They're being referred to as "The COVID Generation": school-age children who had their in-person schooling interrupted by on-again, off-again lockdowns. Their learning progress, as measured by standardized testing and other metrics, is showing a large discrepancy in how kids handled learning during the lockdowns.
I've been writing about the problem of "chronic absenteeism" (kids missing more than 10% of the school year) since August 2023. All the reports, studies, and articles point to one gigantic betrayal by the education establishment. In a word, they failed. And the kids paying the biggest price for the failure of teachers, administrators, school boards, and their apologists in the Democratic Party are the children least able to afford it.
The various COVID recovery bills passed in 2021 and 2022 poured $5.6 trillion into the economy. About $189 billion was spent directly on school aid, as contained in the American Rescue Plan. Another $236 billion was in the Education Stabilization Fund (ESF). This money was specifically earmarked to help students and schools recover from the ill-advised and sometimes unnecessary lockdowns that wreaked havoc on the learning progress of children.
Meanwhile, many schools took the COVID funding and used it to build athletic fields and other useless projects. Chalkbeat reported that half of all COVID relief dollars were spent on staff salaries and benefits, including new social workers and school nurses.
"Georgetown University school finance expert Marguerite Roza pointed to 'eyebrow-raising spending decisions,' like contracts to family members, massage chairs in a teachers lounge in Montana and six-figure salaries for district leaders in Stockton, California," reported the education website.
Meanwhile, the poorest students were getting the short end of the stick.
According to Polikoff's research, low-income students in particular are facing persistent increases in absenteeism when compared to pre-pandemic numbers. Polikoff looked at school absenteeism data from North Carolina and Virginia. He explained that, when comparing absenteeism from before and after the pandemic, the attendance gap between low-income and non-low-income students grew dramatically. Post-pandemic, Virginia low-income students were 12.1 percentage points more likely to be chronically absent than other students, and in North Carolina, these students were 14.4 percentage points more likely to be chronically absent.
Polikoff noted that the gap between different racial groups was relatively minor after controlling for income. "When looking in absolute terms, the most disadvantaged groups are typically more likely to have seen larger increases in chronic absenteeism," he said. "Racial gaps are not overly large, controlling for income and other things.
"The income gap really was the main driver that showed up over and over again," said University of Southern California (USC) education professor Morgan Polikoff during an American Enterprise Institute event last week. "The fact that student-level income is the main driver here seems to be really important."
"The pandemic may have been the earthquake, but heightened absenteeism is the tsunami and it’s still rolling through schools,” said Thomas Kane, a Harvard economist and a member of a research team that examined post-COVID learning and attendance.
Most disturbing of all is that school officials lied to parents about the decline in learning. “Since early in the recovery, the overwhelming majority of parents have been under the false impression that their children were unaffected," states the report.
Not advertising your epic failure might be a good career move, but it's spectacularly unfair to parents.
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