Yesterday, Michael Brendan Dougherty called school closures “the greatest unforced policy error of the pandemic.”
David Leonhardt’s latest NYT newsletter on the subject illustrates this. The data on remote learning are an indictment of the union-driven policies that Democrat-run districts sustained long after it became clear how damaging they were:
Three times a year, millions of K-12 students in the U.S. take a test known as the MAP that measures their skills in math and reading. A team of researchers at Harvard’s Center for Education Policy Research have used the MAP’s results to study learning during a two-year period starting in the fall of 2019, before the pandemic began.
The researchers broke the students into different groups based on how much time they had spent attending in-person school during 2020-21 — the academic year with the most variation in whether schools were open. On average, students who attended in-person school for nearly all of 2020-21 lost about 20 percent worth of a typical school year’s math learning during the study’s two-year window.
Some of those losses stemmed from the time the students had spent learning remotely during the spring of 2020, when school buildings were almost universally closed. And some of the losses stemmed from the difficulties of in-person schooling during the pandemic, as families coped with disruption and illness.
But students who stayed home for most of 2020-21 fared much worse. On average, they lost the equivalent of about 50 percent of a typical school year’s math learning during the study’s two-year window.
Fifty percent. That doesn’t even capture the extent of the inequity.
Leonhardt notes how low-income, black, and Latino students fell furthest behind. This is in part because low-income students were more likely to see their schools go remote since many of them were in big cities run by Democratic officials who listened to unions that pushed for it.
Leonhardt concludes:
Extended school closures appear to have done much more harm than good, and many school administrators probably could have recognized as much by the fall of 2020.
In places where schools reopened that summer and fall, the spread of Covid was not noticeably worse than in places where schools remained closed. . . .
Hundreds of other districts, especially in liberal communities, instead kept schools closed for a year or more. Officials said they were doing so to protect children and especially the most vulnerable children. The effect, however, was often the opposite.
This sad story is another reminder of why policy-makers should never become so singularly fixated on a problem that they ignore the costs of their “solution” everywhere else. When that happens, you get Shanghai. Or you get an unlucky generational cohort suffering a life-altering learning loss — victims not of the virus but of leaders who succumbed to the kind of peer pressure they’re supposed to be mature enough to withstand.