Remote Learning Damaged Young Minds

It should not be surprising. It should not be surprising that children have suffered cognitively from remote learning and school shutdowns. No one knows yet how lasting the damage will be, but surely damage has been done.

We have been reporting on this problem from the onset. For which we grant ourselves plaudits. And yet, the situation is tragic, especially for the minority children who did not have computers or parents to facilitate their learning.

Anyway, the Daily Mail reports the statistics. They tell how the now-reopened schools are trying to help children make up their deficits. The results are not heartening:

Children at every grade level are still performing worse in math and reading than they were before start of COVID, data from 7.3 million standardized tests across the US reveals.   

The study, released this week by standardized test provider Renaissance Learning Inc., revealed that a return to in-person learning in the latter half of the last school year has seen standardized test scores improve across the county.

However, students are still lagging well behind pre-pandemic levels.

How extensive was the study?

The firm analyzed reading scores for 4.4 million students from kindergarten to 12th grade in all 50 states, as well as 2.9 million students' math marks during the 2020 and 2021 school years.

The study suggests that remote learning has had a lasting negative impact on student achievement. Think about that one and tell me why the leaders of the teachers unions should not be in jail. 

It found student performance during the second year of the pandemic was markedly worse than the first year, with each state seeing marked declines in 2021, suggesting remote learning has had a lasting - and negative - impact on student achievement.

It also found that children are still performing worse at every level in math and reading than before remote learning was introduced.

However, when it came to the change in scores for the tests - which are given to students twice a year, first in the fall and then in the winter - the study found that the winter marks had improved slightly, indicating some improvement in the latter part of 2021, when students started to head back to school in person.

That’s the good news. Children have made up some ground. The problem is, not enough ground has been made up. And no one knows now whether it will be possible or feasible to do so.

The poor reading marks, seen especially in students in lower grades, indicate that students who have yet to learn how to read independently are still struggling, with a median student-growth percentile of 35, showing very low growth.

The findings validate educator's and parents' previously aired concerns that younger students being brought up during the pandemic in their most formative years are not receiving the reading instruction they need before they reach the fourth grade, when reading become tantamount to success in other subjects, 

For educators the challenge is to make the best of what they call a less than ideal situation. Does that feel comforting?

The testing official, however, said that educators should therefore strive for growth of any kind, and effectively make the best out of a less than ideal situation.

To the Post, he conceded that there may be no easy solution to the issue, which may take years to address.

'We can't undo a pandemic,' he said.       

It’s good to be optimistic. It’s good to see the bright side of things. But, it is also good to feel a few twinges of anger about the horrors that our bureaucrats have visited on children and on the nation.