Why aren’t we treating the big plunge in student test scores like a national emergency?

Getting kids more schooling is an imperative. So long, three-month summer vaycays. Thanks, school closures!

 
Item: U.S. students in most states and across almost all demographic groups have experienced troubling setbacks in both math and reading, according to an authoritative national exam released on Monday, offering the most definitive indictment yet of the pandemic’s impact on millions of schoolchildren. In math, the results were especially devastating, representing the steepest declines ever recorded on the National Assessment of Educational Progress, known as the nation’s report card, which tests a broad sampling of fourth and eighth graders and dates to the early 1990s. – The New York Times, 10/24/2022

 
Item: National test results released on Thursday showed in stark terms the pandemic’s devastating effects on American schoolchildren, with the performance of 9-year-olds in math and reading dropping to the levels from two decades ago. This year, for the first time since the National Assessment of Educational Progress tests began tracking student achievement in the 1970s, 9-year-olds lost ground in math, and scores in reading fell by the largest margin in more than 30 years. – The New York Times, 09/01/2022

Well, what did we all think would happen, folks?

Back in the summer of 2020, I wrote that “keeping kids out of school this year would be … an economic catastrophe, every bit as serious as the deep recession from which we are currently recovering.” Now, more than two years later, I humbly concede my mistake. Yes, the Great Economic Lockdown that year was incredibly damaging, technically the worst recession on record. But the US economy has since recovered all of the job losses suffered during the pandemic. And the economy is now running above its long-term GDP potential (contributing to hot inflation).

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Πηγή: fasterplease.substack.com