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Harvard Study: Student Development Harmed Much Less in States with Open Schools During COVID

Guy Benson
Guy Benson  |  May 11, 2022 10:25 AM

In Monday's post, I promised to revisit Boston's ongoing school mask mandate, and we'll get to that issue momentarily. But first, we are slowly but surely learning more about the consequences of anti-science, COVID-related school closures. As Dr. Deborah Birx told me last week, shuttering classrooms in the earliest days of the pandemic was a reasonable decision, given what we did and did not know about the nature of the virus at the time. But by the fall of the following school year, she said there was plenty of data to support the reopening of schools. In many places, especially areas of the country dominated by Democrats and their teachers union patrons, that essential decision was not made until the following fall – resulting in acute and disastrous learning loss for millions of students. A new study out of Harvard attempts to quantify at least some of the damage: 

A new report on pandemic learning loss found that high-poverty schools both spent more weeks in remote instruction during 2020-21 and suffered large losses in achievement when they did so. Districts that remained largely in-person, however, lost relatively little ground. Experts predict the results will foreshadow a widening in measures of the nation’s racial and economic achievement gap. The report was a joint effort of the Center for Education Policy Research at Harvard University, the National Center for Analysis of Longitudinal Data in Education Research at the American Institutes for Research, and NWEA, a nonprofit research and educational services provider. It analyzed achievement data from 2.1 million students in 10,000 schools across 49 states and is the first in a series that will be tracking the impact of catch-up efforts over the next two years...We found that districts that spent more weeks in remote instruction lost more ground than districts that returned to in-person instruction sooner. Anyone who has been teaching by Zoom would not be surprised by that.

The striking and important finding was that remote instruction had much more negative impacts in high-poverty schools. High-poverty schools were more likely to go remote and their students lost more when they did so. Both mattered, but the latter effect mattered more. To give you a sense of the magnitude: In high-poverty schools that were remote for more than half of 2021, the loss was about half of a school year’s worth of typical achievement growth...There are 50 million students in the U.S. About 40 percent, or 20 million students, nationally were in schools that conducted classes remotely for less than four weeks, and 30 percent, or 15 million students, remained in remote instruction for more than 16 weeks. In other words, about 40 percent spent less than a month in remote instruction, but about 30 percent spent more than four months in remote instruction. It is the dramatic growth in educational inequity in those districts that remained remote that should worry us.

More details: 


Progressives prattle on endlessly about "racial justice" and "equity" and "systemic racism." This study is another data point proving that Democrat-driven COVID safetyism, which departed dramatically from actual science, did disproportionate and lasting harm to countless non-privileged children in the United States. It's unforgivable, especially when one considers that teachers' unions used their political influence to literally alter the pseudo-"Science," guidance that was then used to justify long-term school closures. Those under-privileged students fortunate enough to live in states run by conservative governors (who followed the data and prioritized kids' wellbeing) ended up much better off, thanks to operational schools and in-person instruction.  It's a shameful outrage that millions of American students were locked out of classrooms for nearly a year-and-a-half by ostensibly pro-science adults, due largely to (1) horrible risk assessment, (2) a collective, panicked aversion to data, and (3) tribal partisan politics.

I'm convinced that the last point was a major piece of the puzzle. President Trump opined that schools should reopen ahead of the 2020-21 academic year – and he was right. But Trump couldn't be right on anything, according to many of the Resistance-minded decision-makers running the show in blue states and cities, so they reflexively did the opposite, regardless of what the real science demonstrated. And when "bad" governors like Brian Kemp in Georgia, Greg Abbott in Texas, and especially Ron DeSantis in Florida moved toward reopenings, it was seen as a partisan duty to sprint in the opposite direction. Kemp was hit hard for reopening soonest ("human sacrifice"). Abbott was accused of signing a death warrant for Texans (the Lone Star State is better than average on COVID death rates). And we know everything they've thrown at Florida (a recent left-dominated MSNBC panel even begrudgingly admitted that Florida has emerged pretty well from the pandemic). Students in those states are much better off than their counterparts in blue areas, and this Harvard research helps prove it. And the less privileged the student was in those blue areas, the more dire his or her learning loss was. How's that for "equity"? There are a great deal of "now it can be said" admissions happening these days, including this one: 

On average, students who attended in-person school for nearly all of 2020-21 lost about 20 percent worth of a typical school year’s math learning during the study’s two-year window. Some of those losses stemmed from the time the students had spent learning remotely during the spring of 2020, when school buildings were almost universally closed. And some of the losses stemmed from the difficulties of in-person schooling during the pandemic, as families coped with disruption and illness. But students who stayed home for most of 2020-21 fared much worse. On average, they lost the equivalent of about 50 percent of a typical school year’s math learning during the study’s two-year window.

Here's another: 


"Belated" and "tardy" don't even begin to cover the extent of the policy catastrophe here. After school closures became untenable – they're largely rejected now, though some far-left officials continue to threaten them – the next battlefront was forcible masking in schools. While less disastrous than closures, mandatory masking inhibited student development and was scientifically unsupportable-to-useless, setting aside harms, per multiple studies. Because Republicans were pushing to end mask requirements and introduce optional masking, it had to be opposed. Same dynamic. The science didn't matter; the politics did. And so children were harmed for additional weeks and months for absolutely no reason. And it's not past tense, in some cases, which brings us back to the Boston example: 

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Boston Public Schools won't let students ditch their masks, two months after the city dropped its indoor mask mandate. According to the school district's COVID-19 health and safety guidelines, all "staff and students must wear a mask on school property" or while riding school buses. The mask requirement remains more than two months after the city dropped its indoor mask mandate. Some parents are frustrated by the inconsistency. "Enough is enough. You can go to City Hall or catch a game at the Garden without masking, but our kids are mandated to wear masks all day in school while trying to learn," Joy McDonald, the mother of a student in the district, told the Washington Free Beacon. McDonald worries that mask mandates are stunting students academically and socially, adding, "It's not fair to impose this on our youth." ... Boston Public Schools shut its doors for more than a year during the coronavirus pandemic, resuming in-person instruction in September 2021.

Tripling down on indefensible anti-student failure, under the guise of "Science." And deep blue holdouts like Boston insist on this nonsense even as their preferred and scientifically-useless superstition has fallen out of favor with a commanding majority of the American public: