It's been four years since American schools shuttered, forcing millions of schoolchildren into months of online learning. While the decision was hailed as necessary to slow the spread of COVID-19 and protect teachers, the years since widespread school shutdowns have produced mounting evidence that pandemic closures led to massive learning losses for students, all without making a significant impact on COVID infections.
On Monday, The New York Times released an extended article combing over new data showing that post-COVID learning losses were directly related to how much time students spent in online school.
According to one study highlighted by the Times, school districts that spent the least amount of the 2020–21 school year in remote learning (between 0 percent and 10 percent online) experienced a significantly smaller drop in student scores than districts that spent almost all of the school year online. For the least online group, declines in third- and eighth-grade math scores indicated that students were 0.35 years behind where they should be, while the most online group had fallen back more than half a school year by 2022.
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