The most difficult policy area to assess at this point is education. Federal tests in reading and math were suspended early in the pandemic, and while some states have conducted their own testing, those assessments are not comparable across states. Schools, districts and state officials have few tools at this point in the pandemic to assess how their students have fared; federal data won’t be available until sometime next year at the earliest.
Currently, one of the only tools that is available is assessment data from private testing companies. POLITICO’s scorecard compiled data from three of those companies into a combined dataset that, while not necessarily representative of a state’s entire population, provides a preliminary snapshot of how a state’s students have fared during the pandemic.
The education score was derived from changes in reading and math assessments from each state’s pre-pandemic baseline to spring 2021. Many districts and schools also experienced drops in enrollment during the pandemic as students struggled to make the transition to online or hybrid education or experienced family difficulties. As a result, we also included change in public school enrollment in the education score.
The data provided by the companies represented a range of students by demographics and geography, but we can’t be certain how closely the final dataset is representative of a state’s population. The dataset includes some private and religious schools, so the results also may not match state testing that included only public schools. One company provided data only for students who took the test at school, as opposed to at home. The other two reported that a majority of tests were taken at school, or in districts where more than 50 percent of schools were not physically closed. Students who take assessment tests at home tend to score higher.
Because of these limitations, we have scored the education category more broadly, giving each state a rank of “little to no learning loss,” “some learning loss” or “most learning loss.” Two states, Maryland and Wyoming, were excluded from the education category because they did not have private testing data with a large enough sample to analyze. (Here’s more information about our scoring system.)
The main takeaway from this data backs up the consensus view in the education community that schools who had more days of in-person school have seen less learning loss in their students. Those decisions to keep students in school, of course, came with risks in other areas, and as with other categories in the scorecard, those trade-offs need to be weighed against their downsides: Many of the states whose students appear at this point to have done better also experienced poorer health outcomes.
For the most part, state leaders who imposed fewer pandemic restrictions on businesses also reopened schools for in-person learning sooner and longer. The scorecard reflects that connection as states who scored well in the education category generally also had better economic outcomes.
Some education policy experts we contacted in compiling the scorecard made the case that the data available now is too preliminary and partial for readers to reach any conclusions, primarily because we can’t gauge how representative the data is of each state’s student population. On the other hand, looking at what we know so far about academic achievement and enrollment trends may help states assess their own policy choices and make decisions now that could help struggling learners catch up this school year before they fall further behind.
The stakes are high; researchers warn that learning lost during the pandemic could set back a generation.
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December 15, 2021 at 05:00PM
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Covid's deadly tradeoffs, by the numbers: How each state has fared in the pandemic - POLITICO
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