In early 2020, the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, students across the nation were sent home from school for what would evolve into many months of online learning. At that time, COVID-19 was ill-understood, even by the world’s top medical and scientific organizations, and keeping kids at home seemed to be the right move. Just as the virus itself was enveloped by clouds of ambiguity, little was known about the effects of moving much of the US student population to online learning. While science continues to unlock the mysteries of COVID-19, the verdict is in on distance learning: It has undone a generation of educational progress.
Data for the 2022 National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), colloquially known as “The Nation’s Report Card,” was released on Oct. 24, the first comprehensive nationwide analysis of fourth and eighth grade students since 2019. The NAEP’s 2022 results show that US students have seen the largest drop in reading and math performance on record. Average reading scores were set back to those of 1992, when the NAEP first introduced reading assessments. Math scores weren’t much better, backsliding to the same average scores as were seen in 2003. The slow, yet steady increase in academic performance that we have seen over the past two decades was eroded away with just two years of distance learning.
Though test scores are one of the best metrics we have, they gloss over the psychosocial effects that distance learning has caused. In the US, education is more than a simple transaction of information. Schools are a place for social learning, where all students are put on a level playing field outside of their circumstances at home. Everyone in a public school has the right to nutritious food, to a distraction-free learning environment, and to interact with peers and adults who treat each other with respect. These rights are not always guaranteed at home, and for many students, school acts as a stable anchor for their lives. When schools closed down for COVID, students with the worst home lives suffered disproportionately, further widening the chasmic educational gap between the most and least successful students.
At EMU, we have barely begun to feel the impact of those years. Those of us attending currently were fortunate to experience the pandemic during the end of our educational journeys. A decade from now, universities across the nation will be taking in students who were just learning to read and write when the pandemic started. From now until then, there is plenty of time to come up with a response to help these students get back on track. We are met with two options here: either do something unprecedented to get our kids back on track, or accept a degradation of curriculum to mask the losses we are seeing.
Assuming we want to get our kids back on track, we could start by acknowledging the downward trend in academic performance. Next, we could begin shoring up the resilience and academic integrity of our schools to ensure that students are protected from any further setbacks. This means taking a hard look at how to keep schools operational and in-person, even in the most difficult of circumstances, through the use of viral testing and contact tracing, as well as preventative measures like vaccinations, particularly for teachers and high-risk students.
We also need to cultivate an environment of trust and transparency between teachers and parents. This means using school board meetings to find common-sense solutions rather than simply bashing whoever is in charge at the time. As a culture, it may be time for us to do some disambiguation on which topics are a teacher’s responsibility and which ones are for parents to cover so that neither teachers nor parents are left in the dark about their own responsibilities as educators.
I believe that we can learn from this educational setback and make our education system more reliable, equitable, and resilient than ever before, but the first step is acknowledging the loss that our kids have experienced, something which many teachers and parents are still coming to terms with. Only then will we be able to truly move on toward finding solutions to this critical issue by rectifying these losses and ensuring that we will be better equipped to handle any future disruptions in education.
