wsj.com
Opinion | The High Price of Covid Learning Loss The Editorial Board 4–5
minutes It equates to a drop in lifetime earnings of about $900 billion.


The full cost of the Covid-19 school shutdowns will take years to
understand, but here’s another estimate that will make many parents
livid: If the recent learning loss can’t be reversed, it would equate
to a 1.6% drop in lifetime earnings for the average K-12 student, or a
nationwide total of some $900 billion.

That’s according to a recent studyfrom researchers at Harvard and
Dartmouth, which is based on census data and historical changes in
performance on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP),
also known as the nation’s report card. The researchers sought to
predict how this year’s deplorable test results could affect students
over their lifetimes if they can’t catch up.

The most recent NAEP results showed a record drop in learning. Not a
single state or large school district managed to improve math performance
among fourth and eighth graders between 2019 and 2022. “A 1.6 percent
decline in earnings may seem like a modest impact per student, but it adds
up,” the researchers write. It’s an average loss, in present value,
of $19,400 per student. Then multiply by the public K-12 enrollment of
48 million.

Harvard economist Thomas Kane used the same method to forecast other
outcomes if eighth-grade students fail to recover from this year’s
abysmal math scores. For this cohort, he anticipates college enrollment
would fall 2.4%. Meantime, the number of high school dropouts would
increase 3.6%, of teen mothers by 3.2%, of the unemployed by 6.6%,
and of young men incarcerated by 14.2%.

These costs wouldn’t be borne evenly across society. Researchers at
Harvard and Stanford used the latest NAEP results to put in context state
standardized test scores and compare the achievement drop in different
school districts nationwide. The results showed some correlation between
learning loss and the length of school shutdowns. Much more conclusive,
though, was the evidence that poor children disproportionately suffered
from pandemic-era disruptions.

In districts where 69% or more of students received lunch subsidies,
children lost the equivalent of two-thirds of a year of math between 2019
and 2022. To compare, in districts where only 39% or fewer got free or
reduced lunch, students fell less than half a year behind.

The disparities in some places were stark. In North Branford, Conn.,
where only 21.8% are low-income, students fell a tenth of a year behind
in math. Less than 12 miles away in New Haven, where 72.9% receive
subsidized lunch, students fell 1.55 years behind.

The personal-finance website WalletHubreports that Falls Church City
Public Schools is the second-most affluent district in Virginia,
with an average household income of nearly $147,000. There students
fell less than 0.3 of a grade level behind in math, according to the
Harvard-Stanford data. Compare that to Richmond City Public Schools,
where 93% of students qualify for free or reduced lunch, and where
children fell 1.96 grade levels behind.

In Massachusetts, students lost slightly over a grade level in Holyoke and
1.3 grade levels in Lynn, two districts where more than 80% of students
qualify for subsidized lunch. Fewer than 10% do in Andover and Wellesley,
where students fell a little more than a third of a grade level behind.


Throughout the pandemic, affluent parents could afford to hire tutors
or yank their kids from failing public schools. Poor children too often
remained trapped, and it’s a tragedy that will reverberate for years
to come.