The decline started well before COVID-19 and has not affected students evenly. Perhaps not surprisingly, Indiana’s lowest-performing youngsters have suffered the largest losses. 

This wasn’t always the case. In the early 2000s, the state’s achievement scores were rising, and those gains were broadly shared across student groups. In a recent project for ���˶��� Million, I called this “a tale of two eras.”

The graph below shows the Indiana story visually. It shows fourth-grade reading scores, broken out by student group. The statewide average is in gray, the highest-performing 10% of students are in yellow and the bottom 10% are in red. 

The left side of the graph shows that average scores went up by 7 points from 2003 to 2015, led by an 11 point gain among the lowest-performing students (roughly equivalent to about one grade-level’s worth of gains).

But since then, the bottom has fallen out from under Indiana’s reading performance. While top performers have suffered a 1-point drop and the statewide average has fallen 10 points, the scores of the lowest-performing students have fallen 22 points.

What happened to cause this sudden reversal? 

It’s tempting to jump to quick conclusions — Was it the Common Core? Is it the increased use of cell phones and other technology? But any good explanation should align with the exact timing and magnitude of the declines.

COVID-19 certainly exacerbated these trends, but they also pre-date the pandemic, so the story neither starts nor ends there. 

It’s also not just an Indiana problem; achievement gaps are growing all across the country. As I noted in my original piece, “49 of 50 states, the District of Columbia and 17 out of 20 of the large cities that participated in NAEP” — the Nation’s Report Card — “saw a widening of their achievement gap over the last decade.”

Many readers have posited that the shift to the Common Core state standards was to blame. The timing does fit, but it doesn’t explain why the same patterns are playing out even in states that never adopted the Common Core, and in subjects like history and civics that weren’t covered by the standards. 

It also can’t be money or teachers. In Indiana, for example, was more or less flat, in inflation-adjusted terms, while achievement was rising, and then spending started to rise around the same time achievement scores started to fall. Teacher staffing levels have also been rising over this period. Indiana schools went from having 17.4 students for every teacher a decade ago down to 15.8 as of the most recent data. 

What about technology and social media? This one’s harder to disprove. As psychologist Jean Twenge has , the rise in smartphone usage aligns pretty closely with a decline in teen mental health and in-person social activities. It would make sense that the same trends are affecting academic achievement. 

And yet, the technology argument has some flaws. For one, it doesn’t explain why achievement gaps are growing in the U.S. than in other developed countries. Two, the achievement declines in the U.S. are not limited to teenagers; they have been just as large among younger students who presumably have less access to phones and other technology. And three, it’s not clear why phones or social media would affect the lower-performing students but would not cause similar harms at the top.

But something must have happened about a decade ago to change the trajectory of student performance. In my original piece for ���˶���, I argue that the weakening of school accountability pressures after the No Child Left Behind Act was passed is responsible for a large portion of the drop. The timing of the change fits with the patterns both nationally and in Indiana. It also explains the growing achievement gaps. After state and district policymakers stopped focusing on the performance of kids at the bottom, their scores started to decline. 

Regardless of which of these theories offers the best explanation, or whether it’s a combination of several, the data point to an alarming increase in achievement gaps in Indiana schools. It’s not just an Indiana problem, but the state’s policymakers will need to reverse these trends if they want to get achievement back on track.

To gauge the magnitude of global learning loss during the pandemic, a team at the World Bank examined data from the Program for International Student Assessment, which tests 15-year-olds in math, reading and science, from 2018-22. is a counterintuitive finding about outcomes: In countries with the longest closures, high-achieving students experienced larger learning losses than their low- and medium-achieving peers.

Harry Anthony Patrinos, one of the authors, explained it like this :

In countries with school closures of average duration — about 5.5 months — learning losses were similar for low-, average- and high-achieving students. However, in countries with shorter closures, the best students experienced minimal setbacks, with the learning losses mostly being incurred by average- and low-achieving students. In countries with longer closures, the largest learning losses were experienced by high-achieving students.

And these achievement drops were sizable. “In countries with the longest closures, the low-achieving students lost around 16 to 17 points,” , “while those at the top of achievement distribution lost 25 points or more.” 

Learning loss estimates depending on student achievement quantiles and the length of closures

The U.S., at least as a whole, avoided this outcome, despite very lengthy closures in some places. U.S. learning losses by achievement group match the average of countries participating in the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, which administers the PISA exam. Patrinos told me this means low achievers lost more than high achievers. But perhaps that’s because decisions were so locally determined and politically charged, with, for example, big red states like Florida and Texas keeping kids in classrooms far more than big blue states like California and New York. 

Indeed, because of this state autonomy, the U.S. was only one of three countries in the report that had zero “full closures,” per UNESCO, as “government-mandated closures of educational institutions affecting most or all of the student population” and tracked them worldwide throughout the pandemic.

Whatever the causes are, however, they’re beyond the scope of the report and my powers of divination, and speculation has limited value. Some takeaways and consequences, however, are worth exploring.

Perhaps the biggest takeaway is that being in school appears to be quite valuable for high achievers’ learning. This runs counter to cynical assumptions that these students attain their level of achievement primarily because of out-of-school factors like household income, parent education level and various forms of evening, weekend and summer enrichment. Of course, these things play a significant role, but the report’s findings suggest that classroom instruction is integral to the magnitude of these students’ achievement.

If what happens in school matters for high achievers even more than for others, it follows that these students will not be fine regardless of the type of instruction they receive. If formal schooling benefits high achievers this much, then the quality of that schooling — teachers, curriculum, rigor, etc. — likely matters greatly as well. This is another way of saying that advanced education programs designed to maximize the achievement of these students are worth pursuing, and efforts to curb or scrap them are quite damaging.

Think of what these learning losses among high achievers mean for them, their nations and the world.

First, the students themselves. All children deserve an education that meets their needs and enhances their futures. They have their own legitimate claim on leaders’ consciences, sense of fairness and policy priorities. When ill-considered policies and adult preferences led to pandemic-related school closures in many countries that were far longer and more numerous than necessary, all students were harmed, but none worse than those who had been high achievers.

Other significant costs were levied against countries’ (and perhaps U.S. states’) long-term competitiveness, security and innovation — which translate to global impacts, too. High achievers are the young people most apt to become tomorrow’s leaders, scientists and inventors, and to solve current and future critical challenges. Most economists agree that a nation’s economic vitality depends heavily on the quality and productivity of its human capital and its capacity for innovation. While the cognitive skills of all citizens are important, that’s especially the case for high achievers. Using international test data, for example, economists Eric Hanushek and Ludger Woessmann that a “10 percentage point increase in the share of top-performing students” within a country “is associated with 1.3 percentage points higher annual growth” of that country’s economy, as measured in per-capita gross domestic product.

Recall that the World Bank’s PISA analysis focused on math scores. that “math skills better predict future earners and other economic outcomes than other skills learned in high school,” , “math proficiency in eighth grade is one of the most significant predictors of success in high school.” This suggests that the huge drops shown in the PISA data may reverberate through the rest of these students’ lives, their countries’ futures and even the fate of the globe.

Bottom line: Leaders must not minimize the importance of formal education and, by extension, the value of advanced programming for high-achieving students. At a time when , , the costs are much too high.

MathBOOST began last fall with six trained tutors — all of them parents or caregivers — working across four of the district’s 50 elementary campuses. It will expand to more than 20 tutors assisting children in 11 schools next year, said Oakland REACH’s CEO, Lakisha Young.

The tutors, or as Oakland REACH calls them, work inside the classroom alongside teachers and also pull children out for small group instruction, said Alicia Arenas, the district’s director of elementary instruction. 

“We really want our kids to be algebra-ready by the time that they enter middle school and high school,” she said, adding that at least one principal reported that participating children truly enjoy the program. “And the teachers bring up the great math progress they’re seeing from students who work with the math tutors.”

She added that students who are not involved in the program regularly ask if they could join. 

Tutors are paid an hourly rate and qualify for full benefits. Most assist third- through fifth-grade students and two of the six work with younger children. All have strong ties to the district and were carefully chosen, Arenas said. 

“We were looking for that connection and that investment in Oakland and OUSD,” she said. “We also wanted our tutors to represent the community that they serve.”

Some are graduates while others have children in the district. Math tutor Janine Godfrey, 55, works primarily at Garfield Elementary School. She said she helps children better understand their lessons and maintain their focus on the subject during class. 

“I chose this work because I have spent the last three years working through the middle school math curriculum with my son and I was surprised by how much I enjoyed math and teaching,” said Godfrey, who has run her own catering business for 25 years. “It felt like it was time to give back to the community and this felt like a perfect fit for me.”

Godfrey said she’s been moved by the students’ openness and by their ability to forge a solid bond with her.

“I truly hope that the work we have done together will somehow inspire them to work hard in math — and perhaps even enjoy it once in a while,” she said. 

As part of the new tutoring effort, Oakland REACH launched a series of outreach-focused “Math Mindset” meetings at the Think College Now Elementary School campus. 

The organization uses the time to help parents confront their own insecurities around the subject — they remind participants of the groundbreaking strides and cultures made in the topic — as a means to improve their own students’ success. 

REACH secured several respected math educators of color to inspire families, Young said, adding that she hopes the gatherings will also serve to identify possible math tutors. 

Recruitment has been a challenge as many people in the Oakland school community identify themselves as “bad at math,”  an idea that leaves parents thinking they can’t help their children progress in the subject, Young said.  

“We have to employ a different strategy when it comes to bringing our communities along in math,” she said. “We need to do the work of building the confidence and awareness they need to feel like math is something in my ancestry.”

Young said REACH’s math-related efforts will extend beyond the school year as the organization recently secured a summertime partnership with the district. SummerBOOST will allow math tutoring at two pilot sites serving some 350 children in kindergarten through fourth grade. 

Children all over the country have long struggled with math. Systemic inequity has caused Black, Hispanic and poor children to fall behind even further than their peers nationwide, a gap that grew worse because of the pandemic. Fourth-grade NAEP scores fell a stunning five points in 2022 from 2019. Eighth graders suffered an eight-point drop in that same time period, erasing decades of growth.

Results are equally troubling in the Oakland district: scored proficient on the 2022-23 state math assessments. High school students fared even worse, with just 14.11% of 11th graders reaching that same benchmark.  

“The mindset shift is key,” Young said. 

Young started REACH eight years ago with the goal of empowering Black and brown families to advocate for a high-quality education for their children. During the pandemic, REACH launched the Virtual Family Hub, providing online learning opportunities to families that resulted in significant literacy gains for students. 

In its December 2021 Hub parent satisfaction survey, 88% of families wanted more math intervention support for their children. So, after crafting an effective literacy model, the group turned its attention to math. 

“Let’s go back to K-2 when they are most flexible around deficits and excited about learning,” Young said. “This is a full frontal attack.”

Disclosure: Walton Family Foundation, Chan Zuckerberg Initiative and The Charles and Lynn Schusterman Family Philanthropies provide financial support to The Oakland REACH and ���˶���.

However, focusing on that type of COVID recovery framework feels less and less meaningful with each passing day. Since the start of the pandemic, most students have moved up multiple grade levels (or graduated!), and districts are already in the last year of their federal emergency COVID relief funds. 

There isn’t and won’t be an educational equivalent to the World Health Organization or Centers for Disease Control and Prevention proclaiming the end to the global health emergency. But it’s time for a new framework that shifts from a temporary recovery mindset to a more lasting and permanent emphasis on growth, equity and continuous improvement. 

What could that look like? There’s a growing consensus around three key levers: getting kids back in school, expanding and monitoring high-dose tutoring and increasing summer or afterschool learning time. Along with the Biden administration’s recent proposal for $8 billion in , researchers such as are all pointing to the same problem areas and potential solutions. 

Three structural shifts must happen to address the needs of the next generation.

First, students must get back in school. consistently that attendance, behavioral infractions and successful completion of academic coursework are strong predictors of outcomes like high school graduation, college attendance and college persistence. That’s true even after controlling for a student’s standardized test scores. In fact, in , NWEA’s Megan Kuhfeld and colleagues at the University of Maryland and Stanford found that measuring academic behaviors such as regular attendance also did a good job of capturing other social-emotional skills like self-management, a belief in one’s ability to succeed, growth mindset and empathy for others from diverse backgrounds. 

Their work also uncovered a promising nugget for policymakers. Given how strongly partial-day absenteeism predicted long-run outcomes, policymakers could consider tracking and monitoring it closely. Other factors, such as tardiness, referrals for in-school discipline and participation in extracurricular activities are also relatively easy to measure and potentially contain rich information about students. Tracking these interim outcomes — and then helping students improve on them — is likely to help boost longer-term outcomes as well. 

Second, students who need it most should receive high-dosage tutoring. There’s finding that students who complete high-dosage tutoring post impressively in test scores when those programs are implemented appropriately. That research has convinced to create or expand their tutoring programs. But as the federal ESSER funding cliff approaches, policymakers should work with local education leaders to sustain high-quality, high-dose tutoring programs that are delivering the biggest gains for academically at-risk students. 

Third, schools should provide extra learning time through summer programs. Like tutoring, intensive, short-term interventions during summer vacations and other school breaks have shown success in raising student achievement. Multiple studies on the effects of summer learning programs have found positive impacts on student outcomes, especially in . Those producing the strongest gains tend to offer for and pair struggling students with the most effective teachers.

Learning programs during shorter school breaks can also boost student achievement. For example, the Lawrence, Massachusetts, district offered week-long acceleration academies to students who were having difficulty in a particular subject. They were placed in small groups of 10 to 12 and taught by carefully selected educators. In total, students received about 25 hours of extra instruction per week, and the program was a key part of the district’s successful . 

As the sun sets on the COVID recovery era, state and district leaders will need to be able to demonstrate the effectiveness of their investments in things like tutoring, summer programs and acceleration efforts. It has always been important to understand which programs or interventions are working, for which students and at what cost. Those questions must now be part of the new normal.

In honor of 3.14, we recently canvassed the country, searching out STEM students with noteworthy projects and inventions. You can see all our recent profiles on our STEM Superstars microsite; here are our most recent video profiles of four remarkable teenagers: 

Helping Amputees — Virginia’s Arav Bhargava

The 18-year-old senior at The Potomac School in McLean, Virginia has developed a universal fit, 3D-printed prosthetic for amputees missing their forearms. (Read the full story) 

Confronting Depression & Suicide — New York’s Natasha Kulviwat

The 17-year-old from Jericho researched a biomarker to help identify those at risk of suicide. (Read the full story) 

Easing Anxiety — Philadelphia’s Gavriela Beatrice Kalish-Schur

The 18-year-old senior at Pennsylvania’s Julia R. Masterman High School gave fruit flies anxiety to gain a deeper understanding for what makes us anxious — and to pave the path for better treatments. (Read the full story) 

Improving Rural Health Care — Maryland’s William Gao

The 18-year-old from Ellicott City’s Centennial High School created an AI-enabled diagnostic app that could help save rural cancer patients. (Read the full story) 

And in honor of March 14 and Women’s History Month, ���˶���’s Trinity Alicia explores women’s ongoing impact in STEM and how a hashtag is driving the Pi Day conversation to representation of women in the field:

By March 20, I’d realized that this was one of Those Moments, a historical signpost when your choices and behavior will echo back at you later, whenever someone asks, “Where were you when?” By the middle of that summer, though, as my social world filled with people shocked that their vacations and family reunions had become superspreader events, I’d also realized that we were collectively going to spend most of this catastrophe it away. 

