Education

Despite massive spending, study finds COVID learning loss persists

July 30, 2024

Ray Carter

At the Sept. 14, 2020 meeting of the Deer Creek school board, Jena Nelson, a teacher who would later become the Democratic nominee for State Superintendent of Public Instruction in 2022, urged officials to keep that district closed due to COVID despite parent pleas to the contrary.

Nelson dismissed concerns about student learning loss, saying, “The wonderful teachers of Deer Creek will fill in any deficits of learning that they may accrue this year.”

New research shows such predictions were optimistic at best, if not delusional.

A new report from NWEA finds students across the country continue to perform worse academically than their prepandemic counterparts, based on testing.

“Our findings make it clear that the road to recovery from the pandemic’s impact on student achievement is far from over,” the NWEA report stated. “The effects continue to reverberate, even for the youngest students entering the education system years after the initial onset of the pandemic. At the end of 2021–22, we optimistically concluded that the worst was behind us and that recovery had begun. Unfortunately, data from the past two school years no longer support this conclusion. Growth has slowed to lag prepandemic rates, resulting in achievement gaps that continue to widen, and in some cases, now surpass what we had previously deemed as the low point.”

The NWEA analysis is based on 2023–2024 school year test scores from approximately 7.7 million students currently in grades 3–8 in 22,400 public schools who have taken MAP Growth reading and math assessments since the onset of the pandemic.

Researchers found that growth during 2023–2024 “fell short of prepandemic trends in nearly all grades” and that the gap between pre-COVID and current test score averages “widened in 2023–24 in nearly all grades, by an average of 36% in reading and 18% in math.”

NWEA’s data showed that some learning loss was reversed in the 2021-2022 school year, the first after the initial COVID wave, but then in the subsequent 2022-2023 school year progress “stalled” and “growth in nearly all grades fell short of prepandemic trends.” That poor trajectory continued in the 2023-2024 school year.

“Growth in 2023–24 lagged prepandemic trends in all but the youngest cohort of students, falling short of prepandemic averages by 1–21% in reading and by 2–14% in math,” the NWEA report stated. “Similar to what we observed in 2022–23, the most notable departure from prepandemic trends is evident in the upper grades in reading.”

Learning Loss Has Compounded Over Time

The report found that learning loss has compounded over time with the reading achievement gap for current seventh graders “now more than twice as large as it was in fall 2022 for this cohort.” In both math and reading, “initial rebounding in 2021–22 has largely been undone by below-average growth in both 2022–23 and 2023–24.”

NWEA officials estimate the average student will need the equivalent of 4.8 additional months of schooling to catch up in reading and 4.3 months in math.

But the report noted that older students will require far more additional learning time to catch up to pre-pandemic trends. For example, students in eighth grade will require nine additional months of instruction to catch up in reading and 9.3 extra months of school to catch up in math.

And researchers found that learning loss has even occurred among students who were not in school during COVID, and therefore were not directly impacted by school shutdowns.

“It is important to note that current first- and second-graders were not yet in school during the first year COVID-19 interrupted schools (2019–20) nor the subsequent year when most schools continued virtual learning to a significant degree (2020–21),” the report stated. “Despite this, their achievement has taken a significant hit, with achievement gaps comparable to those observed for older students who faced more direct disruptions. This underscores the pervasive impact of the pandemic on the education system, demonstrating how its effects have impacted students entering schools even after the initial shocks subsided.”

The problem of learning loss has continued despite schools being provided massive financial resources to address COVID learning loss.

In Oklahoma, a recent report by the Legislative Office of Fiscal Transparency (LOFT) showed that Oklahoma schools received $2.43 billion in federal COVID-relief funds. In the 2021 state budget year, those federal COVID dollars increased funding at Oklahoma schools by 57 percent. As of May 2024, Oklahoma schools have spent $2.06 billion of that total, leaving $368.6 million to spend in the next year.

While the NWEA report indicates that COVID school shutdowns did much harm to students, and continue to negatively impact children, things could have been even worse in Oklahoma.

In July 2020, then-State Superintendent of Public Instruction Joy Hofmeister, who became the Democratic nominee for governor in 2022, unveiled a plan with mandates that “strongly recommended” school closures whenever county COVID rates exceeded 14.39 cases per 100,000 population and mandated cessation of in-person learning when rates topped 25 cases per 100,000 population (meaning 0.025 percent of the total county population had tested positive for the virus).

Oklahoma State Department of Health (OSDH) data on per-capita COVID infection rates by county from Sept. 24, 2020, to March 1, 2022, showed that schools would have been strongly encouraged to close for in-person learning throughout most of the state for the majority of that 76-week period had Hofmeister’s plan been adopted, meaning students attending schools across Oklahoma could have lost nearly two full school years of in-person instruction under the plan.

However, the State Board of Education instead opted to submit Hofmeister’s plan as guidance, and not as a mandate, which allowed most schools to continue in-person instruction during those two years, although all district leaders did not choose to do so.