COVID-19 and education: The lingering effects of unfinished learning
Emma Dorn wrote several posts like this one. https://www.mckinsey.com/our-people/emma-dorn
Exhibit 1. Students in majority-Black schools ended the school year six months behind in both math and reading, while students in majority-white schools ended up just four months behind in math and three months behind in reading.Students in predominantly low-income schools and in urban locations also lost more learning during the pandemic than their peers in high-income rural and suburban schools
Exhibit 2. Taking math as an example, as schools closed their buildings in the spring of 2020, students fell behind rapidly, learning almost no new math content over the final few months of the 2019–20 school year. Over the summer, we assume that they experienced the typical “summer slide” in which students lose some of the academic knowledge and skills they had learned the year before. Then they resumed learning through the 2020–21 school year, but at a slower pace than usual, resulting in five months of unfinished learning by the end of the year.
Exhibit 3. The initial shock in reading was less severe, but the improvements to remote and hybrid learning seem to have had less impact in reading than they did in math.
Exhibit 4. On average, students who took the spring assessments in school are half a year behind in math, and nearly that in reading. For Black and Hispanic students, the losses are not only greater but also piled on top of historical inequities in opportunity and achievement.