I’ve written about this topic several times and the general conclusion is that remote learning during the pandemic was terrible for nearly all kids but especially for those near the bottom, the ones who benefitted most from personal attention from teachers.
However, this article suggests there has to be more to the story because of one simple fact. The same student’s scores started declining about five years before the pandemic hit. So the pandemic definitely made things much worse, but something was going on with these same kids even before that. Here’s the chart that is really the key to the story.
As you can see, all students had trouble in math in 2020 but top scoring kids have bounced back while lower performing kids have not. Also, it’s clear that math scores of the kids near the bottom started dropping after 2013 (2015 for reading), long before the…
