Nine-year-old children have been particularly affected by COVID-19, because beyond what it caused on an emotional or even physical level, their education was brutally affected, since according to the results of a national test, the pandemic erased two decades of progress in mathematics and reading for that group of the population.
For the first time since National Assessment of Educational Progress tests began tracking student knowledge in the 1970s, 9-year-olds' math and reading performance has fallen to levels seen two decades ago.
These devastating effects cut across nearly all ethnicities and income levels, but were markedly worse for the lowest-performing students.
While those in the top 90th percentile showed a modest drop, three points in math, students in the bottom 10th percentile dropped 12 points in math, four times the impact.
In math, African-American students lost 13 points, compared with five points among white students, widening the gap between the two groups.
The study also highlighted the profound effect that school closures had on low-income students, especially African Americans and Latinos.
The decline in test scores means that while many 9-year-olds can demonstrate partial understanding of what they are reading, fewer can infer a character's feelings from what they have read.
In math, students may know simple arithmetic operations, but they have a harder time adding fractions with common denominators.
The setbacks could have powerful consequences for a generation of children who must go beyond the basics in elementary school to thrive later in life.
“Students’ test scores, even as early as first, second and third grade, are really very predictive of their success later in school and their educational trajectories in general,” Susanna Loeb, director of the Annenberg Institute at Brown University, which focuses on educational inequality, told The New York Times.
"The main reason for concern is the lower performance of the lowest-performing children," he added.
In this regard, she pointed out that such a delay could lead to disconnection from school, which would make it less likely that they would graduate from high school or attend university.
The National Assessment of Educational Progress is considered a gold standard in testing. Unlike state tests, it is standardized across the country, has remained consistent over time and does not attempt to hold individual schools accountable for results, which experts say makes it more reliable.
While scores in reading and especially math have generally trended upward or remained steady since the test began in 1970, including a period of strong progress from the late 1990s to the mid-2000s, the pandemic and school closures that forced schools to move to a fully online system left children scrambling to learn from home.
In some parts of the country, the worst of the disruptions were short-lived and schools reopened that fall, but in other areas, particularly large cities with large populations of low-income students and students of color, schools remained closed for many months and some did not fully reopen until last year.
There are signs that students who have fully returned to school have begun learning at a normal pace, but experts say it will take more than a typical school day to make up for gaps created by the pandemic.
With information from The New York Times.
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