Ginny Gentles joins the podcast to discuss this month’s policy focus: Learning Loss. We explore how the lowest-risk demographic — children — have struggled throughout the pandemic because of school closures and remote learning. We discuss the learning loss data, and how this has impacted not only children’s mental health but also their ability to thrive in college and the workforce.
Virginia (Ginny) Gentles is the director of the Education Freedom Center at Independent Women’s Forum and is a contributor to Independent Women’s Network. Ginny is a long-time school choice advocate and former state and federal education policy leader. She served as a senior political appointee in the U.S. Department of Education under President George W. Bush, and her work has appeared in National Review, Newsweek, City Journal, Real Clear Education, and Townhall.
TRANSCRIPT
Beverly Hallberg:
And welcome to She Thinks, the podcast where you’re allowed to think for yourself. I’m your host, Beverly Hallberg, and thank you for joining us for this month’s IWF policy focus, entitled Learning Loss. We’ll explore how the lowest-risk demographic in the country, children, have struggled throughout the pandemic because of school closures and remote learning, so we’re going to get into the learning loss data, and how this has impacted not only children’s mental health, but also their ability to thrive in college and the workforce. And joining us to break it all down is the author of the policy focus, Virginia “Ginny” Gentles joins us. She is the director of the Education Freedom Center at Independent Women’s Forum and is a contributor to the Independent Women’s Network. Ginny is a longtime school choice advocate and former state and federal educational policy leader. She served as a senior political appointee in the U.S. Department of Education under President George W. Bush, and her work has appeared in National Review, Newsweek, City Journal, RealClear Education, and Townhall. Ginny, a pleasure to have you on She Thinks today.
Ginny Gentles:
Thank you, Beverly. I’m glad to be here.
Beverly Hallberg:
And this is an important policy focus because it impacts so many families, obviously impacts most children, considering what most children face during the pandemic, and so I think it’s an unfortunate policy focus that we’re even here talking about learning loss, but it is the reality. So I think, before we jump into what do we know today, I think it would be good to look at where was education prior to the pandemic? How well were children doing prior to the two years of upheaval that we’ve seen?
Ginny Gentles:
I think that’s a really important place to start because we know that the news is bad at this point — we can’t avoid it, that the news coming out of the pandemic is bad for student achievement. I don’t think that many parents and community members were aware of the position that kids were in going into the pandemic. There’s a nation’s report card, also called NAEP, and they test a sampling of students across the country every couple of years. The 2019 NAEP scores for reading showed that really only a third of students were reading proficiently, were reading at not the basic level, but the proficient level. These were kids equipped to go on to college and were going to be career-ready. In math, the NAEP scores in 2019 were something like 40%. But when you start digging down into that data and you look at the 12th-grade math achievement, it’s lower, I think it’s like a quarter of the 12th graders were proficient in math in 2019 going into the pandemic. Then, when you start digging down further into additional subjects like civics, you’re talking like 12%. Really, it’s distressing how low achievement was pre-pandemic.
Beverly Hallberg:
Where did we compare at that point in time in reference to the world? So we know that China is usually doing better. The academics there are very, very tough, but were we falling way behind, way behind other countries as well?
Ginny Gentles:
Well, that’s not a new statistic to share with your listeners. I think people are generally aware of the fact that as much as the United States spends on education, which is a remarkable amount — you’re talking, on average, 15,000 per student, but up to in the 20s and maybe up to 30,000 per student in urban districts — that spending does not show results, and it certainly does not compare well internationally. And the United States is often quite low, almost to the bottom of Western nations as far as achievement.
Beverly Hallberg:
We headed into this pandemic already doing poorly, already failing our children, and then we have these two years of disrupted learning, which obviously does impact children in a wide variety of ways. I want to talk about what is meant for them specifically for things like reading and math scores, even literacy, so what do we know at this point in time on how children fared during these two years? Now, of course, depending on where a child lived, it depended based on where they lived, whether or not they were back in school doing in-person learning sooner than others, so I assume it’s region to region, city to city, how children fared, but what do we see as a whole? What is the data pointing to?