The rest, as they sort of say, became history. The pandemic’s consequences were — are — too dire to ignore, but also too inconvenient to fully acknowledge. Four years later, we’re also at an awkward remove from its most dramatic moments: The pandemic is largely concluded as an historical event, yet we’re not yet far enough out to have anything like a clear view of what’s happened. Most of us are still too battered from the burdens we carried to pause and genuinely reflect. We’ve all spent so many hours of the past four years jabbering into webcams at screenfuls of tiled faces. March 2020 was so many pixels ago. 

That’s why this anniversary should also be an invitation to extend a modicum of grace to ourselves, our peers and our schools. These were four punishing years. Pretending they can be quickly shaken off is . Both individually and collectively, Americans have not yet accepted the scope of the tragedy and we’re taking it out on our schools. 

This odd unwillingness to recognize the pandemic as an unavoidable calamity is part of why we’re still endlessly relitigating pandemic mitigation measures in schools — closures, masks, quarantine policies, and the like. If, in 2019, we’d conducted a thought experiment, asking folks to predict the educational impact of a then-hypothetical viral pandemic that would be transmitted via breathing and , most of us would agree that kids wouldn’t steam forth making the usual academic progress. 

And indeed, the real pandemic unquestionably U.S. students’ academic trajectories, even if they appear to . Yet here on the other side of that disaster, we’re determined to assign blame for dips in U.S. students’ academic achievement, as if learning loss could have — should have — been avoided in a moment of . Say it plain: There was no educational and public health playbook that could have wholly averted the pandemic’s impacts on kids., “[T]he declines, all told, strike me as relatively small, given the context: a brutal pandemic that terrified the country and killed more than a million of its citizens, upending nearly every aspect of our lives along the way.”

But because we can’t face that, we’re now in an educational “One Weird Trick” era, as the field floods with quick-fix solutions to reversing the pandemic’s impacts (particularly with federal pandemic recovery ESSER funds sunsetting). While it’s always appropriate to prioritize high-quality learning opportunities for children, it’s a short step from “let’s help kids accelerate their learning” to “if we do enough now, we can — yet again — banish the pandemic’s impacts from kids’ lives” (particularly if we just buy the right new ed tech product). 

The reality is much harsher. Researchers have known for years that it’s much tougher to shift students’ academic trajectories later in their careers. That’s why children who miss early literacy benchmarks . It’s also why investments in high-quality early learning — like universal pre-K programs — . Now, we have a country of children who, again, , faced . that closures contributed to lost learning, but only as one of many, interrelated variables, and — as noted above — students’ academic achievement in the U.S. appears to have suffered less than it did for students in peer countries that reopened on different timelines and with different COVID mitigation strategies.

Furthermore, the educational story of the past few years is far more complicated and painful than we’d like to admit and its aftereffects won’t vanish because we invest in some limited tutoring programs. Nor could they have been averted if only schools had found some magic mitigations formula to maintain normalcy for kids even as a whole lot of us repeatedly exempted ourselves from responsibility for flattening the curve. 

Why are we so resistant to facing this fact of the pandemic, even now that it’s mostly receded from daily life? It’s flatly impossible to look back at these four years without seeing how national leaders’ rhetoric drove this attitude: real and massive suffering coupled with willful self-deception and disinformation. The Trump administration flailed through COVID’s early stages, insisting it would be over in a few days or weeks, then dabbling in pseudoscience — remember , , and light and/or disinfectant “” into people’s lungs? 

That deadly unseriousness was contagious and collectively punishing. We’ll never know how the country would have behaved under less erratic leadership, but this band of feckless incompetents convinced masses of Americans that the pandemic could be largely ignored if we just wanted it badly enough. Their glib irresponsibility built the narrative that still plagues U.S. public education today — this notion that schools could somehow persist as normal when absolutely nothing around them was. It seems obvious that the ungainly federal response damaged Americans’ trust in public institutions and the social strains it caused ripped deeper holes in our shared social fabric. 

American pandemic flounderings were also personally crushing for many of us. Looking back, I feel a flat, dull, full-body weight settle back into my spine, that familiar 2020-vintage exhaustion. And that’s why, I know this for certain: whatever we all think now about the precise sequence of school closures, reopenings, mitigations, learning loss, and so forth, the past four years ripped a chunk out of the well-being of U.S. , and . 

That’s probably the clearest reason that the country’s still so determined to shift the pandemic out of mind and/or erase its impacts. No one wants to accept how far it knocked us — and our children — off the trajectories we hoped we were following. I remember reaching a point in the endless work-life-kids-panic pandemic juggle where I developed this yearning to just sit quietly on a rocky beach somewhere and watch the waves roll in. To just meditate and let my mind unspool from the tension of masks and ambulances. 

I kept telling my wife, “I bet I could sit there and stare for days before my head finally got back to something like normal.”

At the height of the pandemic, in spring 2020, Maria O. her husband and four children were quarantined in their one-bedroom apartment in South Los Angeles, each vying for privacy, quiet and adequate technology to work and attend school remotely.

There weren’t enough tablets or laptops, and Wi-Fi was glitchy. Her children ended up logging into online classes using their parents’ phones. While the children once loved school, they started falling behind academically. Everyone grew frustrated. 

“People on the outside don’t know the impact that remote learning had on families like us,” said Maria O.  “It was hard and it was stressful. We stayed afloat, but it wasn’t easy.”

Maria O.’s family is among a dozen Californians who  against the state, claiming that in many schools, remote learning was so inconsistent and ineffective that thousands of students — especially low-income, Black and Latino students — were denied their right to an education. She and other plaintiffs in the case were not identified by their full names in court documents and asked to remain anonymous when interviewed in order to protect their children’s privacy.

The  this month in Alameda County Superior Court, which issued an order that the state introduce legislation requiring schools to spend the remaining $2 billion in COVID relief funds to help students who were most impacted by remote learning recover academically and emotionally from the pandemic. That could include tutoring, counseling, after-school activities and other steps.

The impact of school shutdowns

But beyond the settlement details, the case has drawn attention to the magnitude of learning loss during the pandemic. Despite herculean efforts by school staff to keep students engaged during remote classes, learning loss — especially among students who were struggling before the pandemic — is a crisis that could harm a generation of students, researchers said.

“We can measure the impact of lost quality instruction, but the implications of a traumatic few academic years are much bigger for student health, mental health and well-being,” said Joe Bishop, co-founder of UCLA’s Center for the Transformation of Schools. “In the same way we rush to support families after a wildfire or school shooting, we have to deploy assistance to help students, especially youth of color, with the same sense of urgency.”

Bishop and his team at UCLA on learning loss on behalf of the plaintiffs in the lawsuit. They interviewed teachers, administrators, counselors and school staff at all levels. They found that remote learning exacerbated pre-existing inequities and that most educators believe the state offered insufficient guidance on how to navigate the pandemic.

But with California’s decentralized education system, the state’s authority was limited, said Elizabeth Sanders, a spokesperson for the California Department of Education. Still, the department provided ample assistance for schools under difficult circumstances, she said.

“Certainly, there were clear needs for support that students and families had during the pandemic. (The Department of Education) and Superintendent (Tony) Thurmond acted immediately to try to meet those needs,” Sanders said. “And when new needs arose, we stepped in to provide help every step of the way.”

For example, when some districts struggled to get laptops or tablets for every student, the state leveraged its connections to manufacturers to deliver enough devices to districts, even amid a global shortage, she said. In addition, the state provided a host of online resources for schools, addressing ,��,�� campuses,�� and other topics. 

Nonetheless, too many districts were “flying in dangerous conditions without a control tower, or central place of support,” Bishop said. “They were largely left alone to weather the COVID storm.” 

While some districts fared relatively well during remote learning, others struggled to meet students’ basic needs. That included everything from providing enough devices and Wi-Fi hotspots, to addressing students’ mental health needs, to offering adequate academic instruction.

“Schools and districts felt isolated and on their own dealing with this extraordinary moment in our history,” Bishop said. “They had to be public health experts, help parents find jobs and housing, provide IT support.”

The UCLA researchers also looked at solutions to a problem they say stretches far beyond the realm of schools. They said the Department of Education needs support from the Legislature and other agencies to create a long-term roadmap for recovery. It should include a comprehensive plan to address staffing shortages, expand mental health services and target services to students who need them the most, among other steps.

“Right now there’s not a clear compass for where we’re headed and what we’re doing about it,” Bishop said. “Learning has been stagnant, but as a state, what are we doing about it? This is a question we need to answer.”

Parents’ frustrations

Kelly R., another plaintiff in the lawsuit, said she’s hopeful the settlement funds will help students across California regain lost ground. 

During remote learning, her three daughters, who were enrolled in Los Angeles Unified, experienced shortened school days and large amounts of independent work they struggled to complete. Kelly R., a case manager, was working from home, and because the family lived in an airplane path, Wi-Fi was unreliable.  

Her children were falling behind academically, lost their self confidence and started disliking school, she said. This was especially frustrating, she said, because just a few miles away in more affluent neighborhoods, students were attending in-person learning pods paid for by their parents, and staying on top of their academics.

“It was stressful, discouraging. I had a sense of helplessness. I kept asking myself, what could I have done better?” she said. “Maybe if we had been in a different tax bracket, things would have gone differently.”

Compton Unified rebounds

Compton Unified, in Los Angeles County, has rebounded almost entirely from the pandemic, according to the . Last year, English language arts scores actually surpassed the 2019 results, while math scores jumped 5.8% to nearly meet the pre-pandemic score. The graduation rate was 89% last year, two percentage points higher than in 2019. Chronic absenteeism was still high last year, but it was lower than the state average of 24%.

Superintendent Darin Brawley credits a heavy investment in tutoring and mental health services, some of which pre-date the pandemic. The district used its COVID relief funds to contract with four tutoring agencies and expand mental health curriculum at all schools, for families as well as students. It also operates 30 on-campus wellness centers that offer services such as mental health counseling, yoga and mindfulness and crisis intervention.

Brawley also credits an early reopening plan. Some students, including English learners and those in special education, began returning to in-person school in October 2020, months before most other schools reopened.

“Because of that, our students have done a little better. The drops were not as significant,” Brawley said. “Although we’re not where I want us to be.”

Brawley said he’s heartened by the settlement, but its success will depend on whether the money actually benefits students who were most affected by remote learning. Accountability and follow-up will be key, he said.

“This case is extremely important. You cannot deny that Black and brown and low-income students were significantly impacted by the pandemic,” Brawley said. “But the devil will be in the details.”

California’s education landscape, in context

California’s learning loss was not the worst in the country, by a long shot. California is actually in the middle of the pack nationwide,  from the Stanford Graduate School of Education released last month. California schools have seen less dramatic recovery than other states, but the initial loss wasn’t as great.

Nationwide, the recovery for some districts has been remarkable, said Sean Reardon, co-author of the study and a Stanford University education professor. While some districts, especially those in low-income areas, are still behind, some have made significant strides to catch up. Overall, students have rebounded by 25% in reading and 33% in math, far exceeding students’ typical progress in a year, according to the report. 

He said teachers deserve credit for those improvements, helping students stay on track academically while addressing a host of other demands.

“The question is, will the recovery be sustained as (COVID relief) funds run out this year,” Reardon said. “We also need to look at the strategy going forward.”

For Maria O., who works as a case manager, the effects from the pandemic still linger. Her children managed to stay afloat, thanks in part to tutoring and other support from Community Coalition, a South Los Angeles nonprofit that focuses on social justice. But they’re not as enthusiastic about school as they once were.

Her son, who’s in high school, is especially disengaged, she said. Although he’s doing OK  academically, he often wants to skip class, she said, and she worries about him.

“I didn’t take part in this lawsuit for my kids, though. I did it for the kids who don’t have the support that my kids do,” she said. “I want to give them a voice.” 

This story was originally published on CalMatters.

Released this morning through Stanford’s right-leaning Hoover Institution, the report prior by its author, one of the nation’s most cited experts on education finance. Hanushek has cautioned since the emergence of COVID that the prolonged experience of virtual instruction would meaningfully harm the skills and earning potential of today’s students.

His newest release builds on those predictions by examining the math performance of U.S. students on two standardized tests. One, the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), is a worldwide exam comparing American 15-year-olds against adolescents in dozens of other countries; the other, the National Assessment of Educational Progress (often referred to as the Nation’s Report Card) is administered to fourth- and eighth-graders around the United States.

The PISA results, revealed in December, showed U.S. math scores falling significantly between 2018 and 2022, offering more evidence of what federal officials have called a COVID-era “crisis” in that subject. But because other countries saw even larger declines, America’s international ranking actually moved upward slightly, leading Education Secretary Miguel Cardona to the Biden administration’s emergency assistance to schools during the pandemic.

In an interview with ���˶���, Hanushek was much less sanguine, pointing to K–12 students’ persistently mediocre performance in math over the last few decades. After overlaying the NAEP math scores of individual U.S. states onto PISA’s international scoring system, he found that even test takers in the top-scoring state, Massachusetts, ranked below their counterparts in 15 other countries. The lowest-performing American jurisdiction, Puerto Rico, placed below developing nations like Kosovo, El Salvador and Cambodia.

“People in the past , ‘Massachusetts is doing pretty well, maybe we could get New Mexico going like that too,’” Hanushek said. “But if our best-performing state school system is 16th in the world, compared to the average kids in other countries, that doesn’t seem good to me.”

In general, the analysis shows, the top-line U.S. math ranking on PISA rose primarily because the pandemic’s disruptions to schooling were much more acutely felt in countries like Slovenia and Norway, which had been among the top performers on earlier iterations of the test.

Overall, students in relatively higher-scoring countries on the 2018 PISA exam sustained larger losses during COVID than those in countries that hadn’t done as well previously. Hanushek called the trend a “straightforward” validation of the importance of high-quality schools: Canadian students stood to lose more from weeks or months of online classes than those in less-effective Philippine schools.

“If you weren’t learning very much in school before the pandemic, you didn’t lose as much,” he said. “If you were learning a lot in school before the pandemic, you tended to lose more.”

The United States, long mired in the middle of the international pack, saw somewhat smaller math declines between 2018 and 2022 than the PISA average. Meanwhile, in spite of the clear trend, high-achieving East Asian countries like Taiwan, Singapore, Japan and South Korea actually improved in the subject during the pandemic. 

The learning loss exhibited in both NAEP and PISA strongly suggests that the long-term prospects of affected students will be substantially worse than they would have been otherwise. Martin West, a professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, said this is largely due to the very nature of the American economy, in which skills and educational attainment are more highly prized than almost anywhere else in the world.

“The U.S. is a society in which skills really do matter for economic success,” West said. “What that means is that the impact of learning loss on individual students through their earnings is going to be larger in the U.S. than it might be in a society like Sweden.”

