Pandemic Closures and Learning Loss: Extended Remote Schooling Drove Student Learning Loss, and the Time for Recovery is Running Out

The pandemic caused the largest negative shock to student learning the country has ever seen. Average pandemic learning losses exceeded those of one of the worst natural disasters in recent history, Hurricane Katrina, but affected tens of millions of students instead of hundreds of thousands. Though they had been slowly closing for decades, achievement gaps widened over the course of the pandemic, as low-income students, black and brown students, and students who entered the pandemic behind academically all fell further behind their peers.

The pandemic is over, but its effects on student academic progress are not. The perspective we take on this issue is important. If we begin to assess learning loss as something that happened in the past—as something that we are now moving on from—we will be complicit in cementing these losses for an academic generation of students. Pandemic learning loss is not yet cemented, but it is hardening in place, and if we—policymakers, administrators, teachers, families, and students—treat this as a problem of the past, we will abdicate our responsibility to fix it and resign our students to a dimmer future.

Read the full testimony here.

Watch the full testimony here (testimony begins at 30:54).