Questioning COVID’s Long-Term Impact on Students

Nat Malkus of the American Enterprise Institute tackles the question of whether American students are recovering from learning loss tied to the COVID-19 pandemic.

[E]ven that anodyne question includes at least three implicit stories of student achievement that, I argue in this report, are not supported by a careful analysis of recent test score trends. The first implicit story is that declining student performance in recent years is solely attributable to the pandemic: If test scores have declined, that is the result of the pandemic’s aftereffects; if test scores have improved, that is because we have moved past the pandemic.

Insofar as the pandemic was probably the biggest disruption to American schooling in over a century, this story has a lot to recommend it. However, this story suffers from pandemic myopia, leading to a woefully incomplete picture of how performance has declined in recent years and why. Indeed, average test scores began declining well before the pandemic, suggesting that the decline in test scores over the pandemic was perhaps not solely attributable to the pandemic and that test scores could continue to decline in the coming years for reasons that have little to do with COVID-19.

The second implicit story is that things are getting much worse for all students. For good reason, average scores get the headlines, and averages have been trending downward. However, averages can mask what’s going on underneath, and over the past decade, test scores show a sharp divergence in how high-achieving and low-achieving students are performing. …

… The third implicit story is that changes to student performance are the result of what happens in schools: Tests assess students on the skills they practice in the classroom, and so changes to test scores suggest changes to what happens in the classroom. …

… While understandable, recent test scores suggest that factors outside of school might play a considerable role. To wit, during the pandemic, test scores declined significantly for American adults, the vast majority of whom were not in school at any point during the pandemic. I argue that, while perplexing, these changes to adult test scores align too well with changes to K–12 test scores to be ignored.