost the equivalent of 22 weeks of instruction."