The New York Times reports that secondary students lost more than half a year in math as a result of the COVID- 19 crisis.
Learning damage has been a significant , hurdle , for schools to beat in the midst of the epidemic, with many individuals suffering in themes such as math, reading, and knowledge,  , according , to an evaluation from the Times.
One important issue was online learning implemented by some districts in the United States, resulting in rural students from second to seventh grade falling behind in math by 0.57 years compared to 0.35 years with students who remained in person in the 2020- 2021 school year, according to a May 2023 , study  , from Harvard, Stanford, and Johns Hopkins researchers.
” There’s fairly good consensus that, in general, as a society, we probably kept kids out of school longer than we should have”, Dr. Sean O’Leary, a pediatric infectious disease specialist who helped write school reopening , guidance , for the American Academy of Pediatrics, told the Times.
According to the Times, students in remote learning settings for longer periods of time were worse off in their test scores based on the results of the , National Assessment of Educational Progress. 50 % of schools were still remote in January 2021, before falling to less than 20 % by May the same year.
In 2022, American students  , fell , 13 points on average in math compared to their Programme for International Student Assessment results in 2018. With a 0.64 year gap in remote learning, school districts with poorer grades were more likely to experience remote learning loss, which is thought to be related to the fact that children were kept far away for longer in poorer areas.
While school closures for longer periods of time had a more severe effect on students, even short-term closures had significant effects on education as a whole, according to the Times.
” There was almost, in the COVID era, a sense of,’ We give up, we’re just trying to keep body and soul together,’ and I think that was corrosive to the higher expectations of schools”, Margaret Spellings, chief executive of the Bipartisan Policy Center and formerly the education secretary under President George W. Bush, told the Times.
As of 2023, students have only gained back a third of the ground lost in math during the pandemic and only a quarter in reading,  , according , to the Times. ACT scores for high school students have also taken a hit since the pandemic, with the average score , dropping , 1.1 points from 20.6 in 2020 to 19.5 in 2023, and nearly half of students, 43 %, failed to meet college standards for any subject.
The Daily Caller News Foundation was the source of its initial publication.
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