Ginny Gentles:
Well, I wrote this learning loss policy focus for the Independent Women’s Forum before a major study came out. And that study — let’s start there with the most recent data. That’s a study that came out; a combination of organizations wrote it. It was published through Harvard University and received coverage in both The New York Times and also The Atlantic, so now, I think everyone knows what we’re dealing with when it comes to learning loss. That study looked at students in 49 states and Washington, D.C. We’re talking data for over two million students. The picture is bleak. When they looked at, I believe it was math, they compared the students who were not out of school as much.
Of course, most schools closed in March 2020, and that spring was difficult for education, and a lot of students were impacted, but students in many parts of the country, they returned to school in the fall of 2020, and continue to go to school, maybe with some disruptions due to pandemic quarantine policies, but students in particularly urban areas, coastal areas, they stayed out of school. I live in one of those areas that was determined to keep schools closed, even for most of the 2020-21 school year.
This study out of Harvard University found that the students who were in the districts that reopened in the fall and were primarily opened that next school year, they lost about 20% of a year’s worth of math compared to previous years; versus the students in districts that were closed and kept kids out of schools and provided “remote instruction” during the 2020-21 school year, for the most part, those students lost 50%, the equivalent of 50% of a year worth of math instruction. What’s particularly horrible about this is that the students who lived in these school districts that were determined to stay closed were more likely to be low-income and more likely to be black and Hispanic minority students. Those were the kids who got hit the hardest by these school closures and those are the kids who are suffering the most with this learning loss crisis that we’re facing.
Beverly Hallberg:
When you look at the school districts where they were closed longer, closed for some, up to even two years, what is it about the online learning that leads to this learning loss? Is it just impossible for a teacher to teach the same amount of hours, for the students to be able to pay attention that long when they’re using an iPad or a computer? Or were teachers just not teaching, were kids just not showing up to class? What are some of the reasons for that?
Ginny Gentles:
Well, I think that you referenced a number of elements in your question there. I think one thing that might be a bit of a misconception is that we talk about Zoom school: that when schools were closed, that parents were looking over the shoulder of their students into Zoom classrooms. That’s something that I actually say, but it’s technically not accurate for a lot of what students were actually experiencing. They weren’t necessarily logged on in the morning at 8:30 when school started and logged off at 3:00 when the school day was over. A lot of students were in school districts, in schools, that simply uploaded assignments to a classroom management system and expected the students and/or their parents to download those assignments, ensure that the student completed them, and then go through the steps necessary to then upload the completed assignments back into the system so that the teacher could review them.
That has nothing to do with the actual experience of going to school. That does not look like the direct classroom instruction that students needed and deserved throughout the pandemic, even when they were receiving remote instruction, so the quality of remote instruction was a very much a factor here, the fact that a lot of students were not directly interacting with teachers at all, and then the attendance, as you referenced. It’s kind of understandable, particularly for students who were at home on their own without adults helping them navigate these systems because their parents were out and working and out of the house, those kids really became disengaged, and understandably so, and so attendance fell off. Then when schools, even when they reopened, a lot of those kids have been lost to the system and have not returned.
Beverly Hallberg:
There’s also this other element, which is, you mentioned low-income students who are greatly impacted by this, the areas that closed the longest. There’s also the fact that not every household can afford high-speed internet, not every household can afford multiple computers if they have multiple children, so is part of this that even some households couldn’t afford all the virtual learning tools that were needed in order for the children to even learn, even if it wasn’t quality learning, at least learned something?
