It’s a Somber New Year for K-12 Schools

“If the recovery effort is not expanded to involve all the resources that every community has to offer, our young people, especially the most vulnerable, face a diminished future.”

With each passing year, the staggering kindergarten to 12th grade (K-12) student learning loss from pandemic school closures becomes more apparent. It haunts America’s education system—its ghost an emergency described as “education’s long COVID.” Valiant educator-led efforts are underway to remedy the problem. With that said, an early lesson of these recovery efforts is that K-12 educators alone cannot solve the problem. As schools enter the new year of 2024, K-12 leaders and classroom educators must reboot and broaden their current problem-solving efforts to develop community-wide recovery strategies.

If the recovery effort is not expanded to involve all the resources that every community has to offer, our young people, especially the most vulnerable, face a diminished future. For example, Stanford University economist Eric Hanushek calculates that if learning loss is not reversed, the average student’s lifetime earnings will be 6% lower, the equivalent of a 6% income tax surcharge on students’ working lives. Nor will these losses be equally distributed: The most disadvantaged will suffer the worst consequences.

A supercharged community recovery strategy should be honest about the enormity of learning loss. It must be informed by the most promising evidence on what is working to remedy the problem. And it must include a community report card with timely and reliable accountability information on the progress being made to remedy learning loss and what work needs to be done.

The Learning Loss Puzzle

The assessment provider Northwest Evaluation Association (NWEA) reports that students in grades three to eight lost ground in reading and math during the 2022-23 school year. On average, they need four more months in school to catch up to pre-pandemic levels, though “average” hides variation across grades, subjects, and characteristics such as race and income levels.