Closing the COVID Inequality Gap
5 TAKEAWAYS
➀ Learning loss has been extensive during the pandemic, hurting some students more than others. Bryan Hancock of McKinsey & Co. said that poor students and students of color have fallen further behind their classmates since COVID-19 sent schools online in March 2020. His analysis of student assessments, administered before and during the pandemic, found that all students lost ground in both reading and math. The shortfalls were starker for some students. “If you look at the difference between schools that are majority students of color, versus schools that are majority whites, the difference is widened,” Hancock said. “So white students in math are one to three months behind, and students of color in math, schools that are majority students of color more three to five months behind.” Among the possible reasons: More Black students are remote learners than white ones, and they have less access to computers and the internet.
➁ Limited access to the internet has been a significant barrier for some students. By surveying teachers and principals, Julia Kaufman and her colleagues at the RAND Corp. found that a significant percentage of students had inadequate internet access at home. RAND was able to break that down by state, asking teachers if “all or nearly all” of their students had access to the internet at home. In high-poverty schools in some states, only about 20% of teachers answered yes. Kaufman also found that the number of students showing up for school has dropped this year, from more than 53 million students to between 45 million and 46 million. “That’s a difference of 4 to 5 million kids who aren’t learning at school – whether school be remote, hybrid, in-person – but would likely be doing so in a typical school year,” she said.
➂ Learning losses are likely to continue through spring of 2021. The format of schools in the second half of the 2020-2021 school year is still up in the air. Many schools are attempting to have more in-person instruction in the second semester, but that is bumping up against a severe COVID surge. Based on current teaching trends, McKinsey’s forecast isn’t pretty. “By the end of this year, on average, students will be nine months behind in math compared to where they otherwise would have been,” Hancock said. That translates into being seven to eight months behind for white students and 11 to 12 months for students of color.
➃ This isn’t new, as schools have long struggled to teach poor children. The COVID losses come after decades of schools failing to boost achievement for low-income students. Katharine Stevens of the American Enterprise Institute reviewed the connection between education spending, which has steadily risen for five decades, and educational achievement, which has flatlined during that time. (She also detailed the National Assessment of Educational Progress and how reporters can analyze it.) “We need to be asking, ‘How can the same schools that failed these children for years before COVID help them catch up after?’” she said. “I think the answer is that they can’t.”
➄ Intensive tutoring and broadband access could help stem some of the learning losses. Hancock said one method that has helped some students is “high intensity tutoring,” where a teacher or a paraprofessional or even a college student works with a student, allowing them to ask questions and get the specialized help they need. Stevens said the United Kingdom has just rolled out a national tutoring program to help stem COVID learning loss. Similar programs are popping up in some states, including Minnesota, Tennessee and North Carolina. “The only way we can head off an enormous catastrophe is to find a new approach,” Stevens said.
See Also
Op-Ed ~ January 6, 2021
Blog ~ December 21, 2020
Event ~ February 2, 2021