Ginny Gentles:
I think it’s worth noting that the ability to connect remotely was difficult from a technical aspect, and I do think that we saw a number of examples of districts absolutely doing the right thing by ensuring that they were distributing Chromebooks and iPads to students and going to extra measures to reach kids to ensure that they had the technology they needed. School districts were even making in hotspots available. You heard early on of South Carolina school districts parking buses in various places so that kids would have better access — buses that would then help with their remote access, so there were anecdotal stories about districts doing the right thing from the technology standpoint. That doesn’t mean that it all came together and that it all worked.
And then the federal government certainly made funding available so that school districts could do this. There were three rounds of federal funding that were sent out to K-to-12 schools, totaling 190 billion dollars of supplemental federal funding, and especially early on with the Cares Act in spring of 2020, there was an expectation that that funding was going to be used just for this sort of thing, but it wasn’t, and the kids did not receive the technology and the access that they needed, and the low-income families were disproportionately impacted.
Beverly Hallberg:
And so this begs a question for those children who have fallen behind because their schools were not open, there was no in-person learning or, as you even mentioned, schools are reopened but students just haven’t gone back. Is, for those who have gone back, those who’ve fallen behind, can they catch up? What is that process of trying to get them to be able to compete on the same level as other students who’ve been in class longer?
Ginny Gentles:
One thing that I addressed in the policy focus were just the avalanche of studies that have been coming out throughout the pandemic, showing that this was happening. We saw this unfold. We didn’t have to wait for this definitive Harvard study. We knew early on that these kids were falling behind. One of those studies that I cite looked at, again, millions of students’ achievement data and identified the fact that the students were doing worse as they were back in school and testing, and the study concluded that there’s a compounding effect to these closures, to what happened with these students, so I think right now, I don’t see the light and see a lot of hope for getting kids caught up because I think, right now, we’re just really in a dark place, acknowledging just how widespread the learning loss is, just how much it disproportionately impacted vulnerable students, and the compounding effects of the learning loss, of the school closures.
One group that we haven’t mentioned are the younger children who were on Zoom, or not even on Zoom, when schools were closed, in kindergarten and 1st grade, even into 2nd grade, and therefore did not learn to read because, understandably, a teacher was not able to teach them to read. Then when they returned to classrooms, a lot of times the teachers were wearing masks, and the students weren’t able to see their mouths and learn how to form sounds and pronounce words, and so they fell even further behind in reading, and so those students are still struggling. If you hadn’t learned how to read before the pandemic, a lot of those kids are still struggling to learn how to read well up into elementary school, so it looks pretty bleak.
But I think that your question wasn’t how bad is it — we’ve covered that — your question was, is there anything to do to catch them up, and what can be done? So, there certainly is an effort underway to provide what’s called “high-dosage tutoring.” There has been some effort to offer summer school. There’s been very little effort to extend the school day or to, say, double up on, on math, or double up on, on reading. All of those efforts, though, require staff, require tutors, require teachers, and school districts are having trouble both on the contracting front to work through the process of taking these billions of federal supplemental funding and getting them out the door. Then also, they’re having trouble finding staff who are willing to stay after school to provide the extra tutoring and to teach in summer school.
Beverly Hallberg:
Well, I wanted to take a quick break to ask you, our audience, a question: are you a conservative woman? Do you feel problematic for just existing in today’s political landscape? If so, I have something for you. Every Thursday morning on Problematic Women, Lauren Evans and Virginia Allen sort through the news to bring you stories and interviews that are of particular interest to you, a problematic woman — that is, a woman whose opinions are often excluded or even mocked by those on the so-called “pro-woman left.” Lauren and Virginia break down the news you care about in an upbeat and sharp-witted way, so search for Problematic Women wherever you get your podcasts.
And we are talking to Virginia “Ginny” Gentles; her policy focus at IWF this month, which you can find on iwf.org, is called Learning Loss, so we’ve gone through the learning loss problems that we have seen, given some tips on what can be done. I want to focus also on another part of the loss that we’ve seen. There’s the learning loss itself, but there’s also the social loss. There’s the loss of mental wellbeing, the mental health aspect. There’s also the loss of losing skills, the social skills needed for, let’s say, graduating and being able to get into higher education, for one’s career. Those things seem harder to measure. Does the policy focus get into the mental health, and also just the ability for a child to thrive after K-12, or are those a little bit outside of this focus?
