A new analysis of so-called learning loss in Indiana schools tells a familiar story: Students in high-poverty schools have seen the biggest declines in test scores since the COVID-19 pandemic.
Ball State economist Michael Hicks cuts to the chase in a summary of the findings on X (formerly Twitter): “It is poverty folks, plain and simple, that is driving levels of learning loss,” he writes.
The study, “School Learning Loss in the Post-COVID Environment, was produced by Ball State University’s Center for Business and Economic Research. Authors are Hicks, a distinguished professor and the center’s director; Dagney Faulk, the center’s director of research; and Madelyn Ponsier, an undergraduate research assistant.
The researchers examined ILEARN test scores for 2019 and 2021-23 and used statistical modeling techniques to determine whether changes were correlated with student demographic factors and school characteristics. They found a significant correlation between learning loss and the percentage of students who qualified for free or reduced-price meals, a measure of poverty. Learning loss was also correlated with school’s ILEARN passing rates in the initial year, 2019.
But while there was some correlation with other factors, it was not statistically significant after controlling for poverty. A school district’s share of Black or Hispanic students, English learners and special education students did not explain learning loss. Neither did school size, attendance rates or the time spent in virtual or online learning during the pandemic.
If there’s a silver lining in the findings, it’s that schools that had more learning loss on 2021 tests had less learning loss between 2022 and 2023. “Thus, we see evidence of recovery in the effect of learning loss in schools,” the authors write.
There’s no question that remote and hybrid learning didn’t work well for many students, but the study indicates school closings weren’t the whole story. That aligns with a 2022 study by Harvard and Stanford researchers, who analyzed scores in thousands of school districts in 29 states. (They found Indiana students lost nearly six months of learning in math and over four months in reading).
“The poverty rate is very predictive of how much you lost,” Stanford education professor Sean Reardon, one of the researchers, told the New York Times.
Three years after the pandemic, it’s easy to forget how it disrupted nearly every aspect of our lives. It’s no wonder that test scores declined and that they’ve rebounded only modestly.
“We remind readers,” the Ball State researchers write, “that during the COVID pandemic, the U.S. saw the single largest loss of employment and economic activity in the nation’s history, and significant disruptions to modes of learning, along with significant disease spread …. It is axiomatic that these shocks would affect learning, through several pathways, at home and in school.”
Indiana Department of Education officials estimated in 2021 that it might take three to five years for students to recover what they lost, academically, even with targeted interventions to help them. In retrospect, that assessment may have been optimistic.
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