The past couple of years introduced a new term in the education policy vernacular, “pandemic learning loss.”
In the popular imagination, students and schools were humming along until this big outside event happened and due to poor response on the part of schools and the disruption of the pandemic to family life, health, and routines, student achievement tanked.
But what if I told you that was only a small part of a much larger story?
A recent Annenberg working paper by UVA’s Jim Wyckoff, echoing the work of AEI’s Nat Malkus, traces the roots and timeline of declining student achievement much further back in time and finds much more than just the pandemic negatively affecting student performance. As it turns out, NAEP scores peaked in 2013 and have been declining ever since.
The paper is worth reading in full, but in summary Wyckoff makes five points about student performance trends:
· “Pre-pandemic learning losses among low-performing students were large.
· The roots of these losses began earlier than commonly understood, before 2013.
· Other tests (not just NAEP) show similar magnitudes and timing of achievement losses.
· Sustained learning loss is most evident among lower-performing students, but most of the performance distribution has been adversely affected.
· Losses were experienced differently across states. Some states have suffered very large losses, while others show small losses—or even gains.”
Take a look at this graph from the paper, tracking 8th grade math scores for students at the 10th percentile of achievement (so some of the lowest performing students at that grade for that subject).
Wyckoff writes, “projecting earlier achievement trends for the 10th percentile students forward suggests that a substantial portion of pandemic-era learning loss is rooted in the pre-pandemic period. More specifically, extrapolating the trajectory of 2013-2019 NAEP scores predicts 8th grade math achievement in 2024 would decline by 5.6 scale score points. Actual declines were 12.0 scale score points—so 47 percent of the decline since the pandemic would have been predicted by pre-pandemic trends.”
Wyckoff’s paper, like Malkus’s before him, tests various hypotheses to try and explain these trends, and while some factors have some explanatory power, there does not seem to be one overarching explanation of this phenomenon. That makes coming up with solutions much more difficult.
But they say that the first step to finding a solution is admitting that there is a problem. There is a deep-rooted problem in the American education system, particularly for the lowest performing students. It is exceedingly unlikely that there are quick fixes to this problem, and it will most likely take sustained, concerted effort over an extended period of time to do something about it.