Wide state variation

Hanushek’s total calculation for the cost of learning loss, a staggering $31 trillion through the year 2100, is a figure that would dwarf the economic damage wrought by the business closures and layoffs necessitated by COVID’s spread, or even the years of stalled dynamism following the Great Recession. 

The projection is based on prior economic research into the connection between students’ test scores and future earnings. Hanushek further posits that the aggregate slowdown in innovation and human capital development will tend to slow the U.S. economy’s growth over the long haul, burdening even those who didn’t experience learning loss themselves.

The analysis estimates a far greater toll than that of another prominent prediction. In 2022, economists Thomas Kane of Harvard and Douglas O. Staiger of Dartmouth used eighth-grade math results on the NAEP exam following the pandemic. While that estimate pointed to a 1.6 percent decline in students’ future earnings, Hanushek and co-author Bradley Strauss believe that slump will fall between 5 and 6 percent.

Staiger said his paper with Kane represented a “lowball estimate” while Hanushek’s offers an upper-bound projection, adding that most of the discrepancy between their findings likely stemmed from Hanushek’s broader lens on overall growth in addition to direct earnings. Whatever their differences, however, he noted that even marginal losses in productivity could eventually amount to considerable squandered potential.

“There are some that find smaller effects of test scores on economic growth, particularly for high-income countries like the U.S.,” Staiger wrote in an email. “However, as Hanushek and Strauss make clear, even small impacts of the learning loss on future economic growth impose enormous costs on society.” 

If Hanushek’s analysis proves correct, those costs will be borne unevenly. The largest state economies, such as California, Texas, New York, Florida and Pennsylvania, are all projected to absorb losses greater than $500 billion; their disproportionate burden reflects both the scope of their learning setbacks to this point and the number of future workers living in each. 

Individual income losses are also projected to differ considerably depending on location. By the paper’s calculations, students affected by the pandemic will lose less than 2 percent of their lifetime earnings in Utah, where math scores fell the least between 2019 and 2022. In West Virginia, Delaware, and Oklahoma, where they fell the most, former students could forgo an average of 9 percent of their career income.

Sarah Cohodes, an economist at the University of Michigan, said that the inequity of learning loss was a cause for particular concern. While the math performance of all students suffered between 2020 and the present, the losses were especially large for those who were already struggling or navigating critical life changes when COVID emerged. She referred to her own daughter, who wasn’t yet enrolled in a K–12 school when the pandemic began, as an example.

“She lost a year of preschool, but she’s going to be fine — she hung out with me and went to all the parks in New York City,” Cohodes said. “The people I worry about are the ones who were transitioning between elementary and middle school, or who graduated from high school and missed out on some of the final preparations for what comes next.”

Hanushek, whose preferred strategy for learning recovery is to provide financial incentives to top teachers in exchange for taking on more students, observed that the worst-off students were likely the high schoolers who graduated or dropped out over the last few years. The unsuccessful efforts to mitigate their academic reversals, whether led by state or federal officials, were evidence that education authorities “have not really taken seriously the magnitude of this event,” he argued.

“My calculation is that 17 million kids [affected by the pandemic] have already left school,” Hanushek said. “Once they’ve left school, we have little hope of ever fixing their problems. Universities or firms are not going to make up for the lack of learning that these kids suffered, and each year that goes by, we lose four or five million more kids that will never recover.”

Disclosure: The Hoover Institution provides financial support to ���˶���.

On Feb. 9, 2012, then-President Barack Obama invited chief state school officers, governors, superintendents and members of Congress to the East Room of the White House. 

Before the assembled crowd, Obama that he was granting states waivers from the federal No Child Left Behind Act (full disclosure: I worked on this project at the U.S. Department of Education and was in the audience that day). In exchange for a suite of reforms related to standards, assessments and teacher evaluations, states would be freed from NCLB’s most onerous accountability provisions. 

With the stroke of the pen, Obama waved away the notion that all schools needed to make “adequate yearly progress” for all students and for individual student groups. Instead of interventions for all children in low-performing schools, states could choose how many schools to identify for improvement and what happened there.

���䳢��’s accountability pressures had been instrumental in a decade-plus of small but significant gains. That progress was perhaps smaller than policymakers and educators might have preferred, but it was broadly shared. In eighth-grade math, for example, the lowest and highest performers both improved about 8 points  — close to a year’s worth of progress — on NAEP, the Nation’s Report Card, from 2003 to 2013.

Obama’s relaxing of school and district accountability pressures helped set off a decline in student performance across the country. By the time Congress passed, and Obama signed, the Every Student Succeeds Act in 2015, achievement scores had already begun to fall. 

Not only that, but the declines were uneven. From 2013 to 2019, scores for the lowest-performing 10% of students fell 7 points, versus a gain of 3 points for students at the higher end. The response to COVID-19 would eventually widen the gap even further, but it had been growing well before anyone had ever heard of the coronavirus.

Today, achievement gaps are growing across subjects and all across the country. Overall, 49 of 50 states, the District of Columbia and 17 out of 20 of the large cities that participated in NAEP saw a widening of their achievement gap over the last decade. To help visualize how these disparities are changing within individual states and cities, I worked with Eamonn Fitzmaurice, ���˶���’s art and technology director, to create the interactive tool below. Click to find the results for your state or city. 

NAEP Math Scores

Select a state or city below for detailed information

National AverageAlabamaAlaskaArizonaArkansasCalifornia-Los Angeles, CA-San Diego, CADistrict of ColumbiaColoradoConnecticutDelawareDistrict of ColumbiaDoDEAFloridaGeorgia-Atlanta, GAHawaiiIdahoIllinois-Chicago, ILIndianaIowaKansasKentuckyLouisianaMaineMarylandMassachusetts-Boston, MAMichiganMinnesotaMississippiMissouriMontanaNebraskaNevadaNew HampshireNew JerseyNew MexicoNew York-New York City, NYNorth Carolina-Charlotte, NCNorth DakotaOhio-Cleveland, OHOklahomaOregonPennsylvaniaRhode IslandSouth CarolinaSouth DakotaTennesseeTexas-Houston, TXUtahVermontVirginiaWashingtonWest VirginiaWisconsinWyoming

Change in 8th grade math scores 2003 - 2013 2013 - 2022 2013 - 2022

• All Students
• Higher Performing Students
• Lower Performing Students

We chose to focus on eighth-grade math for this exercise because early math skills are to long-term life outcomes. However, similar achievement trends are in other grades and subjects as well. For example, the American Enterprise Institute’s Nat Malkus has  the same growing achievement gaps in reading, history and civics.  

What’s behind the decline? 

A primary factor is the softening of NCLB. The law may not have been especially popular, but at least part of the gains from that era were to its school and district accountability systems. When researchers evaluated the effects of NCLB, they found the law led to noticeable gains in math, for the lowest-performing students. When schools felt pressure from state accountability systems, they increased their academic standards and boosted achievement in ways that had for students. 

New York City provides an illustrative example of what happens when accountability pressure goes away. Under then-Mayor Michael Bloomberg, the city instituted an A-F school rating system in 2007. Research found that the system student achievement, in F-rated schools. But in 2014, the city abandoned that grading system and the previous gains . 

New York City’s NAEP scores show similar trends. All students made large gains from 2003 to 2013, but the lines diverge after that. While the city’s higher-performing students continued to improve, the scores of lower performers fell 10 points over the last decade. 

There are plenty of other potential theories explaining these trends beyond accountability, but they don’t fully align with the timing, scope or magnitude of the declines. In 2019, the Fordham Institute’s Mike Petrilli looked into the “lost decade” and suggested it could be due to economic factors, screens and other technology or a shift away from basic skills. Others, including and the Pioneer Institute’s , blamed the shift to the Common Core state standards, which was happening about the same time. 

Economic factors could certainly play a role. Petrilli is right to note that and periods of rising are bad for kids, especially the most disadvantaged ones. Plus, the Great Recession of 2007-09 did set off a wave of austerity in some states. Given what about how education spending boosts student performance, particularly among low-income students, this feels plausible. 

However, the timing isn’t right. The economic recovery throughout the 2010s and rise in education spending should have augured well for student performance. Yet, the opposite was happening as achievement fell and gaps grew.

The economic argument also doesn’t explain the scope of the declines. While achievement was falling, 47 of 50 states were their inflation-adjusted per-pupil spending. Washington state, for example, increased its spending by 38% over this time period, but its achievement scores fell more than the national average and its achievement gap widened. It’s possible the losses would have been worse if not for the new money, but something else had to be driving the decline. 

The same flaws apply to arguments around the Common Core. If disruptions associated with the shift to the Common Core were the cause, the scores should have rebounded over time. But they didn’t. 

It’s also possible that the Common Core pushed schools to cover different topics in a different order, but that doesn’t explain why achievement gaps grew even in non-Common Core states such as Alaska, Nebraska, Texas, and Virginia, or why the same patterns appear in civics and history, which the Common Core did not address. 

What about technology? Screens have become more pervasive at home and in schools, and kids are reading for fun less often than they used to. Psychologist Jean Twenge has 2012 — the first year when more than half of Americans owned a smartphone — as the beginning of a noticeable decrease in teen mental health. 

That timing lines up with the achievement declines, but it’s not quite clear why the technology problem would hit children in the U.S. harder than in other places. And yet, achievement gaps in math and science for both fourth and eighth graders faster here in America than in any other country (and they were already quite wide here). We have a unique achievement gap problem.

These trends are sobering, but there is one hopeful lesson here: Holding school systems accountable for their lowest-performing students was working — until policymakers decided the pressure wasn’t worth it. It may be time once again to ask schools to focus on the academic achievement of their lowest-performing students. 

It’s time to identify, understand and discuss the under-the-radar issues that are hindering student success and revisit practices that could help solve four of the most critical. Addressing them now can help improve student outcomes for years to come.

There are learning barriers ed tech cannot break through. When children in historically marginalized and under-resourced communities walk into the classroom, many are already steps behind their peers. For families who struggled to meet basic needs before COVID, the pandemic only exacerbated the difficulties they faced, including homelessness, food insecurity and a lack of affordable child care. Four years later, many children have yet to feel , which has increased academic disengagement, chronic absenteeism and learning loss, especially in economically challenged areas.

But when schools offer a learning environment that like bright lights and loud noises, and teachers focus on self-regulation, trust and empathy as much as they do on math and reading, children are better able to navigate and focus on learning. Even one stable and committed relationship with a trusted adult . The more supportive the classroom, the less likely students are to show , the primary stress hormone.

Professional development is failing to address a key factor in student success. Each year, school districts invest millions in professional development. However, , especially for educators working with English learners and students with disabilities. There’s that professional development strongly correlates with student achievement.

Instead of focusing their training budgets on current trends, districts can offer professional learning and evidence-based coaching centered on fostering meaningful interactions to build the teacher-student bond and close achievement gaps. This is particularly where educators lack the support and resources to focus on interactions that build vital social-emotional learning skills.

When teachers’ powers of observation are strengthened, and they cultivate the skills to respond appropriately to each student’s needs, they build healthy bonds that help children feel safe and secure. For instance, a by the U.S. Department of Education found that ongoing, evidence-based, one-to-one coaching helps educators boost student achievement. This is especially true for teachers with less than five years’ experience and those with weak instructional practices. These in literacy, vocabulary and self-control.

Accountability systems aren’t measuring the most important elements of students’ experiences. One notable example comes from early childhood education, where almost every state has its own Quality Rating and Improvement System — and each measures success differently. Some look only at factors related to the learning environment, such as the number of books in a classroom or assurances that safety measures are in place.

Accountability systems can dig deeper by using interactions as the key indicator of whether the school is delivering the best outcomes. By classifying and measuring educator-child interactions across three domains — emotional support, instructional support and classroom organization — states can gain the information needed to guide focused, ongoing improvement that . 

In Louisiana, where lacked critical kindergarten skills, the state set its sights on an interactions-based model that can both provide essential accountability data and identify areas for student improvement. Through the Classroom Assessment Scoring System, the state helped teachers identify where they struggled and provided personalized guidance and professional development aligned with their needs. As a result, Louisiana tripled the number of sites with the highest performance rating on its quality measurement scale.

Development of critical skills is sacrificed for standardized testing. While there continue to be calls to reform standardized testing, districts are under mounting pressure to demonstrate student progress post-pandemic. Clearly, a focus on math, science and reading is warranted, but educators must also make space for core skills needed for success in school and in life. These include the : critical thinking, creative thinking, collaboration, communication and citizenship. Equipped with these tools, students can think more deeply about their experiences, learn from others and engage in civil discourse with their peers.

Play-based, project-based and deep learning allows students to dive into different concepts and creatively apply their knowledge to real-world issues. In addition, educators are able to connect with curious students through their interests, observe their actions and formulate open-ended questions around them, helping build that critical educator-child bond. Countless studies demonstrate the of investment in these core skills as they return strong academic outcomes, attendance, school engagement and behavior.

Amid all the cutting-edge solutions that are capturing attention, it is important not to lose sight of the proven power of life-changing interactions between teachers and their students. Ed tech resources are powerful tools, but they can’t replace the impact of supportive relationships. Teachers must have the training and resources that make them possible.

The American high school is broken. The pandemic underscored just how broken. American teens are—as a September 2023 Gallup poll shows—disengaged, stressed, and questioning the value of high school and college. At the same time, they are hungry to make a difference in the world and to use new technologies and ideas toward that end. 

In 2013, Ted Sizer wrote a book called The New American High School. Large national foundations invested in smaller, more personalized high schools. The pandemic made clear it’s past time to finally remake high school, but with an eye toward the future. 

Rather than seek to provide a comprehensive set of learning experiences under one roof, the new American high school would connect students to meaningful work in their communities and to expert knowledge around the globe.

Rather than dumb down concepts or activities to make them easier for teenagers, it would support young people to do meaningful work that makes real contributions and leads to credentials that hold weight in the adult world.

Rather than sort students into tracks or marshaling all of them toward a single objective, it would provide every student adult guidance and technological support to understand their own conception of a good life, and provide them with the support, connections, knowledge, and skills to pursue that life—and to change course where necessary. 

Rather than focus on a centuries-old curriculum and memorization, it would recognize the transformative forces of AI technology, climate change, and geopolitics and prepare students to thrive, collaborate, and innovate in a rapidly changing world. Yes, students would still study Sophocles, Shakespeare, and Newton, but in a more relevant, contemporary context. 

Arizona State University’s Michael Crow conceived something similar for the postsecondary world—the New American University. These institutions would be designed for access rather than exclusivity, and would develop knowledge that could improve student’s communities and address global challenges. 

New career and technical education (CTE) programs popping up across the country provide a great starting point. They’re building tighter integrations between high school and postsecondary education, delivering industry-recognized credentials on the way to graduation, resourcing students through college via learn-and-earn programs, and developing students’ social capital to strengthen their support circles and professional networks. 

Seamless and permeable pathways

It is key that the New American High School does not place students into tracks or find them in dead-ends. Instead of “tracks,” there should be a seamless and permeable set of pathways between high school, college, and career. 

