Students Lost One-Third of a School Year To Pandemic, Study Finds

Children experienced learning deficits during the Covid pandemic that amounted to about one-third of a school year's worth of knowledge and skills, according to a new global analysis, and had not recovered from those losses more than two years later. The New York Times reports: Learning delays and regressions were most severe in developing countries and among students from low-income backgrounds, researchers said, worsening existing disparities and threatening to follow children into higher education and the work force. The analysis, published Monday in the journal Nature Human Behavior and drawing on data from 15 countries, provided the most comprehensive account to date of the academic hardships wrought by the pandemic. The findings suggest that the challenges of remote learning -- coupled with other stressors that plagued children and families throughout the pandemic -- were not rectified when school doors reopened.

'In order to recover what was lost, we have to be doing more than just getting back to normal,' said Bastian Betthauser, a researcher at the Center for Research on Social Inequalities at Sciences Po in Paris, who was a co-author on the review. He urged officials worldwide to provide intensive summer programs and tutoring initiatives that target poorer students who fell furthest behind. Thomas Kane, the faculty director of the Center for Education Policy Research at Harvard, who has studied school interruptions in the United States, reviewed the global analysis. Without immediate and aggressive intervention, he said, 'learning loss will be the longest-lasting and most inequitable legacy of the pandemic.'

Because children have a finite capacity to absorb new material, Mr. Betthauser said, teachers cannot simply move faster or extend school hours, and traditional interventions like private tutoring rarely target the most disadvantaged groups. Without creative solutions, he said, the labor market ought to 'brace for serious downstream effects.' Children who were in school during the pandemic could lose about $70,000 in earnings over their lifetimes if the deficits aren't recovered, according to Eric Hanushek, an economist at the Hoover Institution at Stanford. In some states, pandemic-era students could ultimately earn almost 10 percent less than those who were educated just before the pandemic. The societal losses, he said, could amount to $28 trillion over the rest of the century.

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