The Nation’s Report Card landed with a thud last month. According to the National Assessment for Education Progress’s annual report, America is failing its students.
Since the early 1990s, the country has seen, on average, slow growth in reading and math scores.
This year,
math scores regressed back to 2003’s levels, and reading scores to 1992’s levels, signaling a loss of educational progress of decades, not just years.
WHITE HOUSE TRIES TO DISTANCE DEMOCRATS FROM COSTLY SCHOOL CLOSURES
Families
are understandably frustrated and looking for ways to turn things around, just as they would be if their child brought home a poor report card.
Many are already pointing the finger at the once-in-a-century pandemic that hit in 2020. To a degree, this is true. But the response to the pandemic is what’s to blame. Not every country mirrored the U.S. pandemic response with respect to
education,
and the results aren’t the same, either.
Sweden, for example,
kept
preschools, primary schools, and lower secondary schools open throughout the pandemic, even in its early days. The Nordic country opted instead for pandemic-fighting measures, such as quarantine recommendations, rather than blanket school closures.
As a result, a 2022 International Journal of Educational Research
report
found no evidence of early reading loss during the pandemic era in Sweden: “In the light of international studies on reading skills in younger students during the pandemic, we conclude that the decision to keep schools open benefitted Swedish primary school students. This decision might also have mitigated other potentially negative effects of school closures, especially for students from more disadvantaged backgrounds.”
The Swedish success story signals that the massive learning loss across America’s schools was not inevitable.
Even within the United States, certain schools bucked the trend of locking schoolhouse doors at any cost. Children who attended Catholic schools, for instance,
weathered the learning loss storm
better than students in other sectors.
Johnstown, Pennsylvania, is one of the lowest-income communities in America. Not surprisingly, it’s also one of the lowest academic-performing communities for K-12 students.
Most schools in Johnstown were closed during the 2020–21 school year amid pandemic concerns. But
Bishop McCort Catholic High School
, just down the street from the local high school, kept its doors open for 84% of scheduled academic days during the same period. For many low-income learners, McCort was their only in-person option during the pandemic.
Schools in the
Archdiocese of Boston
similarly prioritized their students by offering in-person learning in the face of immense pressure to close. This pattern largely repeated nationwide.
The new NAEP results seem to carry some vindication for school leaders who chose to remain open. Fourth and eighth graders attending Catholic schools outperformed public school students of the same grades in reading and math across the board, even gaining ground from 2019 to 2022 in eighth-grade reading.
It’s premature to make any empirical causal claims about the effects of school closures on learning. But much of the evidence suggests that the schools that fought to keep their doors open were right, while the interest groups that fought to keep children locked out of the public schoolhouse were wrong.
With that said, there is no denying that the achievement gaps exposed during the pandemic have existed for decades and have been steadily widening over time.
Getting America’s children back on track requires creative thinking, and so far, much of the thinking has been far from creative. Even before the pandemic, the U.S. education outlook was not exactly rosy. For decades, the federal government’s solution, along with many state governments, has been to throw more money at the problem. Now, public schools are funded at historic levels, yet serious learning shortfalls persist.
Indeed, since 1960, inflation-adjusted education funding has nearly quadrupled. Average per-pupil funding in the U.S. is now more than $16,000. In the most recent round of pandemic relief alone,
the federal government injected
$123 billion into public education. The biggest whispered problem now in public education is that school leaders have more money than they know what to do with.
NAEP’s results are shedding light on what many already knew to be true: Locking children into district schools is a recipe for academic failure.
Our students need options now, not later. The sobering reality is that an entire generation of children is falling behind. For too many families, the status quo is not enough. School choice gives them the best chance to find an educational setting where they’ll thrive to their fullest potential. They deserve schooling options beyond their ZIP code, and they can’t afford to wait.
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Marc LeBlond is the director of policy and Ed Tarnowski is a state policy associate at EdChoice.