To provide a few examples:

• Colorado’s Homegrown Talent Initiative is a grant-funded program designed to help rural districts create career-relevant learning experiences aligned to the needs and aspirations of their local economies. Participating districts have redefined student graduation requirements, designed new courses, integrated career exploration into existing classes, and created new learning opportunities via internships with local industry and dual enrollment in local higher education institutions. 

• Seckinger High School in Gwinnett County, Georgia, is the district’s first artificial intelligence themed high school and is part of a broader district vision to foster excellence and a sense of belonging in every school. Once the school opens, students will receive a college preparatory curriculum that is taught through the lens of artificial intelligence. Students will also be able to pursue an education in developing artificial intelligence. 

• Indiana’s Purdue Polytechnic High School is a public charter school network designed to prepare students for careers in the STEM fields. The school implements hands-on and project-based learning, industry and higher ed partnerships, and a flexible and personalized approach. Students leave high school with college credit, in-demand industry credentials, as well as preferred admission to nine out of the 10 colleges at Purdue University. 

• Another Indiana charter school, GEO Academies, offers a College Immersion Program, a hyper personalized dual enrollment program where high school students take college classes on the college campus of their choice beginning as early as the ninth grade. GEO pays for everything and provides the academic, social, and emotional supports so that kids learn real-life skills and grow the confidence necessary to earn college degrees—and a path to escaping poverty—before they graduate from high school. When they are on the high school campus, GEO students can engage in direct, teacher-led instruction, independent learning and practice, and teacher-assisted small group instruction. 

• At the state level, Colorado, Delaware, Indiana, Louisiana, and Virginia are moving toward more coherent state-wide career pathways, using federal funds and industry partnerships to create a more permeable path between high school, college, and career. (Colorado Governor Jared Polis and Virginia Secretary of Education Aimee Guidera elaborate on their states’ work in essays on pages 76 and 39, respectively.)

There is plenty of evidence that the current American high school is outdated and irrelevant. The best source of data is coming from students themselves. Adolescents report feeling isolated, bored, and disengaged in school. In this volume, we report plenty of evidence that they are calling for change and they are voting with their feet by failing to attend school or dropping out to get a job in larger numbers than ever. 

Despite the very obvious need to update and refresh secondary education, high schools are notoriously resistant to change. Shifting existing curriculum, coursework, instructional strategies, counseling, industry partnerships, and teacher expertise are all onerous prospects. What’s more, the old model of high school is hard-wired: core graduation course requirements are geared toward a “college for all” mentality. Do students intent on pursuing a career in music, for instance, really need to take calculus? Schedules do not easily shift to accommodate a student who must leave during the day for an apprenticeship. If a student wants to take an online pre engineering course in place of a course offered by their high school, they must pay for it themselves. 

Much of schools’ inability to change stems from outdated state policy. State teacher licensing laws often prevent would-be teachers with industry expertise from teaching credit-earning classes. State graduation requirements often do not allow students to count industry credentials toward graduation. Funding models are outdated and assume high school students will receive all of their education in one building. 

A New National Initiative

To overcome these and many other barriers, we need a new national initiative for the New American High School. We need more states to follow the lead of vanguard states such as Colorado and Virginia—and for these states to continue to push for lasting changes to the core aims and structures of their schools. 

The growing movement to add or update career and technical education is a good start, but ultimately, career focus needs to grow rapidly from small, peripheral programs to a widespread, core element of all secondary education. 

As the other essays in this report suggest, we need to start thinking, talking, and acting bigger. Career preparation in high school is essential for every student. At the very least, students should leave high school with a guarantee that they have mastered the core skills the business and nonprofit sectors say they will need for the middle-class jobs of the future.

We can do this, but the business community, philanthropies, governors, and state school chiefs must lead. Here are some first steps that could make a real difference:

• Create a national council on the New American High School to set national goals and guide federal and state funding strategies 
• Support more state- and district-level initiatives for business-education partnerships like Colorado, Louisiana, and Virginia have done 
• Incentivize every state to collect data across states on long-term outcomes like Indiana has done
• Build a global network of schools and school districts that are committed to the New American High School
• Create a national research center on the New American High School to amass evidence on innovations, best practices, and policies to support schools and states that want to re-tool their high schools 

Tinkering around the edges of American high schools won’t ensure that every student graduates on a viable pathway to a family-sustaining career. We don’t need to remake career and technical education—we need to remake high school. 

Skeptics will understandably ask: how is this possible when school systems are struggling just to keep their heads above water, grappling with record levels of mental health and behavior challenges and declining achievement? 

My response to the skeptics: high schools across the country began this transformation before or even during the pandemic. They did so because they know there is no alternative but to shift toward the future. They know they must catch kids up, but they also know that the best way to do so is to engage them in deep, meaningful, and relevant ways. With the right help from the federal government, states, businesses, and philanthropies, this is doable. 

But the first step on any road to recovery is to admit that there’s a problem. Given the reality of the past few years, can anyone really argue that the American high school has not reached its bottom?

See more from the Center on Reinventing Public Education and its .

High-dosage tutoring already had a strong demonstrating its effectiveness, and the combination of broad public concern about achievement levels mixed with the influx of federal funding via ESSER created an opportunity tutoring to gain market share. 

Today, high-dosage tutoring continues to grow as a policy focus and as a core part of schools’ academic recovery plans. The White House released its in January, and tutoring was front and center. The U.S. Education Department sent out guidance to states for the extension of ESSER spending, explicitly calling out tutoring as a preferred category. The of principals across the country showed a continued push to provide tutoring to students. to support tutoring have been introduced in both houses of Congress. And states continue to propose legislation and regulations to support the growth of tutoring in local communities. All this presumes continuity beyond ESSER. 

Yet, schools are facing different challenges than they were even two years ago. The most recent continues to show that academic recovery is slow; kids are not close to returning to pre-pandemic learning levels. Meanwhile, the challenges for schools are multiplying. Chronic absenteeism is , enrollment rates and staffing challenges — particularly for non-teaching roles — .

In this changed landscape, public schools and policymakers can no longer afford to treat academic recovery as a short-term challenge, which means tutoring has to be a permanent part of the solution.  Most states will not see NAEP and state test scores return to 2019 levels without an ongoing push for personalized intervention, and high-dosage tutoring has the strongest research, the best infrastructure,and the strongest support as the backbone of a longer-term recovery model. 

What is needed to massively grow high dosage tutoring in the years ahead, then?

First, a commitment from federal, state and local leaders to do whatever it takes to get all students, including those with the highest needs, back to pre-pandemic levels. This seems non-controversial, but the country currently lacks true accountability, reporting and hard conversations about where students are vis-a-vis 2019 learning levels. 

Second, a policy framework that supports the growth of genuinely effective high-dosage tutoring. This means direct funding and flexibility to pay for tutoring, which can cost anywhere from under . Policymakers must also require reporting from school districts on tutoring delivery at the student level. The “dosage” piece of high-dosage tutoring is non-negotiable for getting results, so It is unacceptable to pay for services without knowing and reporting which students received exactly how many tutoring sessions. Additionally, policymakers can put guardrails on which types of tutoring and which specific programs are eligible for public funding. Our partners at the National Student Support Accelerator have created excellent guides correlating research-backed principles with student success. And individual programs continue to produce research showing their own efficacy.

Third, school districts and school leaders need to prioritize and better manage the delivery of tutoring. Through Accelerate’s and tutor-providing partners, we are seeing two major delivery challenges. Students are not receiving the appropriate number of sessions per week; regularly, programs recommend three, but students receive one or two instead. And, tutoring begins too late in the year, with schools assigning students to programs that begin in October or November. The combination of late starts and lower dosage means that even when states and districts agree to tutoring and pay for it, they are not maximizing the benefits.

Finally, the private sector must continue to produce tutoring models and materials with a focus on results. If policymakers do begin to more effectively regulate the implementation of high-dosage tutoring in schools, requiring active reporting and prioritization for evidence-based practices, the strongest programs and providers will be rewarded. But these providers must be willing to engage in meaningful research to show their efficacy, they must show willingness to sign and they must aspire to greater scale. In particular, curriculum providers should take steps to deliver tutoring modules and lessons that align with the overall classroom curriculum. This is what teachers and school leaders want, and it will allow tutoring to function as a coherent strategy rather than a one-off skill-building exercise. 

Accelerate is hosting over 100 leaders from the high-dosage tutoring community, including policymakers, tutoring providers, researchers and school district chiefs at a this week. They are gathering to share their lessons and engage in conversations that explore what is working well, and what could work even better — and they are bringing optimism and determination because they see their programs succeeding. 

This success needs to spread to more students, though. Millions of young people need personalized interventions to help them catch up academically. The means exist to do it. Policymakers and private investors must work together to achieve this common goal.

I’ve always believed that education is the closest thing we have to a silver bullet for life success. A quality education leads to greater personal earnings, better health outcomes, a stronger economy, and lower community crime rates, among many other benefits. For example, bachelor’s and associate degree holders take home median weekly earnings of $1,334 and $963, respectively, compared to $809 for their peers with only a high school degree, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

But as the global economy rapidly evolves, we must rethink the way we educate students and our workforce. A fragmented approach—where high schools, postsecondary institutions, and employers all work in their own silos— shortchanges everyone.

We need to create more seamless pathways from school to careers. In Colorado, for example, 91.4% of jobs that can support a family of three require postsecondary education or some form of training or certification in high school beyond diploma requirements. Conventional four-year degrees alone cannot solve this problem, as more and more jobs value skills over a formal college diploma.

Blurring the Lines

In Colorado, we refer to breaking down silos as “blurring.” Advanced degrees and credentials are now table stakes to participate in the modern economy, but accessing them usually requires students to persist through four years of high school work that often doesn’t feel relevant to their futures. Then they proceed to postsecondary programs where they must take on debt, pay tuition, or forgo work while they pursue credentials. Blurring can make high school more relevant and credentials more attainable for all students.

While Colorado has seen one of the strongest economic recoveries in the country following the pandemic, employers across our state still struggle to find the right talent for their available jobs. One factor: we have historically asked students to make choices about their careers after leaving high school, often without the appropriate data needed to identify industry-specific needs or what kind of return on investment a particular pathway will afford.

That’s why we have been laser-focused on blurring the lines between high school, higher education, and the workforce. Students and young professionals deserve more opportunities to gain skills.
By increasing those opportunities, we can save people time and money, create a better-trained workforce, and better support our businesses.

Today, roughly 53% of high school graduates in Colorado earn college credit or industry credentials through dual and concurrent enrollment while in high school, saving them an estimated $53 million annually on tuition costs. A growing number also participate in apprenticeship and “learn while you earn” models.

Innovative intermediaries, such as CareerWise Colorado, are working between education and business to provide youth apprenticeship opportunities in industries such as banking, finance, health care, insurance and advanced manufacturing.

Additionally, Pathways in Technology Early College High School models (PTECH) provide students the opportunity to learn on the job while in high school, earn an associate degree and be first in line for those jobs following graduation.

However, more students can and should be participating in these opportunities. Our vision is that every student will graduate with a diploma in one hand and a certificate, degree, or meaningful job experience in the other.

That’s why the Colorado Legislature created a task force that brought together partners from schools, postsecondary pathways, and industry. Its mission was to “develop and recommend policies, laws, and rules to support the equitable and sustainable expansion and alignment of programs that integrate secondary, postsecondary, and work-based learning opportunities.”

This past year, the task force identified several impediments to the various pathways available to students: lack of awareness, confusion about program goals, affordability, and inadequate data on outcomes. Schools are already working to better target and maximize their resources, and the task force will present a final report with clear recommendations on how to scale this work by the end of 2023.

A Skills-Based Ecosystem

The four-year degree is still a great choice for many students, but we must also create opportunities for those who choose a different path. That’s why we are creating a skills-based ecosystem, where people of all ages can get the skills they need to fill jobs that will earn them a good living and support their families.

To lead by example, we implemented skills-based hiring practices for our state workforce, and we expanded apprenticeship opportunities within state government, implementing best practices already in place at many major employers in the state.

Colorado has removed or provided flexibility on degree requirements for most state jobs, such as entry-level positions, project management, IT and supervisory roles, replacing them with the opportunity to show experience and transferable skills. In the private sector, companies such as Google and Slalom Consulting now list degrees as optional for most positions in Colorado.

To ensure all students have access to these various pathways, Colorado has created a zero-cost credential program, making it completely free to pursue a number of healthcare certifications at any of our community and technical colleges. More than 1,000 students have taken advantage of this program, and we are working to expand it to other in- demand industries, such as early childhood and education, law enforcement, fire and forestry, skilled trades and green jobs. We also created a new state scholarship program that will provide eligible students who graduate in 2023-24 with $1,500 each to pursue higher education or postsecondary training.

We have also implemented a series of programs that help ensure our agencies, schools, and industry partners work together to break down silos and integrate our “blurring the lines” vision at a statewide level. In recent years, we’ve created other programs that encourage agencies, schools and businesses to collaborate in ways that offer students more opportunities to pursue credits and degrees. Those include expanded state apprenticeships, more scholarships for students in high-needs fields, and an $85 million grant program that helps businesses work with schools to grow their own talent.

All of this work creates a more integrated talent pipeline that serves students, professionals, and businesses alike. Blurring the lines means creating new opportunities, taking a bold new approach to training the workforce of tomorrow, and meeting Coloradans where they are—to help everyone achieve a successful future in a career that they love.

See more from the Center on Reinventing Public Education and its .

Parents have been kept in the dark about how far behind their kids are in school. The latest results from the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) are devastating for our students, including many who are just starting high school and don’t have time to waste. 

We all agree the stakes have never been higher. The COVID-19 pandemic widened educational and economic inequality.

As the mother of five boys who struggled during school closures, and as we continue to navigate today’s education system, worries about their future trajectories are never far from my mind. As the president of the National Parents Union (NPU), I spent the last three years in constant communication with families nationwide. Parents are sending a message loud and clear: we want better, more accurate information about our kids.

about their children’s educational and life experiences and what it means for them long-term. 

The more parents learn about the state of education, the more concerned they become and for good reason: the kids are not alright. Parents widely agree that America’s education system is in despair.

• label it a major problem that students are still behind academically, according to the Nation’s Report Card, including 34% who say it’s a crisis.
• agree the mental health challenges among children is a major problem, including 34% who say it’s a crisis. 
• believe America’s education system needs to be overhauled.

We want policymakers to acknowledge the pandemic’s impact on our children’s learning and development, and comprehensively address the challenges facing our education system to ensure students fully recover with pathways to economic mobility. Elected leaders and education decision makers must move past culture wars, rhetoric, and finger pointing with legislation and policies that reflect the reimagined experience parents want for their kids.

Policymakers can contribute to a more equitable, resilient education system with some practical solutions. These proposals are based on over decades and innovative approaches developed during the pandemic. They are aligned with what parents want for their children. 

First, give parents a seat at the table

Parents should be partners with schools from the beginning: participating in strategic planning, budgeting, leadership changes, and contract negotiations. It’s not enough to ask them for permission after decisions have already been made. Only collaboratively can we create a path forward. 

After our heroic leadership as facilitators of our own children’s educations and powerful partners in school reopening and recovery, we expect to continue to be involved in decision making and want a say in how education will be reimagined. Over the past few years, we established greater transparency and communication with policymakers about strategies for addressing today’s challenges. We must continue to deepen these efforts.

