School closures and the transition to remote learning during the pandemic disproportionately harmed the academic performance of minority and low-income students, a new study conducted by Harvard University finds.
Using student-level testing data from 2.1 million students in 10,000 schools across 49 states and Washington, D.C., researchers found that the switch to online instruction exacerbated the existing performance gap separating low-income and minority students from their white and wealthier counterparts. The study compares pre-Covid results (fall 2017- fall 2019) to pandemic academic performance (fall 2019- fall 2021) across students of various racial identities who attended schools that switched to remote learning for different durations.
The joint study was conducted by the Center for Education Policy Research at Harvard University, the National Center for Analysis of Longitudinal Data in Education Research at the American Institutes for Research, and NWEA, a nonprofit research and educational services provider.
On the socio-economic front, high-poverty schools within districts that were remote for most of the 2020-21 school year experienced 50 percent more achievement loss than low-poverty schools. “High poverty schools were more likely to go remote and they suffered larger declines when they did so,” the study states.
The widening of the racial achievement gap occurred because the schools attended by black and Hispanic students were more likely to close for in-person learning, the authors suggest.
“We observe a higher incidence of remote schooling for Black and Hispanic students. We also find that high poverty schools spent about 5.5 more weeks in remote instruction during 2020-21 than low and mid poverty schools,” the study reads.
While white students also endured learning loss during the pandemic, “Black and Hispanic students lost even more ground relative to White students with similar baseline achievement during the pandemic period than in the pre-pandemic period,” the report confirms.
“Black students lost an additional .119 standard deviations and Hispanic students lost an additional .092 standard deviations,” it adds.
Notably, in progressive states with some of the longest school shutdowns and strictest Covid-19 mitigation policies, such as California, Illinois, New Jersey, Washington, and the District of Columbia, “high-poverty schools spent an additional 9 weeks in remote instruction (more than 2 months) than low-poverty schools.” Therefore, minority students concentrated in under-resourced school districts fared worse academically than white students in many progressive states, the study shows. States that spent the most average weeks remote included Washington, Oregon, California, Washington, D.C., Illinois, New Jersey, Maryland, Arizona, Kentucky, New Mexico, Nevada, and Virginia, most of which are Democratic strongholds.
On the other hand, in Republican-controlled states that prioritized reopening schools as quickly as possible, such as Florida and Texas, high-poverty schools were remote for six-weeks fewer on average than many of the Democratic states, the study indicates.
The study relied on the Return to Learn Tracker generated by the American Enterprise Institute to measure schools’ instructional mode changes during the pandemic. This database archived weekly data on mode of instruction from August 2020 through June 7, 2021 for 98 percent of enrollment in U.S. school districts with three or more schools. School poverty levels were determined by synthesizing data on the percent of students eligible for Free or Reduced Price Lunch (FRPL) in the Common Core Data from 2019-20, or the percentage of students directly certified in the National School Lunch Program if a state did not provide a count of FRPL students.
Regardless of racial and socio-economic distinctions, all students attending schools that went remote fell behind academically, the study shows.
“The main effects of hybrid and remote instruction are negative, implying that even at low-poverty (high income) schools, students fell behind growth expectations when their schools went remote or hybrid,” it notes.
The authors warn, “If allowed to become permanent, such losses will have major impacts on future earnings and intergenerational mobility.” Since schools have resumed in-person teaching following Covid-19, many studies have emerged reporting a massive drop in literacy, reading comprehension, and math knowledge among students of all grade levels. For young children that did receive limited classroom time during the pandemic, mandatory masking inhibited phonetic learning, causing a crisis of illiteracy and speech delays, many parents claim.