Commentary: Public Education’s Alarming Reversal of Learning Trend

School Work

Call it the big reset – downward – in public education.

The alarming plunge in academic performance during the pandemic was met with a significant drop in grading and graduation standards to ease the pressure on students struggling with remote learning. The hope was that hundreds of billions of dollars of emergency federal aid would enable schools to reverse the learning loss and restore the standards.

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Math Scores Around the U.S. Plunge as Students Suffer from Learning Loss

U.S. students are lagging behind other industrialized students in math in a global assessment released Tuesday, according to Axios.

Students in the U.S. saw a 13-point fall in their 2022 Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) score compared to their 2018 results, according to Axios. The score was “among the lowest ever measured by PISA in mathematics” and comes as U.S. students are suffering learning loss following the pandemic.

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Schools Struggle to Get Students to Class amid Learning Loss

Schools across the country are struggling to get kids to class while still recovering from the learning loss following the COVID-19 pandemic, according to The New York Times.

The National Assessment of Educational Progress released a report this month showing that students who missed three or more days of school had lower math scores than those who were not absent. Schools, however, are having trouble finding bus drivers to get children to class, with some districts delaying their start times each day and others forced to postpone school for a week, according to the NYT.

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National Opportunity Project Founder Patrick Hughes Details the Misallocation of COVID Dollars to Private Schools

Friday morning on The Tennessee Star Report, host Michael Patrick Leahy welcomed National Opportunity Project founder, Patrick Hughes to the newsmaker line to discuss the misallocation of millions of COVID dollars to private schools throughout the country.

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Government School Districts Plan K-12 Closures as Student Enrollment Plunges

Some of the largest public school districts in the nation are planning to close K-12 schools as they face plummeting student enrollment rates. “Nationwide, public school enrollment fell by more than 1.4 million students to 49.4 million between fall 2019 and fall 2020—a decline of roughly 3%, according to data from the U.S. Education Department,” reported the Wall Street Journal in January. “The following school year, enrollment failed to return to prepandemic levels and remained roughly flat.”

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Learning Loss Greater in School Districts That Stayed Remote Longer, Study Shows

School districts that resorted to remote learning during the pandemic took a large learning loss hit, according to Thursday study by a Brown University economist.

K-12 school districts who stayed with remote learning the longest during the pandemic saw a 13% sharper drop in learning losses than schools that returned to in-person learning sooner, according to study by a Brown University economist Emily Oster. The study notes that while there were other factors that resulted in learning losses, remote learning was a “significant contributing factor.”

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