During the COVID-19 pandemic, students suffered significant learning losses. Moved online, cut off from in-person support, and shuffled from plan to plan, many students struggled to utilize the minimal learning opportunities before them. Some never regained their academic stride, leading to the high levels of chronic absenteeism and missing student rates we see today.
But what about the students who did return to in-person classes? An academic year (sometimes two years) spent under pandemic circumstances has academic consequences. If a child missed a lesson on commas, or on Abraham Lincoln, or on the Pythagorean Theorem, they are at the mercy of future teachers to provide remedial instruction.
Understandably, the education system strained and occasionally snapped under these new requirements. Today, there has not yet been a full academic or structural recovery from the pandemic.
Certain students recovered more quickly from the pandemic than other students. A new Brookings research paper authored by Dr. Lauren Bauer and Eileen Powell found that students in lower grades recovered more quickly from the pandemic-related learning losses than higher grades. While all grades remain below pre-pandemic standards, it appears that younger children possess more educational resilience.
The study used proficiency data from state standardized tests for third through eighth graders from 2015–25 for the 28 states that did not change their tests (including Minnesota) to follow the trajectories of student cohorts post-COVID. Creating counterfactual test results based on previous test result averages, the study followed the post-pandemic trajectory of students to see when (or if) they caught up to the counterfactual, pre-pandemic expected performance.
For example, the researchers questioned if students in fourth grade during the pandemic recovered their learning losses by eighth grade.
The dark blue, gray, and light blue lines represent projected mathematics scores based on three different methods of counterfactual calculation. The green line represents the scores of children who were in fourth grade during the pandemic. As can be seen, the fourth graders had not yet recovered the mathematics learning loss by their eighth grade year. From Brookings:
While the pre-COVID third grade test score is at the high end of the pre-pandemic cohorts (it is the exact same observation as the 2018–19 school year for third grade), the first post-COVID observation (fifth grade) is about 10 percentage points (21 percent) below the pre-pandemic rates and remains at about 36 to 38 percent proficient through eighth grade. Math proficiency rates fell for the fourth grade cohort by more than 17 percentage points from 2019 to 2021; but, once we correct for the pre-pandemic trend (a decline of about 7 percentage points from third to fifth grade), our estimate of loss due to COVID is closer to 10 percentage points.
The researchers repeated this analysis for every grade.
All grades have struggled to recover from pandemic-related mathematics learning loss; even students who were young kindergarteners during the pandemic exhibit lower scores than would be routinely expected. Yet, it seems as if younger students had more academic resilience. From Brookings:
Among students who were affected by pandemic disruptions before third grade, whom we only observe after the pandemic, proficiency rates are closer to pre-pandemic levels and learning curves than those of older pandemic-impacted cohorts. The younger a student was during the 2019–20 school year, the closer they are to their pre-pandemic counterfactual, and the older a student was, the larger the gap at each grade level.
English
The data for English proficiency told a slightly more optimistic story than the mathematics proficiency data.
While students similarly exhibited unmitigated English proficiency learning loss throughout the pandemic, the drops were not as steep as those shown for mathematics. This might be chalked up to the nature of the subject; culturally, parents are more likely to read with their children than they are to teach the times tables, softening any academic blows.
What about Minnesota?
Using an interactive graphic, the Brookings researchers provided data that measured the expected performance of Minnesota’s students (based on pre-pandemic test levels) against their post-COVID performance.
As my colleague Catrin Wigfall has written, third grade is a critical time in a child’s academic career, especially for reading. In third grade, students transition from “learning to read” to “reading to learn,” meaning that, more than ever, the learning environment must be all-hands-on-deck. What happened to the Minnesota students whose typical third grade year was stripped away by the pandemic?
As can be seen by the graphics above, the Minnesota students who missed their traditional third grade year remain eleven percentage points behind in English and fourteen percentage points behind in mathematics by their eighth grade year.
Across all Minnesota grades, no elementary cohort, no matter what age they experienced the pandemic, has yet been able to reach traditional eighth grade English academic averages. The closest was the cohort of students who were in seventh grade during the pandemic, who were seven percentage points below the pre-pandemic score. The mathematics scores were even more dismal. The closest cohort to the pre-pandemic score was the cohort of students who were in third grade during the pandemic, who scored fourteen points below the pre-pandemic score.
These are worrying facts for Minnesota educators and families. The youngest kindergarten students who experienced COVID-19 are currently in fifth grade, and the oldest students have already graduated from college. There is still time to reach many of them.
There were signs of strain in the education system pre-COVID. Like freezing water falling into holes in rock, the policy choices made during the pandemic simply forced the broken gaps wider open. If policymakers can take this current educational crisis seriously, there is a strong opportunity to reform education systems that were previously functionally broken.
The pandemic experience taught us that, as the Brookings team notes, the primary indicator for recovering academic scores across districts was how quickly they returned to in-person instruction. As the cleanup efforts continue, it would be best for policymakers to look first at the districts whose students lost the most in-person class time. Research tells us that the most damaging learning losses are seen in urban, low-income, high-minority (Black or Hispanic) schools, which generally had less time in-person.
Significant system reform and renewal must happen now, so that the students who stayed home don’t pay a lifetime academic penalty.