More bad news about the effect of the Covid lockdowns, hot on the heels of the growing realisation that, in this country, it will take 15 years to clear the backlog of medical care that was deferred during Covid-19 lockdown in Ireland.
Now a new federal study in the United States has shown that the disruptions caused by the Covid-19 lockdowns has led to the largest drop in reading achievement in 30 years.
Newly released national test scores in the U.S. showed that math and reading scores for nine-year olds fell dramatically in two years of the lockdowns, and some of the most disadvantaged children saw the steepest declines.
National Center for Education Statistics (NCES), a branch of the U.S. Education Department, said that they saw the largest decrease in reading scores in 30 years – while math scores for 9 year olds were down for the first time in the history of the testing.
In math, the average score for 9-year-old students fell 7 percentage points between 2020 and 2022 – while the average reading score fell 5 points, according to the research.
The NCES said that it observed greater score decreases for lower-performing students, though reading and mathematics scores for students at all five selected percentile levels declined in 2022 compared to 2020. They noted that students of color saw some of the steepest decreases, and the divide between black and white students widened by 8 percentage points during the duration of the crisis.
Most of the country’s standardized testing was suspended in the first few months of the crisis, but the data now released reflects the impact of pandemic learning disruptions.
“These are some of the largest declines we have observed in a single assessment cycle in 50 years of the NAEP program,” said Daniel McGrath, the acting associate commissioner of NCES. “Students in 2022 are performing at a level last seen two decades ago.”
The Commissioner of NCES, Peggy G. Carr, said “we have all been concerned about the short- and longer-term impacts of the pandemic on our children. There’s been much speculation about how shuttered schools and interrupted learning may have affected students’ opportunities to learn. Our own data reveal the pandemic’s toll on education in other ways, including increases in students seeking mental health services, absenteeism, school violence and disruption, cyberbullying, and nationwide teacher and staff shortages.”
She said that COVID-19 disruptions “may have exacerbated many of the challenges we were already facing.”
“We know that students who struggle the most have fallen further behind their peers. The 2020 long-term trend assessment showed that scores in both mathematics and reading for 9-year-olds were flat overall since the prior assessment in 2012, but lower-performing students had significant declines. In 2020, students who struggle the most—those in the 10th percentile—started losing the reading gains that were made over the longer term, ” she said.
While math scores dropped by 5 percentage points for white students, black students saw a fall of 13 points and Hispanic students recorded an 8 point drop.
Meanwhile, in Britain, it has emerged that almost 100,000 children have stopped going to school since the lockdowns began.
The chair of England’s education select committee, Robert Halfon, described them as ‘ghost children’ as he says they have vanished off the school rolls.
“How we can allow as a country (nearly) 100,000 children to vanish off the school rolls completely and not treat it as a priority is beyond me,” he told Sky News. He also pointed out that in 2021, more than 100,000 children missed at least 50% of the autumn term in school.
Again, disadvantaged areas seem to be hit the hardest.
Anxiety and behavioral difficulties exacerbated by the lockdowns are thought to be one significant cause for the problem.
The NHS says it is treating a record 400,000 children a month for mental health problems, with many others waiting to be diagnosed.
In Ireland, we seem to be largely ignoring the negative outcomes of being locked down so hard, for so long. We need to gather the data on the effect of this policy on our children, their schooling, their health and their wellbeing.