By JOHN RICHARD SCHROCK
The just-released NAEP report indicates that the U.S. response to the pandemic resulted in the performance of 9-year olds’ math abilities dropping to levels of two decades ago.
The decline in reading was the worst in three decades. It affected the poorer-performing students worse, where “students in the bottom 10th percentile dropped by 12 points in math, four times the decrease of students in the 90th percentile.”
These National Assessment of Educational Progress tests have been tracking student achievement in grades 4, 8, and 12 since 1970. Academic areas evaluated include mathematics, reading, writing, U.S. history, geography and other areas.
This rapid and severe decline in student performance and knowledge during the two and a half years of pandemic schooling in America, much of it conducted online, will not be reflected in students’ grades. Grade inflation was already institutionalized across most states by policies that drove grade point averages (GPAs) up while scores on another common assessment, the ACT, continued to fall. The pandemic dramatically accelerated this grade inflation while ACT scores, and now the NAEP, show that learning has dramatically fallen. —Thus, higher grades for much less learned.
At the beginning of the pandemic in 2020, I described a set of measures that could be used to quantify this upcoming loss in learning. Medical doctors rate the damage of a particular disease by calculating the years of potential life lost (YPLL); therefore a disease that kills children is far more harmful to the population than a disease that kills the elderly. “Years of Potential Intellectual Life Lost” would use the same metrics to evaluate the slowdown in learning caused by a pandemic. My prediction in University World News was that academic progress would be slowed by several years due to the lost learning time and inferiority of online learning. —And that the lost learning would impact the K–16 education pipeline since students would carry this shortfall in learning up the grade levels for many years.
The NAEP and ACT reports indicate this substantial pause in learning was correct for the American educational system. However, a different cultural response in East Asia appears to have avoided most if not all of the education loss of a pandemic slowdown.
The initial infections in mainland China, Taiwan, South Korea, Japan, Singapore and Vietnam were met with a relatively short shutdown where most of the population stayed-in-place. By universal use of facial masking—a very common practice in Asia every winter for decades—as well as modern green-yellow-red cell phone contact detection, their pandemic was dramatically reduced or eliminated. Most new cases were imports. As a result, students returned to school with universal masking, regular fever monitoring and a wide array of distancing and antiseptic practices. And they continued school into the summer break—teachers and students made up for the pause in learning by extending school for two months. The result was that students did not lose their normal progress in reading, writing and math skills.
The major cultural difference is their value for education which extended beyond surviving this pandemic. Not only is the school year longer in Asia, the school day is usually longer. On average, Asian parents value education more highly and many push their student(s) to also take extra tutoring after school or on the weekend. Simply, “an A-minus is an Asian F”; such students stay up studying late into the night to make sure the next grade is an “A.”
Our U.S. schools have received extra money for summer classes in order to recover “lost learning.” But the scale of our summer programs is nowhere near that of Asian countries where all teachers and students continued on. For the most part, they put school before vacation. For many of our K–16 students—as indicated by the NAEP and ACT data—school was a vacation.
Each of the East Asian countries administers standardized high school leaving exams that measure learning by subjects for ranking students to enter universities. This is a parallel to the ACT and will likely show that there was little to no decline in learning in East Asia.
Currently, a growing number of states are now considering reducing K–12 school from five to four days of attendance each week for various reasons. The next time I am in Asia, I am going to be asked why we are reducing our school days. There is absolutely no way that they will understand.
. . .
Late August NAEP report is at: https://nces.ed.gov/nationsreportcard
May 2022 ACT report on “Grade Inflation Continues to Grow in the Past Decade” is at:
https://www.act.org/content/dam/act/unsecured/documents/2022/R2134-Grade-Inflation-Continues-to-Grow-in-the-Past-Decade-Final-Accessible.pdf
“Years of Potential Intellectual Life Lost” in University World News is at:
https://www.universityworldnews.com/post.php?story=20200807090836187
John Richard Schrock has trained biology teachers for more than 30 years in Kansas. He also has lectured at 27 universities during 20 trips to China. He holds the distinction of “Faculty Emeritus” at Emporia State University.