Ginny Gentles:
This is absolutely an area that’s important to the Independent Women’s Forum, also a discussion that we have regularly over on the Independent Women’s Network. I would say the policy focus did address that in the sense that I cited McKinsey studies that mentioned that we’re not just talking about learning loss right now, we’re talking about the impacts of this, ensuring that students are going to be on a different life trajectory. They’re not going to have the same opportunities to go onto college, and this is going to impact lifelong learning.
As far as the social impacts, that’s something that I’ve addressed elsewhere as far as behavior issues that are impacting students and teachers, now that they’re back in the classroom. I know in my community, there are widespread discipline issues. The middle school that my daughter would have been attended, if we hadn’t switched to a private school that was open during the pandemic, the police have been called 22 times this year already to that middle school, so this is absolutely something that parents, community members, community leaders need to be very concerned about. Not only are we dealing with a learning loss crisis, we’re dealing with kids who emotionally, behaviorally, socially are not able to function as they should be in the classroom, and all of that needs to get back on track, both for the students, but also for the teachers. The teachers deserve to be working in safe environments.
Beverly Hallberg:
We talk a lot about children being resilient. I feel like we heard that a lot during the two years, but at the same time, we are talking about a group of individuals in this country who were one of the least impacted demographic by COVID, so we’re talking about young children who, thank God, were, for the majority of them, were not going to be impacted too negatively by COVID, yet we made all these changes to keep them out of school. People went back to work before kids went back to school in some areas. Do we look back now, especially as we look at this policy focus, and think, “Man, we got it all wrong”?
Ginny Gentles:
Well, some of us were saying that all along. Actually, quite a few people were saying that all along. If you go through Twitter, the hashtag #OpenSchools Twitter, hashtag #TeamReality Twitter. A lot of us knew that a crisis was unfolding right before our eyes. We had the data. The studies were showing that. We knew the kids were low risk. The evidence showed that. It just wasn’t allowed, it just wasn’t to be said, it wasn’t condoned. But now it is. Again, Harvard University study, it’s been covered by The New York Times, it’s been written about in The Atlantic, so we’re allowed to say that.
But it’s not gratifying that we’re on the other end of this, and everybody else is now agreeing with #OpenSchools and #TeamReality. It’s still devastating that the kids experienced what they did when they shouldn’t have and that the kids have lost so much and that the kids are going to be struggling. This impacts their life trajectories, particularly the vulnerable students, the low-income students, the minority students we’ve talked about, the younger students who hadn’t learned to read, and then a third group of vulnerable students we haven’t talked about yet, and those are the students with special needs. Those students needed an established schedule. They needed and have a federal law, IDEA, that granted them, should have granted them protection and access to services, to supports, to therapies. All of that was stripped away, and those vulnerable students struggled, and will continue to.
Sure, everybody now is agreeing, “Gosh, we shouldn’t have done that. That was wrong,” but we still have a crisis on our hands that we need to address. And that’s what I’m concerned about. We don’t perhaps need to be spending too much time pointing fingers. We need to be working really hard to ensure that these students, particularly the vulnerable students, are receiving the services, the tutoring, the intense academic instruction, and the focus and the care that they need at this point.
Beverly Hallberg:
Absolutely. And sadly, I think as more time goes on and more research is done, we’re going to find that there are lifelong effects to some of the decisions that we made in COVID, especially when it comes to children that impacted them, things like learning loss due to school closures. That’s why a policy focus like this is so important. Ginny Gentles with IWF, thank you so much for your time today and joining us on She Thinks.
Ginny Gentles:
Thank you, Beverly.
Beverly Hallberg:
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