As the clock runs down on billions in financial aid, we need to examine what is working and what isn’t. We’re looking at an abrupt funding stop and deep cuts beginning in the 2024- 25 school year and our most vulnerable students will suffer when the fiscal cliff hits. This is the moment to rethink how we teach and finance education.

Parents want , as well as additional educational and mental health support.

Enter a new age of honesty and transparency

Policymakers and educators need to welcome a new age of honesty and transparency with parents, families, and communities. Assessment data plays a critical role in driving student progress by providing educators with a clear picture of learning and identifying areas for additional interventions and investments. 

• would like their child’s teachers to discuss their child’s performance and progress with them more often.

Data helps teachers individualize instruction and ensure all students reach their full potential. Tracking student progress over time allows educators to identify patterns in student learning and adjust instructional strategies as needed. We must also be flexible to change when plans do not yield the results our children deserve. 

Offer diverse pathways

With all of its complex challenges, the pandemic also provided the opportunity to create more flexibility in the education system. It highlighted the limitations of traditional classroom-based learning and the need for alternative approaches. Now we are hungry for more options for remote learning, hybrid learning models, and other approaches that will accommodate the diverse needs of children and families.

• want to have a personalized pathway plan for their child, outlining classes they could take in K-12 to help them achieve their individual career or college goals.

Any expectation that families will continue to conform to an outdated school model holds us all back. The path forward is clear for parents. 

• said K-12 schools should change the way they teach students reading and math to line up with what the newest research says is best practice.
• say schools should do more to have school schedules and calendars reflect research on how and when kids learn best.
• say schools should do more to provide opportunities for additional learning time, such as after-school or summer academic programs.

Urgent support for teens

Our teens need more support to ensure they aren’t simply pushed out before we’ve adequately prepared them to launch. 

• say schools should do more to ensure college-bound students and students who choose different pathways have equally good opportunities to prepare for their future while in high school.

Many of our youth have lost out on important opportunities including internships, job shadowing, or other career-related experiences over the last several years. They struggle with depleted family resources and basic needs, preventing them from pursuing postsecondary education and training opportunities. 

• support student loan relief as a tactic for economic mobility.

Will families still be willing to take on unending debt to pay for tuition in our colleges and universities as a good investment for our children in the future? Multiple recent surveys suggest they won’t.

Increased access to alternative opportunities for students to gain valuable career experience— including virtual internships, work-based and skills-based learning opportunities, adult education programs, vocational training, and more—will help prepare students for the future.

Prioritize mental health

In addition to academic support, parents want policymakers to prioritize students’ mental health and social-emotional well-being.

• believe policymakers need to prioritize addressing their children’s mental health needs. 

The pandemic took a toll on our students’ mental health, increasing rates of anxiety, depression, and other mental health concerns. We want to see more funding and long-term investments in school based mental health and social-emotional resources.

Needed: Transformational change

We must put an end to petty political fights, institutional racism, an antiquated status quo, and policies that prioritize adults over kids and instead collaboratively address the transformational changes our children and families need. NPU will continue to work with lawmakers on key priorities to improve the quality of life for families across the country. Now is the moment for elected leaders and education decision-makers to act with bold urgency and a renewed commitment to courageous conversations about how our nation’s schools can truly change—systematically and thoroughly. Parents will be watching.

See more from the Center on Reinventing Public Education and its .

The school, which serves 400 students pre-kindergarten through second grade in Maryland’s Baltimore City Public Schools, is rethinking the way it operates to boost parental involvement, said first-grade teacher Kaylah Crawford.

Crawford, who is in charge of family engagement at Arundel, said every student will lead their own parent-teacher conference this year, giving their families a glimpse of what they do in the classroom.

“Students will be leading their conferences by saying, ‘This is what I’m doing in school’ and then parents will be able to see (their child’s work) firsthand,” Crawford said. “It’s more engaging for families to hear from the student about how they’re performing.”

Parent perception of their child’s educational progress is tricky for many schools around the nation. A recently released national study has unveiled there’s a stark gap between parents’ knowledge of their child’s performance in school and their actual achievement in the classroom.

released in November by Gallup and the nonprofit Learning Heroes, surveyed roughly 2,000 parents of K-12 public school students nationwide about their experiences with and perceptions of their child’s educational achievement.

What researchers found was that parents don’t have a complete understanding of their child’s progress, said Bibb Hubbard, founder of , a national parent advocacy organization.

Nearly 9 out of 10 parents surveyed believe their child is performing at grade level in reading (88%) and math (89%) despite standardized tests showing far fewer students are on track. showed that at the beginning of the 2022-23 school year, public schools reported on average half of their students were below grade level.

“We just can’t afford to leave parents on the sidelines right now. We absolutely don’t have 9 out of 10 students performing at or above grade level, unfortunately,” Hubbard told ���˶���. “We need to give parents more information.”

The study also found that nearly two-thirds of parents (64%) said report cards — often considered the “holy grail” of measurements, Hubbard said — were important in determining whether their child is at grade level. And for 79% of parents surveyed, those report cards showed their children getting mostly B grades or better.

Hubbard said oftentimes, good grades equal “on grade level” for parents.

“That’s because they’ve not been told otherwise,” she said. “Grades don’t necessarily reflect grade-level mastery. You can also have your fourth grader getting an A or B in reading and that’s because they are reading at a second-grade level and they are getting B’s on their quizzes at a second-grade level.”

Crawford said her building principal strives to be transparent with parents about grades, but recently it has become more evident that some students complete homework without understanding all of the content.

“(Turning in finished homework) doesn’t necessarily mean that they’re able to read or even always able to complete work independently,” Crawford said. “So one of the things that we’ve done to target some of those discrepancies is starting different family programming.”

Arundel Elementary School launched a program called Family University in December, Crawford said. Parents can communicate with school staff to learn more about what’s happening in the classroom. They will also get feedback about what their child needs to work on academically.

“We learned through every program that we have within the building that the goal is to teach the parents something that would better prepare them to have a scholar within the school system,” Crawford said.

When parents are more informed about their child’s academic progress, they are more likely to take action and discuss concerns with their child’s teacher, Hubbard said.

The study found that 97% of parents who know their child is below grade level in math are worried about their child’s math skills. Only 22% of the parents who knew their child was at or above grade level in math were concerned about their child’s math skills.

Parents were also asked about what worries they have about their children.

“For the parents who perceive their child to be at or above grade level, their top worries are social media and emotional well-being … reading and math fall to the very bottom of their worries,” Hubbard said. “For those parents who have information that their child is not performing at grade level, their number one worry is math or reading.”

Researchers also unearthed racial differences in parents’ perceptions of how well their child was doing in school. The study introduced a hypothetical scenario to participants where their child receives a B in math but has two below-grade-level math test scores. While more than half of parents (56%) said they would be very or extremely concerned, Black parents were more likely to say they would be concerned (72%) compared with Hispanic (56%) and white parents (52%). 

Black and Hispanic parents were also more aware of their child’s academic performance in the study, Hubbard said.

Black (42%) and Hispanic (40%) parents were found less likely than white parents (54%) to say their child was performing above grade level in reading, with a similar finding in math. 

Contradicting that Black parents don’t care about their child’s education, Hubbard said, “Black parents in particular are taking more action, thinking and more deeply worrying. The Black parent in this dataset really emerges as the super active parent that’s really focused on academics.”

Lakisha Young, co-founder of Oakland REACH, a parent empowerment group that recently launched a large-scale parent-led tutoring program, said Black parents in Oakland have been more aware that something isn’t right with their child’s achievement, but they don’t know what to do about it.

“They’re definitely plugged in around something not being right,” Young said. “We asked our parents what was keeping them up at night and they just said, ‘I know my child’s not reading on the level they should be. But I’m not really getting a lot of help from the school to figure out the best thing for me to do to move forward.’ ”

The parent perception problem in education is solvable, Hubbard said — parents need to look beyond their child’s grades and engage with teachers to get to the bottom of their achievement.

“Teachers say that the number one way to know how your child is achieving is to ask them,” Hubbard writes in the study. “Asking teachers to unpack those factors and focus on grade-level learning is how to know where to lean in and help.”

Young said when her own son is struggling in his eighth-grade classes, he’s not the one to inform her — his teachers are. 

“I think things that continue to be helpful for families is to be able to feel like they can engage with the school and I think it really starts with building a relationship early,” Young said. “Kind of (letting) the school know, ‘I’m here, I’m accessible. I care. I want to understand these things about what’s going on with my kid.’ ”

Learning Heroes has been working to boost parent engagement across the nation, most recently with its campaign. The campaign partners with local nonprofits to connect parents with teachers and helps them understand achievement scores, among other resources. 

In addition to the national project, Go Beyond Grades has local campaigns, most recently launched in St. Louis, Missouri, but is also in New York City, Chicago, Washington, D.C., Houston, Boston and Sacramento.

“Grades are important, but we need to unpack that a little bit and get some additional information about how your child is doing,” Hubbard said. “The call to action is pretty simple.”

Disclosure: The Carnegie Corporation of New York provides financial support to Learning Heroes and ���˶���.

High-dosage tutoring is one of the most effective tools to help students recover from lost learning, including in subjects like reading, where . 

But what if schools didn’t wait until students fell behind? What if all kindergartners got a reading tutor from the start?

That’s what the early-literacy tutoring company is testing out. They have a hunch the results will look good. 

By contracting with schools and tracking outcomes, the company hopes to convince more schools and districts to invest in early literacy tutoring, according to Matt Pasternack, Once’s chief executive and co-founder. 

“It sounds crazy, but why couldn’t you just teach every kid in America to read one-on-one?” Pasternack said.

The program includes daily, 15-minute sessions during school, but is flexible, according to Pasternack.

Pasternack said the curriculum is informed by the , a growing movement to change literacy instruction and re-emphasize phonics. Alone with a tutor, students are taught to recognize letters, the sounds that they make and how they blend to form words. 

By the end of the year, Pasternack hopes all students can decode fluently, which he thinks will enable them to learn “more autonomously in every grade afterward.”

The two-time grantee received roughly half-a-million dollars from Accelerate, a national nonprofit that has given roughly $21 million to various groups to scale tutoring efforts post-pandemic. Once worked with “hundreds” of students during the 2022-2023 school year and will work with over 1,000 during the upcoming school year, according to Pasternack. The program has been offered at public, charter and private schools in states including California, Hawaii, Texas, New York, and Ohio, and in Washington, D.C. 

The program costs schools about $400 per student and has been given to entire classes and as an intervention for selected students.

Schools are required to provide personnel to be tutors, such as paraprofessionals or other existing school staff. Once provides a scripted curriculum and ongoing coaching. Pasternack said school staff are generally not compensated for the additional tutoring duties, but the program is working to partner with local universities so they can get course credit. 

One-on-one key to teaching phonics

Pasternack said “one-on-one instruction simplifies the implementation of the science of reading.” 

He said phonics is challenging to execute in large classrooms because it requires “near-perfect classroom management.”

“In order to teach those types of skills, you need to hear what every single child is saying,” Pasternack said.

“Master teachers” excel at large-group instruction, but many others struggle, Pasternack said. 

Rebecca Kette, an intervention specialist at Orchard STEM School in Cleveland and a former Once tutor and coordinator, said one-on-one time was beneficial to meet her students’ needs.

“I think a constant struggle for classroom teachers is that individualized attention for children,” Kette said.

Patrick Proctor, the at Boston College and a professor focused on bilingual education and literacy, said without individualized attention, teachers can’t meet students’ phonic needs.

“A whole-group phonic program is not designed to meet every student where they are at, but rather is focused at on-average expectations of where students should be,” Proctor said in an email.  

‘Everything in a package’

Once tutors get two half-days of training upfront followed by weekly sessions with Once coaches. All tutor sessions are recorded and viewed by the coaches, who provide feedback during weekly meetings. 

“The way that they tutor and train people, you understand the curriculum and are able to deliver it,” said Joseph Salazar, a Once tutor and coordinator and an English as a Second Language teacher at Seaton Elementary in Washington, D.C.

Salazar said he knows how much goes into designing lessons, so he appreciates Once’s script and curriculum. Even if he didn’t have teaching experience, he said he’d feel confident.

“Once provides everything in a package,” Salazar said.

Empowering school employees, like paraprofessionals who may not have prior experience in literacy instruction, is important for scalability, according to Matthew Kraft, an education and economics professor at Brown University who has studied .

“Scaling tutoring requires expanding the pool of tutors,” Kraft said in an email. “Paraprofessionals offer an attractive pool of labor for tutoring because they have lots of experience working with students and they are already employed by school districts.”

Early results and criticism 

Pasternack said research about Once is “extremely preliminary.” He’s “hopeful” more results will be available “by the middle of this year.”

by LXD Research highlighting the impact of the Once program on students at seven schools last academic year concluded there was a positive correlation between Once lessons and students’ scores on the Dynamic Indicators of Basic Early Literacy Skills (DIBELS) assessment.

“Overall, the more lesson cycles students completed in Once, the higher their scores,” Rachel Schechter, the report’s author, writes.

Salazar said that of the six students he tutored last year, all started below benchmark and five met or exceeded reading-level benchmarks by the end. 

Kette said her students showed “big gains” in oral-reading fluency.

Laura Justice, at Ohio State’s Department of Educational Studies and the executive director of its Crane Center for Early Childhood Research and Policy, agreed there is “strong evidence” for the efficacy of small-group lessons on decoding and comprehension skills. But before scaling a program like Once, it’s important for claims to be “assessed using experimental methods,” she said. 

Justice said there isn’t evidence supporting the idea that one-on-one is more effective than small-group tutoring. 

Pasternack said he’s open to exploring small groups, but that it would pose several challenges for the program.

“All the kids need to say the exact same sound at the same moment otherwise they’re going to listen to each other, rather than reading,” Pasternack said.

Justice also said it should be tested whether daily sessions really boost outcomes more than sessions two or three times per week.

“There is a threshold of additional instruction that is needed to help children advance, but instruction above that threshold does not necessarily pay off,” she said in an email.

Pasternack said that Once has “documented cases” of students that missed sessions and attended approximately two or three sessions per week. 

“The kid just moves half as quickly,” Pasternack said. “You can’t move faster in less time.”

Proctor said he’s skeptical about the logistics of scaling Once. Tutoring a class of 16 students one-on-one for 15 minutes each amounts to four hours of instructional time a day. But, since school days are complicated, he said it would take longer. 

“Likely it wouldn’t happen every day for every child because schedules are challenging,” Proctor wrote. “Multiply that by every day of the school year and you get a lot of slippage.”

Pasternack responded by saying schools aren’t required to use Once programming everyday.

“We work with each school to create a schedule that works for that school,” Pasternack said.

Proctor also challenged the belief that schools “need to be going so heavy on phonics and decoding in kindergarten.”

“The point of kindergarten is to develop social skills, introduce children to literacy, language, and numeracy, explore music, play,” he said.

But Pasternack said declining kindergarten enrollment makes him think current standards may not be working.

