Amna: The school year has either
ended or is just wrapping up in
most of the country.
As another year finishes, there
are real concerns about learning
loss dating back to the pandemic
and the ongoing struggles for
students to catch up.
Lauren Perrone Lopez has the
latest conversation.
Lauren: The federal government
gave schools $190 billion to
help them reopen, recover and
respond to the impacts of the
pandemic.
The aide can be used for
tutoring, adding teachers,
summer learning and other ways
of helping.
Some money has been spent for
those purposes, but fears remain
about the long-term impacts of
learning loss from remote
schooling.
Alan Mcginnis has been reporting
on efforts to deal with this,
including in Richmond, Virginia
as part of a joint story for
"The new Yorker" and pro public.
You've reported on the magnitude
of learning loss including in
Richmond, Virginia as well as
other places across the country.
>> The gap is just enormous.
It is hard for us to comprehend
how enormous the gap is.
I've talked with a lot of
experts, and they are completely
alarmed by how large the
disparities have gotten.
We've succeeded in closing some
of the racial and economic
disparities in our schools.
It has been blown completely
wide open in the last couple
years largely because of the
school closures and the shift to
remote learning.
There is evidence that the
longer the district stayed
close, the worse the learning
loss was, and it just so
happened that a lot of the
districts that stayed closed the
longest were our cities where we
had a lot of black and hispanic
students who suffered the most
from the shift to remote
learning.
Lauren: Mueller report in some
districts -- you reported in
some districts schools are
grading more generously.
Does that mask the problem?
>> One expert spoke to the
urgency cap where a lot of
families and parents are not
aware of how dire the situation
has become because they are
seeing their kids get decent
grades.
There is a recognition among
teachers that these kids have
been through a lot and we should
take it somewhat easier on them.
Meanwhile, you can see these
standardized test scores that
have just fallen off a cliff,
really to a degree that
researchers and economists have
never seen before.
One economist describes this as
having a massive economic effect
on par with the great recession.
Because skills are so directly
tied to income, you will see a
lifelong effect for students in
the communities in which they
live, building a lifelong loss
into their economic well-being.
Lauren: You took a particular
look at Richmond, Virginia where
the student body is almost
entirely black.
There was a push for a 200-day
calendar.
What was behind the push?
>> It was a recognition that
there has been so much time
lost, and the key challenges
finding additional time to make
up some lost ground.
Richmond school stayed closed
the longest of any district in
Virginia, and test scores
reflected that.
One estimate was that students
lost two years in math learning.
There was a push to add time to
the calendar and somehow extend
the school year, add more days
to the school year for some
students, and shrink the summer
vacation so that there is less
of the summer slide, build more
time into the calendar for
students.
I went there to tell that story.
Lauren: That extended calendar
came from a few places.
Some school board members, white
people in particular appear to
more opposed, in addition to
some teachers.
Why were they opposed?
>> There were many arguments
against the shorter summer break
.
There were practical things
like, we've got a summer job,
scheduled summer vacations, we
don't want to change those
plans, but there is a general
sense, why are we disrupting the
way things have been done at a
time when there has been so much
disruption?
We need to get everyone back to
their normal routine.
The other argument is that this
is exactly the moment we need to
do something different.
Lauren: In the end, roughly 1000
of the district's 22,000
students will be in school the
next several days on the
calendar.
What has been your take on the
struggle to approve a pilot
project for these students?
>> In the end, only two schools
got a part of this pilot, just a
small step forward for the city,
and it is a sign of how strongly
complacency and inertia have
become on this issue.
We almost not even talking about
it anymore.
It's been striking how much the
educational debate has shifted
to culture war issues.
Meanwhile, we see this crisis in
learning loss.
There's been this real
reluctance to look at it in the
eye and recognize how much we
have to do.
I did see some of these
educators in Richmond who did
recognize this and were fighting
as hard as they could to move
forward, and it will be
interesting to see how these
schools in this one city fair
with these extra 20 days they
are getting.
Lauren: That is allocable Gillis
with new reporting in "The new
Yorker" and pro public up.
Thank you so much.
>> Thank you.