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It turns out that educational disruptions are bad for kids.

Perhaps you already knew that?

In a series of posts in 2020 and 2021, I wrote about the research on past educational disruptions and predicted what they might mean for children going through COVID-19.

This month marks the fifth anniversary of the pandemic. What have we learned since then? Here’s my analysis of what I got right and what I got wrong:

Prediction No. 1: Lost learning time will translate into lost learning.

As I wrote in 2021, “Years and sometimes even decades after a disruption in schooling, researchers are able to detect noticeable differences in student outcomes.”

COVID’s effects were so large that they showed up immediately. And they were worse for students who missed more school. For example, a recent international analysis in Nature concluded that, “countries with the shortest closures experienced relatively small losses” and “countries with the longest closures, experienced losses of … 9 to 12 months of learning.” Here in the States, a team of researchers led by University of Washington economist Dan Goldhaber found that remote instruction was the “primary driver of widening achievement gaps.”

Predictions No. 2 and 3: The losses are likely to be large. Their full extent may not show up immediately, but small losses can grow over time.

In 2020 and 2021, I was looking at localized events like an earthquake in Pakistan or teacher strikes in Argentina. Researchers found noticeable negative effects from these events, but there was no modern precedent for the scale and length of the COVID-related disruptions.

Here in the States, the average student fell behind by the equivalent of half a grade level in math and one-third of a grade level in reading. Today, with federal COVID funding ending, student performance is still far below where it was.

Prediction No. 4: Learning losses are likely to be larger in younger children.

Based on prior research, I anticipated that kids in middle school and high school might transition to remote learning better than their younger siblings. But it’s hard to know which age group ultimately struggled the most. ACT scores for high schoolers fell to 30-year lows, but so did fourth and eighth grade math and reading scores. Curriculum Associates data point to ongoing gaps among younger kids, while NWEA data suggest middle schoolers are the furthest behind. In other words, there’s no biggest loser here; achievement is down across the board.  

Prediction No. 5: Math scores are likely to drop the most.

Math skills are generally picked up at school, while in English Language Arts, proficiency is more closely linked to a student’s home environment. That shows up in the data: Math scores declined more when students were learning remotely and have shown more signs of recovery since then.

Meanwhile, reading scores have continued to decline. That could partly reflect broader societal trends, but state leaders should be looking toward Mississippi and other Southern states for ideas on how to get those back on track.

Prediction No. 6: Beyond academic losses, students are at risk of disconnecting from education.

In 1916, schools in many parts of the country closed for weeks in the midst of a polio outbreak. Researchers later found that those shutdowns caused some students to drop out of school and never return.

More than a century later, COVID magnified this to an extreme, changing the relationship kids had with school and leading to huge spikes in chronic absenteeism. While those rates have come down a bit from their highs in 2022, I didn’t anticipate just how much COVID would break cultural norms around school attendance, and how hard it would be for schools to restore those (good) habits.

Prediction No, 7: Higher-income students may not suffer any noticeable effects.

I underappreciated how much a district’s decisions about in-person versus remote schooling would have on all students. The Goldhaber paper found that, “even at low-poverty (high income) schools, students fell behind growth expectations when their schools went remote or hybrid.”

Still, higher-income and higher-performing students have managed the post-pandemic recovery better than others. For example, in eighth-grade math, the top 10% of students made noticeable gains from 2022 to 2024, while scores continued to fall for lower-performing students. At the high school level, the percentage of students who took and passed an Advanced Placement test dipped in the wake of COVID but has now surpassed pre-pandemic levels. Similarly, the percentage of high school students who are also taking credit-bearing college courses is hitting all-time highs. In other words, even as average achievement scores are down, many more high school students are finding ways to take more advanced courses.

However, this leads to …

Prediction No. 8: Low-income and disadvantaged students will suffer the biggest losses.

The virus may have been the same, but it did not affect everyone equally. As I noted last year, all kids missed more school in the wake of the pandemic, but those increases varied substantially. For example, the kids with the best attendance records missed about one extra day of school per year, while the kids with the worst absentee rates missed multiple weeks worth of school time.

The same trends appear in achievement scores: The bottom has fallen out across a variety of  tests, grades and subjects.

Prediction No 9: The COVID-induced recession will affect children, families and schools in many ways.

The pandemic’s effects on students have the potential to be long-lasting. For example, the study of teacher strikes in Argentina found that the children of strike-affected students were more likely than their peers to be held back in school. That is, the effects passed on to later generations.

But beyond the students themselves, no one could have anticipated all the downstream effects of the COVID school closures. They are at least part of the story behind public school enrollment declines, families moving  away from blue states and urban areas, and declining satisfaction with the nation’s public schools, not to mention broader political realignments.

Prediction No. 10: Without any action, the losses are likely to have long-term consequences.

To its credit, Congress provided states and school districts with $190 billion in 2020 and 2021. As hard as it is to fathom, the best research suggests it would take a lot more money to get kids fully back on track. The achievement declines were that large.

The money is now gone, and the national conversation has moved on. But I’m struck by what I wrote a few years ago: that if policymakers don’t act to get kids back on track, they will be, “condemning a generation of children to worse academic and economic outcomes throughout their life.”

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