Study: Students falling behind in post-pandemic learning
- Data shows American students are falling behind in reading and math
- A long-time teacher says online learning also caused delay in social skills
- A House subcommittee held a hearing to discuss the state of education
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(NewsNation) — A House oversight committee held a hearing on the state of post-pandemic education as data reveals slipping math and reading scores among students.
In September, the National Center for Education Statistics reported among 9-year-old students, average reading scores dropped 5 points and math scores dropped seven points in 2022.
This was the first ever score decline in math scores recorded by the center.
Teachers tell NewsNation they are continuing to see the effects of pandemic-era learning at every grade level.
“I’ll say something and literally, a minute later ask a question and they won’t know what I just said,” said a high school teacher of two decades. “Socialization skills, taking notes, little stuff that I think are normal, but I guess they have to relearn all that.”
The teacher, who asked not to be identified, also noted a rise in behavioral delays.
“It definitely caused a huge delay in maturity. I saw it a lot in the boys coming in to 9th grade. They were definitely a lot slower to mature and you can see it in their behavior issues. But I don’t think we could’ve done anything different. We were just learning as we went along,” the teacher said.
The House oversight committee will hear from the president of the American Federation of Teachers on what the committee calls the “consequences of school closures,” the second hearing on this topic.
Pandemic-era learning also led to a 30% rise in students getting no education at all, according to Vincent Lisbon, executive director at the Bethel Community Foundation, a group that works with struggling students.
“I think when it went virtual, it just created a situation to where I want to say we saw a change in habits. We saw a change in how parents approached school and how they thought of school and we saw how kids all of a sudden who were getting tutoring services all of a sudden that kind of fell off,” Lisbon said.
Lisbon added, “There’s a lot of generational problems that pop up. For example, we have a lot of families with parents where nobody graduated from high school, so they’re not valuing that education.”
