Roughly six years on from the first lockdowns in the name of “containing” the coronavirus, another study has demonstrated their profound effect on the next generation of Americans. This report illustrates how only a fraction of schools have recovered the learning losses incurred during the pandemic’s early months.
More than three years ago, American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten attempted to absolve herself from the effects of prolonged school lockdowns. But the most recent study shows how students continue to pay the price for unions’ pro-lockdown policies.
Schools Lagging Behind
The study, conducted by NWEA (since 2023 a division of testing company Houghton Mifflin Harcourt), shows anemic progress overall. By the fall of 2024, only 1 in 7 (14 percent) of schools had returned to fall 2019 (i.e., prepandemic) achievement levels in both math and reading. Only 32 percent of schools had returned to prepandemic levels in either subject.
Put another way, more than 2 in 3 schools (68 percent) are performing worse in both math and reading than they did before the Covid panic. To call these data points an indictment of our education system — and a burden that this generation of young Americans will have to bear for decades — puts it mildly.
Disparities Worsen
Unsurprisingly, schools with the greatest need also suffered some of the greatest learning losses. Only about 1 in 6 (17 percent) low-poverty schools have returned to prepandemic performance levels in both math and reading, and not quite 2 in 5 (38 percent) have recovered in one of the two subjects. By contrast, only about 1 in 8 (13 percent) high-poverty schools have fully recovered in both math and reading, and 3 in 10 (30 percent) have done so in either subject.
Those disparities among schools by income bracket also extend to racial demographics:
[W]e see higher rates of recovery for majority white and Asian schools, followed next by majority Black and Hispanic schools. Schools that are the most diverse, with no more than half of their student population belonging to any one race group, are least likely to be recovered across all school groups…: just 11% in both subjects and 24% in either subject.
The disparities bring up a cruel irony: For all Democrats’ talk of “structural racism” and the importance of “diversity,” few if any bothered to claim in 2020 and 2021 — when many public schools remained closed in whole or in part, even as private schools developed protocols to reopen safely — that prolonged lockdowns like those promoted by teachers unions were “structurally racist.” Yet they ultimately had a similar effect, placing some of the most disadvantaged students in a deep academic hole and making it difficult for them to recover.
Lingering Effects
The NWEA study does offer a glimmer of hope, albeit a very dim one. It notes that “between 2021 and 2024, post-pandemic gains were largest among high-poverty schools and schools enrolling a majority of students of color.” While these particular schools have made the largest gains, they “still lag in overall recovery because their recent progress has not been enough to overcome their larger initial declines during the pandemic.”
Moreover, “because these schools entered the pandemic with lower levels of achievement,” their higher-than-average drops mean the pandemic actually worsened the achievement gaps between high-performing and low-performing schools. While these schools may have begun to close the achievement gap in recent years, their sharp declines during the pandemic have left them worse off than they were before.
All in all, it’s a legacy that will sadly take years for most children to overcome — if they ever do. Thankfully, the continued expansion of school choice will allow more parents and families to select the best educational options to allow their children to grow and thrive. (While I have worked for school choice groups in the past, they played no part in writing this article, the views expressed in which are mine alone.)
Even as we move on from the pandemic, Americans should not forget what and, more specifically, who contributed to those performance losses in the first place. That is a lesson that we owe it to the next generation to remember.