Additionally, Pasternack said Once isn’t just about decoding. Each lesson emphasizes phonemic awareness, includes comprehension questions, and revolves around reading an episode, he said, “in a suspenseful and engaging epic journey of a group of animals searching for safety, wisdom and connection.”

Ultimately, Pasternack said he hopes Once can build on existing research and “broaden the conversation.”

“We don’t want to play games with the data,” he said. “We are truly curious. Does scripted, explicit, one-on-one instruction in foundational literacy change the trajectories of the students who receive it in kindergarten?”

Correction: Rachel Schechter is the founder of LXD Research and the author of a report on the Once tutoring program. Her named was misspelled in an earlier version of this story.

Disclosure: The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and the Overdeck Family Foundation provide financial support to both Accelerate and ���˶���.

“This is the biggest problem facing America,” Jens Ludwig, a University of Chicago professor, said flatly. Nonetheless, he told those assembled at the Washington, D.C., event sponsored by the , a think tank, “We do not have our hair on fire the way it needs to be.”

That disconnect is the subject of a new released Monday that further explores what many have labeled an “urgency gap.” To pinpoint the extent of the gap, the authors talked to parents about the signals they’re getting from teachers and schools about their children’s progress. Parents expressed little concern about lasting damage from the pandemic and typically thought their children were doing well in school — a view that researchers say is belied by dismal state and national test scores. 

The issue is “genuinely vexing,” said Morgan Polikoff, an associate education professor at the University of Southern California and the paper’s lead author.  

“Parents are overwhelmingly getting the message from grades and teachers that kids are doing fine-to-great,” he said. He attributes that upbeat outlook to how little parents pay attention to standardized test scores — the “external measures” that matter most to researchers. “We just never heard anything about standardized tests from the folks we interviewed.”

The 2022 National Assessment of Educational Progress showed historic declines in math and flat performance in reading. According to this year’s spring test results, pandemic recovery remains elusive for some states. Several have continued to lose ground in reading and most have not surpassed pre-COVID performance in math. Last week’s release of international scores show U.S. students dropped 13 points in math between 2018 and 2022. 

Ludwig argues that U.S. students have made such little progress that the $190 billion Congress appropriated to address the COVID crisis is insufficient and lawmakers should find to fund high-dosage tutoring.  

“If we don’t remediate this pandemic learning loss, this cohort of 50 million kids will experience reduced lifetime earnings of something like $900 billion,” he said.

Those messages, however, don’t always get to parents. 

Given the gauntlet of tests schools administer, it’s easy for parents to get lost, said Meredith Dodson, executive director of San Francisco Parent Action, a group that advocated for schools to reopen and has recently pushed for improvements in the district’s reading program.

For many parents, “​​it’s hard to understand all the acronyms — this test versus that test, the state versus the national,” she said. “Parents just really want to trust their teachers. Is my kid on grade level or not?”

Even some parents who knew their children’s standardized test scores tended to put more stock in grades, Polikoff found. One parent interviewed for the study knew that a majority of students scored higher than her son on the NWEA MAP test in math. But, she said, “his knowledge is much greater than that” because he received a 3 on a scale of 1-3 on his report card, which “means they’ve achieved the mastery or whatever.” 

Researchers have documented  between grade point averages and , especially since the pandemic. from three organizations — EdNavigator, Learning Heroes and TNTP — showed an increase in B grades since the pandemic even among students who performed below grade level and were chronically absent.

‘Kids are not stupid’

Schools have also made it easier to do well, a vestige of pandemic-era incentives to get students to complete their work. Dan Goldhaber, director of the CALDER Center at the American Institutes for Research — and the father of two school-age children — said he’s increasingly “astounded” at how many chances students get to bring up their grades.

“Kids are not stupid,” he said. “They’re going to learn that, ‘No, I don’t need to study real hard for this test because I can just correct it after the fact.’”

It’s not a surprise, he added, that there’s been a lackluster response to some academic recovery efforts. A lot of districts have spent relief funds on less-effective remediation efforts, such as optional on-demand tutoring. And those companies typically get paid whether or not students improve or even use the service, according to . 

In response to disappointing results, some states and districts have shifted course. A few have with large online tutoring companies. Some have turned to “outcomes-based” contracts — in which tutors earn more money for better results. But others are sticking with . 

If districts are going to spend funds on tutoring, Goldhaber said, officials should “have some control over” which students receive the help and when it’s delivered.

He and Polikoff are among the experts urging educators to make test score data a much larger focus of their conversations with parents. And there’s some evidence that hard facts about students’ scores can be a wake-up call.

A November showed that among parents who knew their children were below grade level in math, improving those skills became their number one concern, more important than curbing the effects of social media and protecting them from bullies.

Being honest with parents starts at the top, said Nat Malkus, deputy director of Education Policy Studies at the conservative American Enterprise Institute. 

“Superintendents should not say, ‘We’re chugging along. We’re going to get there.’ They should say this is a huge problem,” he said at the Aspen event. Teachers, he added, need “political cover” to tell parents their children are behind. “It’s the truth and we need to deliver it.” 

But the news doesn’t always go over well. When Precious Allen, who teaches second grade at Betty Shabazz Academy, a charter school in Chicago, showed parents test results that indicated their children were a year or more behind, she said they grew “flustered” and complained about doing extra review sheets with their children after work. 

It was tough, she said, for them to “wrap their minds around” the data. She shared passages from that explains where children should be for their age to help parents understand how the pandemic threw their kids off track. “I had to bring a lot of science and research into it because sometimes the voice of a teacher is not enough.”

‘Worst possible time’

But not all educators believe assessments provide valuable or reliable information. Polikoff sees the separation between parents and the nation’s education scholars as part of a larger anti-testing movement that started brewing long . The pandemic pause on state assessments and accountability sparked a to limit the number of tests and try .

The Massachusetts Teachers Association, for example, is leading a to remove the state test as a graduation requirement, calling it “harmful.” The proposal drew sharp criticism from National Parents Association President Keri Rodrigues, whose organization trains parents to advocate for quality education.

“This is the dawn of a new era, where high school diplomas now become participation trophies,” she wrote in an . 

Testing critics complain that assessments take up too much instructional time and that the results rarely benefit teachers because they arrive after students have already moved on to the next grade. Others say high-stakes tests are racially biased against Black and Hispanic students. 

“There’s just very close to zero constituencies advocating for tests or that they matter,” Polikoff said. Republicans, he said, “want only unfettered choice” while the left is not defending the usefulness of tests “to ensure educational quality or equity.”

’The backlash against testing, he said, has come “at the worst possible time given the damage that’s actually been done.”

It’s time to bring back the coffee cups!

 When I first attended the annual meeting of the Education Commission of the States in the early 1990s, they were handing out coffee cups with an exhortation that “all kids can learn.” I remember thinking, duh, of course they can. The standards movement was in full bloom at the time, and the statement seemed like a no-brainer. 

No longer. The pandemic merely illuminated and exacerbated what has been happening in American education for years: the systematic dismantling of a culture of high expectations. Rather than continuing to work together to help all children meet these high standards, which had been the national focus for a few decades, too many state leaders have settled for moving the goalposts, , and pretending that everything was okay. It isn’t.

Combating historic declines with a commitment to excellence, opportunity and innovation

On the most recent National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), Virginia had a 13-point drop in fourth-grade reading since 2017 (the largest reading decline in the nation) and a 12-point drop in fourth-grade math (tied with Maryland as the largest math decline). Both declines are nearly three times the national average in learning loss, and they began before the pandemic as previous administrations lowered expectations across the board. The pandemic worsened everything, of course. As a result, we’re on the verge of losing an entire generation of students.

This tragic reality has fueled our sense of urgency and commitment to change in Virginia. Nothing but boldness will suffice. We know that Virginia has excellent schools, but not every student and family has access to that excellence. We are relying on a much broader set of innovative solutions, and tapping into the expertise of educators and community partners to ensure that every student can attend a school that prepares them for success in life.

For example, 19 (and counting) partnerships have applied to take advantage of the $100 million we have earmarked for , which will stimulate innovative approaches to teaching and learning; encourage greater collaboration among K-12, postsecondary, business and other community partners; and develop model programs that can be replicated. In Southwest Virginia, public schools, community colleges, and local hospitals are collaborating to develop a school to prepare students for careers in health care, which will help support these traditionally underserved communities. On the eastern shore, NASA, Virginia Space, the local community college, and aerospace companies are working with K-12 school districts to launch an aerospace-focused school as part of the goal to make the area the “space hub of the east coast.” Efforts like these are breaking down the walls between education and work, blowing up the one-size-fits-all approach to education, and providing students, especially those who have been marginalized in the past, exposure to the careers of the future.

To help support and accelerate efforts such as these, we’ve created an Office of Innovation within the Virginia Department of Education. This office will not only catalog innovative approaches throughout Virginia, but also network and learn from them so we can replicate success in every corner of the commonwealth. Together with education stakeholders, we will continue to dive into the important and tough questions such as:

•  Why doesn’t the commonwealth have more Thomas Jefferson High Schools, the highly acclaimed STEM school, when the waiting list shows huge demand for many more?

• Why are colleges lowering admissions standards at the end of students’ K-12 journeys, when it is much more effective (and fair) to focus on challenging them and preparing them from their earliest years? That’s why we are rethinking gifted/talented and similar programs to provide historically underrepresented kids access to educational opportunities that some children have always had. In addition, the is revamping how we teach all students to read—ensuring that all instructional materials, professional development, licensure, and teacher prep are based in the science of reading by the 2024-25 school year.
• What can we learn from the new tutoring and mentoring partnerships among K-12, the Urban League, and historically Black colleges and universities in the Petersburg and Hampton Roads areas that can be scaled statewide and nationally?

Empowering families

Parents matter. They deserve to not only have a seat at the table, but to be at the head. We are proactively empowering parents with more actionable information and greater options for their child to access excellence. 

Parents have inflated perceptions of student achievement. National research documents that 90% of parents believe their child is at or above grade level in reading and math. In reality, only 37% of students nationally perform at or above grade level in reading and math—a 53% gap between parent perception and reality. This is largely due to a lack of transparency around student proficiency and a dearth of effective communication with parents. 

Therefore, Virginia is preparing data reports that tell the truth about where every student and school stands. This year, for the first time ever, schools sent every parent and teacher the same understandable, actionable academic proficiency report, showing a clear picture of how their students were performing and offering discussion topics to support student success. The Virginia Department of Education has also created a complementary online portal, , which includes easy-to-read charts and tables showing a student’s performance compared to their peers. 

Thanks to a work group created in our latest legislative session, we are developing an online parent portal that will give parents quality information so they are informed champions and partners in their children’s education. The State Board of Education is also revising our school accreditation system so that there is clear, easy-to-digest information about the academic proficiency and progress of students in every K-12 school in the commonwealth. 

We are using data as a flashlight, not a hammer, to inform better decisions at kitchen tables, classrooms, school boards, and the State Capitol. A professional learning community of 25 school districts is helping us develop tools and supports to use this data effectively. Our goal is for every off-track student to have a personalized learning plan with a set of actions to address learning gaps. These plans will be developed and implemented in partnership with teachers, parents, and students.  We’ll also train teachers on how to communicate with parents and students about the steps to get a student to grade-level proficiency. 

To combat the drastic impact of COVID-19 school closures on students’ educational progress and address the earlier decline in proficiency, we provided $63 million in grants to help families access tutoring services this summer. We have also been increasing awareness of the Education Improvement Scholarship Tax Credit so that more families can afford to send their children to schools that can better meet their academic needs. In all this work, we are empowering parents—with better information and, when possible, financial support, while always ensuring that they are at the head of the table.

Breaking down silos to provide multiple pathways to success for all Virginia learners

We must also increase exposure, experience, and expertise in the world of work in high school and postsecondary education. To achieve this, Governor Youngkin has vowed to further blur the lines and increase coordination between K-12, higher education, and the workplace. Our goal is that every high school student graduates with an industry-recognized credential and/or an associate degree. We will do this by expanding career and technical education, launching lab schools, and accelerating dual enrollment partnerships between high schools and community colleges. 

Our colleges have an equally urgent focus on connecting learning with working. The business community, higher education, administration, and General Assembly are all committed to the Virginia Talent & Opportunity Program, which aims to ensure a paid work experience for every college student while in school. Fast Forward, a short-term workforce credential and training program in Virginia’s community colleges, provides affordable opportunities for students to receive training and credentialing in high-demand industries like information technology, skilled trades, infrastructure, and healthcare. The Virginia Community College Board voted this past year to allow high school students to take advantage of this program as well. Additionally, our G3 program, a tuition assistance program for Virginia students, is aiding community college students in high-demand industries.

Virginia, like every other state in the country and every other country in the world, is competing for talent. Quality schools are the foundation and door-opener. The good news is that we know how to improve student success: with high expectations, great instruction, transparency, accountability, and a commitment to innovation. Given the setbacks of the past several years, however, we’re now in an all-hands-on-deck moment in Virginia. By law, Governor Youngkin is limited to a single four-year term. We’re not wasting a minute.

See more from the Center on Reinventing Public Education and its .

David Steiner

America’s Education System Is a Mess, and Students Are Paying the Price

COVID-19, the legacy of race-based redlining, the lack of support for health care, child care and parental leave, and other social and economic policies have taken a terrible toll on student learning. But the fundamental cause of poor outcomes, writes contributor David Steiner of the , is that policy leaders have eroded the instructional core and designed our education system for failure. As we have sown, so shall we reap. The challenges and rewards of learning are being washed away, and students are desperately the worse for the mess we have made. Read More

Margaret Raymond

The Terrible Truth — Current Solutions to COVID Learning Loss Are Doomed to Fail

Despite well-intended and rapid responses to COVID learning loss, solutions such as tutoring or summer school are doomed to fail, says contributor Margaret (Macke) Raymond of the Center for Research on Education Outcomes at Stanford University. How do we know? CREDO researchers looked at learning patterns for students at three levels of achievement in 16 states and found that even with five extra years of education, only about 75% will be at grade level by high school graduation. No school can offer that much. It is time to decide whether to make necessary changes or continue to support a system that will almost certainly fail. Read More

Mark Schneider

The Future is STEM — But Without Enough Students, the U.S. Will Be Left Behind

America no longer produces the most science and engineering research publications, patents or natural-science Ph.D.s, and these trends are unlikely to change anytime soon. The problem isn’t a lack of universities to train future scientists or an economy incapable of encouraging innovation. Rather, says contributor Mark Schneider of the Institute of Education Sciences, it originates much earlier in the supply chain, in elementary school. Congress has a chance to help turn this around, by passing the New Essential Education Discoveries (NEED) Act. Read More

John Bailey

The Promise of Personalized Learning Never Delivered. Today’s AI Is Different

Educators often encounter lofty promises of technology revolutionizing learning, only to find reality fails to meet expectations. But based on his experiences with the new generation of artificial intelligence tools, contributor John Bailey believes society may be in the early stages of a transformative moment. This may very well usher in an era of individualized learning, empowering all students to realize their full potential and fostering a more equitable and effective educational experience. Read his four reasons why this generation of AI tools is likely to succeed where other technologies have failed. Read More

Chad Aldeman

Interactive — With More Teachers & Fewer Students, Districts Are Set up for Financial Trouble

To understand the teacher labor market, you have to hold two competing narratives in your head. On one hand, teacher turnover hit new highs, morale is low and schools are facing shortages. At the same time, public schools employ more teachers than before COVID, while serving 1.9 million fewer students. Student-teacher ratios are near all-time lows. Contributor Chad Aldeman and Eamonn Fitzmaurice, ���˶���’s art and technology director, plotted these changes on an exclusive, interactive map — and explain how they’re putting districts in financial peril. View the Map

Fascinating, right? But these are only the tip of the iceberg. Here’s a roundup of some of the hottest topics our op-ed contributors tackled, and what they had to say:

Future of High School

Credit Hours Are a Relic of the Past. How States Must Disrupt High School — Now

Russlynn Ali & Timothy Knowles

Back to School — 6 Tips from Students on How to Make High School Relevant

Beth Fertig

I Changed My Shoes, and It Revolutionized How I Was Able to Rethink High School

William Blake

Fiscal Cliff & School Funding

The 50 Very Different States of American Public Education

Chad Aldeman

It’s Time to Start Preparing Now for School Closures that Are Coming

Timothy Daly

Educators, Beware: As Budget Cuts Loom, Now Is NOT the Time to Quit Your Job

Katherine Silberstein & Marguerite Roza

Schools Could Lose 136,000 Teaching Jobs When Federal COVID Funds Run Out

Chad Aldeman

Artificial Intelligence

Artificial Intelligence Will Not Transform K-12 Education Without Changes to ‘the Grammar of School’

Joel Rose

Schools Must Embrace the Looming Disruption of ChatGPT

Sarah Dillard

Personalized Education Is Not a Panacea. Neither Is Artificial Intelligence

Natalia Kucirkova

Tutoring

Done Right, Tutoring Can Greatly Boost Student Learning. How Do We Get There?

