In February, Sean Reardon, a researcher at Stanford who has assembled an enormous database of schools and test scores, came to visit the Opinion section's monthly education meeting. |
Reardon brought slides. I have worked with him since 2013, and I can tell you: Sean always brings slides. When we met, Reardon, Tom Kane, who is a professor of education and economics at Harvard, and a host of other researchers were still putting their most recent study together. But we could already see from what Reardon told us that "the pandemic was a public health and economic disaster that reshaped every area of children's lives, but it did so to different degrees in different communities, and so its consequences for children depended on where they lived," as the article Kane and Reardon published in Opinion last week put it. |
Quoctrung Bui, the deputy director of graphics for our section, was also at that meeting, and immediately grasped the import of what Reardon, Kane and their collaborators had found. He asked to look at the data. "What really struck me," Bui told me, "was how much of a change there was from 2019 to 2022 in the math scores. Once you fix on change being the key idea, then visual representation of change becomes the heart and core of the piece." |
"Typically what economists would do," Bui said, "is condense this information to make it easier to display, but the problem with averaging it over deciles or quintiles is that you lose the specificity of the schools. It doesn't root you in a place or a community and that's what Sean's data does so well." |
The pandemic-era losses in math were worse than the losses in reading, but both were devastating. "By the spring of 2022, according to our calculations," Kane and Reardon write, "the average student was half a year behind in math and a third of a year behind in reading." And these effects were worse when they compared the richest and the poorest districts: "By 2022, the typical student in the poorest districts had lost three-quarters of a year in math, more than double the decline of students in the richest districts." |
Reardon has been thinking about the problem of educational inequality his entire adult life. In his 20s, he was a high school physics teacher. He taught for two years on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota, part of which is in Oglala Lakota County, one of the poorest regions of the United States; he then taught for two years at a Quaker school in an affluent community in New Jersey. The contrast shocked him. "I needed to understand the problem on a bigger scale in order to do something about it," he told me recently. "That's why I went to graduate school to do what I do." |
So what can be done? Kane and Reardon offer a number of solutions, from longer school years to increased tutoring to "an optional fifth year of high school for students to fill holes in academic skills, get help with applying to college or to explore alternative career pathways." |
"Another option," they write, "would be to make ninth grade a triage year during which students would receive intensive help in key academic subjects." |
But the point is not so much to choose any one program — what their piece makes clear is that this must be an all-out effort, executed with moral conviction. "In many communities, students lost months of learning time," they write. "Justice demands that we replace it." |
Here's what we're focusing on today: |
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