[CliffFletcher]

Originally Posted by opendoor

If that was the case, then wouldn't there be a discrepancy between jurisdictions with longer school closures and those with shorter or no closures? Because the most recent OECD data shows no real distinction in resilience of performance based on school closure length. In anything, there's actually a slight negative correlation, where the jurisdictions with a higher percentage of students experiencing 3+ month closures were actually more likely to have resilient performance in math and reading compared to pre-pandemic than jurisdictions with shorter closures.

And that doesn't even get into the fact that educational performance declines in most countries long predate the pandemic.

Links?

Learning declines do predate Covid, so there are likely other factors at work. But there’s a wealth of evidence that disruption from schools closure and remote learning during the pandemic have had substantial long-term impacts on learning.

On average, students globally are eight months behind where they would have been absent the pandemic, but the impact varies widely, with countries falling into three archetypes:

High-performing systems, with relatively high levels of pre-COVID-19 performance, where students may be about one to five months behind due to the pandemic (for example, North America and Europe, where students are, on average, four months behind).

Low-income prepandemic-challenged systems, with very low levels of pre-COVID-19 learning, where students may be about three to eight months behind due to the pandemic (for example, sub-Saharan Africa, where students are on average six months behind).

Pandemic-affected middle-income systems, with moderate levels of pre-COVID-19 learning, where students may be nine to 15 months behind (for example, Latin America and South Asia, where students are, on average, 12 months behind).

The pandemic also increased inequalities within systems. For example, it widened gaps between majority Black and majority White schools in the United States and increased preexisting urban-rural divides in Ethiopia.

https://www.mckinsey.com/industries/...earning-crisis

To what extent has the learning progress of school-aged children slowed down during the COVID-19 pandemic? A growing number of studies address this question, but findings vary depending on context. Here we conduct a pre-registered systematic review, quality appraisal and meta-analysis of 42 studies across 15 countries to assess the magnitude of learning deficits during the pandemic. We find a substantial overall learning deficit (Cohen’s d = −0.14, 95% confidence interval −0.17 to −0.10), which arose early in the pandemic and persists over time. Learning deficits are particularly large among children from low socio-economic backgrounds.

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-022-01506-4

What’s your theory about the reasons for declining outcomes? Do you think Covid had an impact at all?