Kevin Huffman

As Virginia Rolls Out Ambitious Statewide High-Dosage Tutoring Effort This Week, 3 Keys to Success

Maureen Kelleher

Why This Tutoring ‘Moment’ Could Die If We Don’t Tighten Up the Models

Mike Goldstein

Learning Loss

New NAEP Scores Reveal the Failure of Pandemic Academic Recovery Efforts

Vladimir Kogan

Quarantines, Not School Closures, Led to Devastating Losses in Math and Reading

John Bailey

6 Teachers Tell Their Secrets for Getting Middle Schoolers up to Speed in Math

Alexandra Frost

Special Ed and Gifted & Talented

Bracing for a Tidal Wave of Unnecessary Special Education Referrals

Lauren Morando Rhim, Candace Cortiella, Lindsay Kubatzky & Laurie VanderPloeg

Why Are Schools Comfortable Accepting Failure for Students with Disabilities?

David Flink & Lauren Morando Rhim

NYC’s New Gifted & Talented Admissions Brings Chaos — and Disregards Research

Alina Adams

In the first year of the pandemic, policymakers confronted an unprecedented national education crisis with an historic infusion of funding. Now, with those dollars set to expire and a crisis that may be deepening, I worry about the temptation to throw our hands up and say, “Oh well, we tried our best; it was just too hard.” And I worry that distractions — including divisive ideological debates — are diverting focus from students’ real and urgent needs. That must not happen. Instead, America must recommit to a learning recovery moonshot.  

High-dosage tutoring is one of the most powerful tools available to help kids recover missed learning. While many schools have launched tutoring initiatives, only gets the dosage — the duration and consistency — required to see the learning gains that has shown is possible. Barriers to implementation continue to limit expansion and impact, risking premature declarations that this personalized learning approach simply doesn’t work.

In reality, schools have yet to implement high-dosage tutoring effectively enough to credibly measure outcomes at scale. 

Before joining Accelerate, I was a district leader in Tennessee’s Hamilton County and Georgia’s Gwinnett County schools during and after the pandemic. I witnessed COVID’s dramatic impact on educators and students. I understand how tough it is to get kids back on track. Teachers are constantly asked to do more with less, and they do. I continue to see their genuine effort in classrooms across the country in my current role.

A collective commitment by state and district leaders, policymakers and tutoring providers would make it easier for schools to implement effective learning recovery and avoid leaving a generation of students less prepared to succeed in life than their peers who happen to have the good fortune of graduating before the pandemic.

Accelerate has to tutoring providers, states and districts implementing high-dosage tutoring. These grants have provided direct support to thousands of the students who need it most, and some of the recipients offer a roadmap toward our north star of scaling this successful approach. 

Baltimore City Public Schools, for example, served over 15,000 students last school year, achieving an increase in attendance and dosage of 18% over the year prior. In 2023-24, the district expects to serve nearly 1 in 4 students through partnerships with and a district-run program utilizing paraprofessionals. 

Guilford County Public Schools approaching 12,000 students, or one-fifth of total, twice the number served in 2021-22. The district implemented a data platform this year to ensure that students across their portfolio of university, community and school-run programs are getting the amount and frequency of tutoring needed to make a difference. Accelerate is partnering with Mathematica to release a forthcoming report on lessons learned, highlighting the school conditions necessary for high-dosage tutoring to thrive.

Implementation is hard, but it is possible.

Early analysis shows that our first cohort of grantees are successfully implementing programs in 28 states. Using a variety of creative approaches to overcome challenges, they are reaching a diverse group of students with the right dosage of tutoring.

If public schools are going to address learning loss in the face of daunting challenges, America needs to embrace the growth mindset that educators bring into the classroom every day. When kids say, “I’m just not a math person,” teachers know better. They encourage their students to make the effort and believe they will achieve. It’s time for national policy and education leaders to embrace that same sense of possibility and persistence. 

On Dec. 6, the Aspen Economic Strategy Group hosted a livestream , “,” where I joined a panel of leading scholars to discuss our perspectives on concrete policies to overcome pandemic learning loss. 

Here’s are some critical points for state and district leaders and policymakers:

• Funding: As ESSER funding sunsets, policymakers must identify long-term funding streams that support tutoring. This includes, as well as appropriating state and local funding for high-dosage tutoring and other evidence-based strategies to accelerate student learning. 
  
• Integration: State and district leaders need to help schools make high-dosage tutoring a standard daily feature for students who are furthest behind. Aligning high-dosage tutoring with high-quality instructional materials and connecting it to current guidance on will allow schools to prioritize this proven intervention. State agencies should lead in developing implementation tools and vetting tutoring programs/providers that are evidence-based, classroom-ready and scalable.
  
• Accountability: Schools need help getting students the that can recover the average four-month learning loss in a single school year. Policymakers must drive the creation of better data infrastructure for reporting and transparency around student attendance and dosage for tutoring. Districts and states can also leverage for mutual accountability between schools and providers for implementation and results.  

Educators know the stakes. Lifetime economic and health outcomes, particularly for the most vulnerable students, hang in the balance as the nation commits to a learning recovery moonshot. The challenges are real. But giving up on a whole generation of students is simply not acceptable. It’s up to all of us — families, business leaders, nonprofits, policymakers, educators and tutoring providers — to believe we can do it and then come together to make it happen. 

Disclosure: Walton Family Foundation, Overdeck Family Foundation and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation provide financial support to Accelerate and ���˶���.

Announced Tuesday morning, the scores represent more proof of steep learning loss in math during the pandemic and its aftermath. But they also provide the first international context for COVID’s impact on American children, indicating that many students abroad — including in countries that have previously ranked among the world’s top performers — may have experienced even worse setbacks.

Eighty-one countries participated in PISA in 2022, according to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, the intergovernmental authority that administers the test. Among that group, average scores fell by 15 points in math and 10 points in reading since 2018, while science scores were not significantly changed. 

As in several other standardized tests conducted since COVID’s emergence in 2020, those declines are unprecedented; over 20 years of PISA testing, average math and literacy scores have never moved by more than four or five points between consecutive assessments. Peggy Carr, commissioner of the U.S. Department of Education’s National Center for Education Statistics, told reporters on Monday that even highly developed countries across Europe and Asia “suffered tremendously” from the learning disruptions triggered by the pandemic. 

“These results are another piece of evidence showing the crisis in mathematics achievement,” Carr said. “Only now can we see that it is a global concern.”

But while American students’ 13-point drop in math fell within the international average, their relative stasis in PISA’s other testing domains of reading and science (minus-one and minus-three points since 2018, neither of which is considered statistically significant) provide surprisingly positive news. Indeed, while U.S. scores slumped across all three subjects, the ranking of the United States among PISA participants actually improved since 2018: from 29th in mathematics to 26th, from eighth in reading to sixth, and from 11th in science to 10th. 

Those shifts in relative performance result from even greater COVID-era slides in other countries. Among those seeing especially large reversals in math were Iceland (minus-36 points), Norway (minus-33 points), Poland (minus-27 points), and Slovenia (minus-24 points). Fifteen-year-olds in Finland, which has built for top performance on exams like PISA, saw a 30-point drop in reading skills over the last four years. 

In a somewhat curious turn, the index of four Chinese provinces where students have traditionally taken the PISA (Beijing, Shanghai, Jiangsu, and Zhejiang) did not report scores for the 2022 round. In previous administrations of the test, those students on all three subjects — although those results were also criticized by international observers for allegedly being “cherry-picked” from China’s wealthiest and highest-achieving areas.

According to the OECD, the four provinces participated in the 2022 test, but their performance couldn’t be measured because schools were closed during the intended data collection period. Impressive scores were posted by students in the Chinese jurisdictions of Hong Kong and Macau, though these will likely also be considered atypical of learning across that country’s vast mainland. 

Among PISA’s top-scoring nations in math were East Asian participants like Singapore, Hong Kong, Macau, Japan, Chinese Taipei (Taiwan), and Korea. Singapore, Ireland, Estonia, Japan, Korea, and Taiwan boasted the strongest readers.

‘I would have expected a larger drop.’

The scores will undoubtedly be used as an indicator of how learning was affected by COVID. Two-thirds of participating countries reported that they closed schools for longer than three months for the majority of their students during the pandemic. Students in countries that experienced briefer periods of closure did see smaller drops in math scores, the OECD reported, but Carr said the statistical correlation was “weak.”

A wealth of research conducted since 2020 has drawn close connections between virtual learning and academic harm. But prior standardized testing releases, such as that of the National Assessment of Educational Progress, have shown that states that kept schools open also endured significant learning damage, muddying the argument over the ultimate impact of shuttered schools.

In surveys accompanying the test, large numbers of American students reported that they’d experienced particularly lengthy school closures. Twenty percent said their school building had been closed between six and 12 months over the previous three years (compared with 15 percent of respondents across all OECD member nations), while another 20 percent said their school had closed for over a year (compared with just 12 percent of respondents across the OECD).

Tom Loveless, a researcher who previously headed the Brookings Institution’s Brown Center on Education Policy, said that America students’ math decline, while significant, was not “enormous.”

“Compared with the other OECD countries, we definitely had schools closed for a longer period of time,” Loveless said. “If you take this as a pre- and post-pandemic indicator, I would have expected a larger drop.”

Other learning observers were more bearish on the Americans’ showing, especially compared with comparable youths in countries far poorer than the U.S. Sal Khan, founder of the online learning platform Khan Academy, argued that the international averages concealed significant disparities between the highest- and lowest-achieving test takers.

“The results are disappointing, but not surprising, and consistent with all of the other data we’ve seen post-COVID,” Khan added in an email. “In general, I think the state of math education is pretty bad globally — but there is less of an excuse in wealthy countries like the United States.”

Whatever the prevailing trends in other countries, some in the K–12 policy community will agree with that glum appraisal. Overall, 34 percent of American test takers demonstrated only basic or below-basic math skills — slightly higher than the OECD average of 31 percent. And while their reading and science scores held their ground during the COVID era, they are also not measurably improved from the years when PISA first assessed those subjects (2000 and 2006, respectively.)

The findings also raise the question of how school leaders in the United States and other countries will boost student performance in the long run. Local and state test data in the U.S. confirm that many students are still performing substantially worse than children of the same age four years ago. And with the imminent expiration of federal emergency funds that have underwritten extra staffing and programs over the last several years, authorities will need to move fast to effect a turnaround.

Bob Hughes is the director of K–12 learning programs at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, which has launched school reform and improvement efforts across the U.S. for over two decades. Last year, the organization over $1 billion to improve math instruction by making the subject more engaging and relevant to students.

While calling the PISA scores “upsetting news,” Hughes added that schools and school districts could jump-start significant progress in math by employing a host of evidence-based strategies: high-impact tutoring for struggling students, improved professional learning for teachers, and more rigorous curricular materials (the “Singapore math” approach, which has shaped elementary math instruction in that country since the 1980s, has spawned a legion of fans in the U.S. as well). 

“We actually have much better data than we’ve had in the past, and we have a clearer view of what the interventions need to be,” Hughes said. “We just need to get to the business of doing it rather than spending a lot of time wringing our hands.”

Disclosure: The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation provides financial support to ���˶���.

Kesar Gaba, a rising sophomore at Queens College, was in high school when the pandemic hit. 

“All I saw for two years was black screens on Zoom. It affected my mental health, it affected my relationships within my family, and it really overall affected the way I see the world.” 

Arshia Papari, a rising freshman at the University of Texas at Austin, had a slightly different attitude toward online schooling compared to Kesar. 

“What the pandemic did for me was that it really opened me up to a new opportunity in schooling, but it also took away the ability for me to do any sort of in-person connections and have a real high school experience. But I think it’s been a trade-off between the experiences you have during high school and also the convenience of online schooling.”

Many students had similar experiences during the pandemic. Whether they enjoyed online schooling or not, these stories have been published dozens of times in varying news outlets and reflected in student surveys. But older students in particular had less time to catch up before leaving the school system, creating concerns as to whether they had ample support emerging from the pandemic. 

We at CRPE were interested in learning about these students’ current hopes, fears, and ideas for how to strengthen the U.S. education system. To that end, we spoke with 10 older youth— that is, high schoolers nearing graduation or students who have already graduated—to get their perspective on the data in our report as well as on life as an American teenager, their take on rising mental illness rates among peers their age, and what it would take to change the current education system.

Why the kids are not all right

“If the world around you is giving you stimuli that the world is falling apart or the world’s on fire, and that repeats every day on TikTok or on YouTube … I think that’s what’s leading to the [rising mental health problems] trend of going up, up, up, and up.” –Arshia Papari, rising freshman, The University of Texas at Austin

By now, it is common knowledge that students’ mental illness rates are, and have been, worsening. The pandemic is often blamed. In reality, the pandemic is just part of a bigger picture. Students had concerns around their well-being and safety—both inside and outside of schools—long before Covid-19. The pandemic just created an opportunity to bring these issues to light.

“I feel like the pandemic gave us this gateway to just talk about [feelings of helplessness and depression] in a more normalized setting. This has been a problem for some time, but I don’t think that it’s just because the pandemic happened.” –Abigail Singh, rising freshman, Bennington College, Vermont

Students had a lot to say about what they believe is contributing to these rising trends. 

