Tipsheet

NYT Once Again Acknowledges Just How Devastating Pandemic School Closures Were on Students

Leah Barkoukis
Leah Barkoukis  |  March 18, 2024 3:00 PM

The New York Times is acknowledging in a new report that pandemic school closures did not help stop the spread of COVID-19 and resulted in significant learning loss among students.

Four years later, the paper took a look at what the data show about the effects of remote learning on academic test scores and found that across income levels, academic declines were seen among students.

At the state level, more time spent in remote or hybrid instruction in the 2020-21 school year was associated with larger drops in test scores, according to a New York Times analysis of school closure data and results from the National Assessment of Educational Progress, an authoritative exam administered to a national sample of fourth- and eighth-grade students. 

At the school district level, that finding also holds, according to an analysis of test scores from third through eighth grade in thousands of U.S. districts, led by researchers at Stanford and Harvard. In districts where students spent most of the 2020-21 school year learning remotely, they fell more than half a grade behind in math on average, while in districts that spent most of the year in person they lost just over a third of a grade. (NYT)

Even more disconcerting is that students are still having a difficult time catching up. 

The most recent test scores, from spring 2023, show that students, overall, are not caught up from their pandemic losses, with larger gaps remaining among students that lost the most ground to begin with. Students in districts that were remote or hybrid the longest — at least 90 percent of the 2020-21 school year — still had almost double the ground to make up compared with students in districts that allowed students back for most of the year. (NYT)

“There’s fairly good consensus that, in general, as a society, we probably kept kids out of school longer than we should have,” Dr. Sean O’Leary, a pediatric infectious disease specialist involved in creating school reopening guidance, told The Times. 

While the Times’ editorial board acknowledged the learning loss last year, the paper spent most of the pandemic either denying the problem, shaming then-Education Secretary Betsy DeVos for urging schools to reopen, or deriding Sweden’s decision to keep life as normal as possible. But critics pointed out that the teachers unions were most to blame. 

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