First and foremost, these students are concerned about their safety and security in schools, physically and emotionally. They named political and cultural tensions — Title IX scandals, bans on Pride flags, anti-trans legislation, and reckless gun violence, among others — as harmful to their wellbeing. Even if these events were not happening in their schools or didn’t affect them directly, these issues still impact the mental health of the COVID generation. 

Lazuli Clark, a transgender female student, remarked on how difficult it can be to focus on school when some policymakers are passing laws against her identity.

“Going to school is the least of people’s concerns at this point for a lot of people. There are days where I’m like, oh yeah, I have to worry about my AP U.S. history project and yesterday another state basically made it so that I can never exist in that state. And it’s like, how’s anyone supposed to think about anything at all when there’s all of that going on? Even if you’re not directly impacted by it. Most people in my generation know somebody who’s impacted in one way or the other.”

Other students felt vulnerable in their own communities. Liv Birnstad, a recent graduate from a public charter school in Washington, D.C., explained how school resource officers (SROs) were meant to be replaced with mental health professionals in school buildings:

“But what ended up happening is they took [SROs] away and then didn’t replace them [with mental health professionals]. And so now they’re putting [SROs] back into schools because they thought that the problem was that we didn’t have SROs. But the real problem is that we didn’t have inter-community support. At my school we have school resource officers, but we also have a lot of police. And so a lot of students feel really uncomfortable receiving support at school because it feels like a really kind of carceral space.”

Liv is not alone. Arivumani Srivastava, who attended a high school in rural Kentucky, described a similar initiative in his state as a “give-and-take” bill. After the Marshall County High School shooting, the bill mandated a mental health professional be present in schools, but also required a certain number of police officers on campuses. Similarly, Abigail Singh, a graduate of a charter school in Brooklyn, New York, described how it felt to go through scanners at school meant to check for weapons: “It just makes us all feel villainized.”

The students made it clear that in-school mental health supports are not enough to improve their well-being. First, they need to feel safe enough to use these supports.

“If students aren’t able to freely explore themselves in a safe and supported way in schools, then all they’re doing is looking at a future where they’ll have less guidance and probably equal, if not more scrutiny. And so it makes sense for me that they would be hopeless or sad.” –Jaylen Adams, rising freshman, Columbia University, New York

“I feel like mental health is something that we’re still growing in society. We’re advocating on [it] because it is a really big issue that students face. And if it’s not tackled, it just keeps becoming an issue and it could lead to more severe factors on a student’s life. It’s just something that needs to continue to be touched upon in a school setting.” –Alejandro Blanco, rising sophomore, University of Illinois at UrbanaChampaign

Social media: A double-edged sword

We cannot underestimate the influence social media platforms and apps have on youth. For instance, Georgia’s Brady Phan benefited from school closures. He used the free time during lockdown to reflect on his goals and double down on his academic aspirations. But he also saw how school closures adversely affected many of his peers, especially those who were drawn to influential people on social media.

“A lot of these entrepreneurs [on social media] are saying that you should not go to college, that there’s a lot of easier ways to make money. And especially during the pandemic where they’re the most vulnerable–that’s where I see them influence [youth] a lot. And that would maybe change [my peers’] minds about pursuing or excelling in an academic career.” –Brady Phan, rising senior, DeKalb County School District, Georgia

“We saw a lot more people who were more radicalized [during the pandemic]. They’d fallen down certain rabbit holes because they were just like locked up on their own. And they also lost a lot of empathy because, well, we gain empathy by talking to people who are different from us. But if you’re just alone for a year, a year and a half, two years, then you do tend to lose that sense of compassion for people who are different than you.” –Maya Murali, rising senior, Lewisville Independent School District, Texas

While there is ample evidence of the harmful effects of social media, including the spread of misinformation, the students also highlighted the opportunities these platforms provide. Abigail Singh, for example, has an interest in social justice and wants to pursue a career in journalism. In her eyes, social media is a powerful tool for advocacy.

“Being someone with so many intersectional identities, it’s hard to find a community where I feel represented and exist. And so social media is definitely somewhere where I feel like I’ve been given the platform to help other students like me.” –Abigail Singh, rising freshman, Bennington College, Vermont

Liv sees a similar opportunity. As someone who attended a small school and identifies as Jewish and queer, she praised social media for helping connect her to like-minded peers. It is a “reminder that there’s life outside of [school] … social media can kind of help you find your niche group when you don’t have access at a school.” 

While there is cause to be wary of harmful users who can influence youth negatively, the benefits social media bestows are also notable. For teenagers like Abigail, Liv, and others who use these platforms to connect to one another and find community where they may not otherwise have the opportunity to do so, social media can be enlightening.

“I definitely think that social media helps in addition to the ways it harms. It definitely is harmful and I don’t want to understate that, but I also really feel like that the way social media is reported about overshadows the good that it can do.” –Arivumani Srivastava, rising sophomore, Pomona College, California

Ideas for the future of education

Although youth have serious concerns about deteriorating mental health and social conflicts, they are also optimistic about how schooling can be improved. They are especially intrigued about the potential of AI and peer mentoring.

Similar to social media, students acknowledge how AI can be harmful for those that rely too much on technology like ChatGPT. Rather than dwelling on these concerns, however, students were more excited to share the possibilities it can offer.

“I think the education system as a whole is concerned more about how [ChatGPT] can be used for cheating and not really seeing it for what it can be, which is a really powerful tool.” –Maya Murali, rising senior, Lewisville Independent School District, Texas

“I hope that things like ChatGPT and text-to-speech [tools] can continue to advance in a way that provides more accessibility for people. As someone who is not neurotypical, a lot of times I do benefit from different approaches to how lessons are taught, and it can be a lot of work for a teacher to have to create multiple different ways for something to be taught. So if we can find a way for artificial intelligence to be used in terms of accessibility, it’ll be a lot less work on the behalf of the teacher and the student.” –Lazuli Clark, rising senior, KIPP Academy Lynn Collegiate, Massachusetts

Other students also commented on how they use ChatGPT to compare their own writing to it, or as a jumping-off point for assignments. But they warned that AI cannot be the end-all be-all. As one student put it, “You still need to know what you’re doing. You need to be able to think critically and be able to edit essays or whatever it’s generating for you.”

Students also want schools to provide more mentoring support and help navigating college and career pathways.

“[Having] a set structure in schools to just have one-on-one talks with each student: see where they’re at, see how they’re feeling, what they want to pursue. Just have that intensive nature to each student to make sure they’re feeling heard, they’re feeling shown attention. And I feel like that’s really helpful, especially in a high school setting where there’s a lot of kids and being heard goes a long way.” –Alejandro Blanco, rising sophomore, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Illinois

When we asked students what they found to be most helpful in considering postsecondary options, nearly all of them mentioned talking with an older peer or adult. For instance, Jaylen will be attending Columbia University this fall on a full scholarship. But she was no expert at the college application process. Instead, she relied on help from various college readiness programs to research the application, financial aid, and negotiation processes. Brady, who wants to study computer science at Georgia Tech, has been getting advice about the admissions process from his football coach (an alumni) and his uncle (a current student).

Continuing the conversation

The students also spoke of the increasing external pressure they feel for their generation to attend college, rectify key issues like climate change, and generally “do well.” If we put expectations like these onto youth, it’s only fair that we also provide the necessary supports for them to succeed.

Bottom line: educators must listen to students now more than ever. As they are currently navigating the educational system, they have the best understanding of its strengths, and more importantly, what it still lacks. Older youth who were forced out of the education system during a global health crisis were especially vulnerable to its flaws. They deserve better. They want to be heard. And they expect adults to act on their advice.

“I’m on the DC State Board of Education, and they were so excited to have student members of the board. My first term, we couldn’t get anything done. I’d ask [for help] at public meetings and instead of even saying no, they just would not respond. Everyone would just go silent for a minute and move on. I give 10 hours a week, I’m on two committees of the board, and they can’t even listen to me.” –Liv Birnstad, rising freshman, Harvard University, Massachusetts

“It feels like a lot more people want to hear what [students] say, but even though they hear what we say, that doesn’t mean they take it into account at all. It really feels like they just said, ‘Oh we listened to the kids but they’re young, they’re stupid, they don’t know.’ So we’ll just add it as an appendix to what we’re doing and then move on with what we think. And I guess that’s just really infuriating to me because I feel like I’d rather just not be listened to than to be tokenized.” –Arivumani Srivastava, rising sophomore, Pomona College, California

See more from the Center on Reinventing Public Education and its .

But then COVID struck. 

Thomas had trouble learning the subject online: She mastered some of the material two years behind schedule.  

“I always did really well in math — until I entered high school,” she said. “Because of COVID, I had to learn so many things on my own, especially in my ninth-grade year.”

Despite this challenge, Thomas remained a focused and determined student: She’s already earned an associate degree from Ivy Tech Community College and hopes to attend a top-ranked school next fall, possibly Columbia University, to which she applied early decision.

Thomas’s struggle with mathematics mirrors that of students throughout the nation: Test results released in June charting long-term trends show 13-year-olds have suffered tremendous losses. The NAEP scores unveiled in October 2022 revealed a five-point decrease in math for fourth graders and an eight-point plummet for eighth graders, the largest drops ever recorded.

Disparities along racial lines were significantly worsened by the pandemic and the alarming outcomes for Black students on state exams in Indiana, where Thomas lives, prompted the state’s NAACP last year to release an plan to address long-standing inequities. 

Last year, in Indianapolis, Thomas’s city, passed both the math and English sections of the state’s tests. Recent state assessments show a majority of children in Indiana cannot meet minimum math standards: Just 41% of students in grades 3-8 scored proficient or better in the math portion of the state’s ILEARN exam. 

In Indiana and across the country, educators and advocates are searching for ways to make the subject more relevant and engaging — and less a source of failure. 

Some are working to address persistent obstacles for low-income children and students of color by re-evaluating their requirements and offerings. To that end, many are providing students with additional pathways — not just one road leading to calculus, a course whose value is being questioned, even for those students who seek a career in STEM.  

Thomas is among BELIEVE’s 300 students, most of them children of color: 51% of the charter high school’s student body is Black while 41% are Latino. Nearly all qualified for free or reduced-price lunch last school year. 

Thomas is currently enrolled in Advanced Placement Statistics, excelling in a class she believes will one day help her to better her local community. 

She’s glad her school offers numerous rigorous mathematics courses and plans to continue with the subject in college where she seeks to study journalism, education and law. Thomas is one of seven children: Hers is the first generation to attend college. 

���˶���: Do you think it’s possible to skip your freshman year of college after earning so many college credits in high school?

Jania Thomas: I’m hoping that I could move into my sophomore year. It just depends on the college that I get accepted to and how many of my credits transfer over.

Tell me how you’ve done in math through the years.

Before high school, math was, for sure, my favorite subject because it was something that I quickly latched on to and that I could understand. It’s not like the sciences or reading because it’s all stats. You just have to understand the steps. I always did really well in math — until I entered high school.

And what happened then?

Because of COVID, I had to learn so many things on my own, especially in my ninth-grade year. That’s when the letters came into it: sign, cosign, tangents and triangles. I really struggled, especially my freshman year and into my sophomore year.

Did that improve when school resumed?

I was better in the classroom environment. I started to get it because I had more one-on-one time with my teachers. I had to learn things that I thought I knew from my ninth-grade year in my sophomore and junior year.

How have you done since?

When I took my college algebra class at Ivy Tech, I really enjoyed it. It was more focused on degrees, measurements and numbers.

Many students in previous generations were told to take calculus to qualify for top-tier schools. Did you ever hear that?

I’m really glad to have the opportunity to choose the math classes I want: I have more autonomy over the courses I can take. I’ve spoken with my counselor, and she’s never said that.

What role do you think math will play in your professional life?

I don’t know what specific field I want to go into, but I like dealing with finances.

I want to fight against inequality within the American system. I know I’m going to have to understand a lot of concepts pertaining to money, which is all math.

But you want to pursue the subject for other reasons, right?

I want to be someone you could come to if you’re struggling. I want to start a tutoring program. I’ve tutored before and I want to be able to help students in all subjects. If I stopped learning math now, I wouldn’t grow (in that area.) I would rather have a growth mindset than one that’s stagnant.

How far do you plan to go educationally?

I want to get at least one doctorate. I’ve always told myself I will be in school for the rest of my life because I enjoy being in the classroom environment. I’ll just be getting degree after degree after degree, not trying to reach a limit, but just trying to attain the most information that I can so that I can apply it to the real world and teach it to other people.

Are you concerned about paying for school?

That’s one thing that’s given me a lot of anxiety in my senior year. My school is focused a lot on trying to help us fill out scholarships. I’m just going to fill out as many scholarships as I can my senior year and while I’m in college.

Hanushek is right about this: Teachers already working in schools are the key to addressing COVID losses. He would know, because he in this area. However, his suggested remedy would reach far too few students to get the impact needed, and dismissing struggling teachers is premature in light of shortages.

Nearly 15 years ago, we drew on Hanushek’s research to create innovative school staffing designs, now known as the national initiative. After a decade of helping schools implement many variations of these designs and teaching roles, data from thousands of teachers — and this year, about 170,000 students in over 800 schools in 12 states — shows that it is possible to deliver excellent teaching to large numbers of kids by engaging many educators, not just the elite.

Schools using Opportunity Culture designs create small teaching teams led by educators with a record of producing high-growth student learning. In addition to teaching for part of the day, leaders observe, coach, model instruction and plan with their team members. They earn more and are accountable for the results of all the team’s students.

Team teachers may directly work with more students than usual, also for higher pay, but most use rotating small groups so children can receive individualized attention. Some schools reallocate funds from staff vacancies or interventions that aren’t showing results to hire paraprofessionals and create year-long teacher residencies to provide small-group tutoring. Pay supplements are about 20% extra, on average, for the team leaders, up to 12% for teachers and up to 10% for paraprofessionals. These are funded through reallocations of funds in regular school budgets, by repurposing salaries from vacant staff positions and sometimes by using sources such as Title I. Reallocating regular funds means schools can sustain these roles permanently, not just while ESSER or other grant money lasts.

Two third-party using teacher-level data show that with these teams, on average, student learning increases about an extra half-year annually and participating teachers move from the 50th to the 77th percentile in producing student growth in both reading and math. And annual, anonymous surveys show that teachers like this structure.

Critically, schools need fewer long-term subs to fill vacancies when they have these teams in place, and teacher shortages may decline when educators are offered better career opportunities. Providing team leadership, guidance and collaboration — and including more teachers, not just the “most effective,” as Hanushek recommends, in higher-paid roles — correlates in our data with greater odds of schoolwide high-growth learning.

Instead of spending on short-term, small results, states and districts should use temporary ESSER funds to create roles like the ones we describe here, which can reach far more students.

Every district committed to reaching all students with excellent teaching can run with it, leveraging the new roles to achieve student gains. Using of translating student learning gains into impact on economic growth, it would add $6 billion to $10 billion to an average state’s economy over the next 16 years if three-fourths of schools made the transition rapidly.

Nearly all districts could give students access to excellent teaching and high-growth learning while paying teachers more. There really isn’t any reason to ask students and communities to wait longer, or to accept small, temporary solutions.