In another sign of the pandemic's negative impact on kids, test scores plummeted to a level not seen in decades. According to a new report from the National Center for Education Statistics, nine-year-old students scored dramatically lower in math and reading in 2022 than they did in 2020. Dr. Peggy Carr, Commissioner of the National Center for Education Statistics, joined Cheddar's News Wrap to discuss why this happened, how concerning it is, and what can be done about it. 

Cheddar's News Wrap

Student Test Scores Dropped Dramatically During the Pandemic

Welcome back to cheddar news wrap and yet another sign of the pandemics. Negative impact on kids. Important test scores plummeted to a level not seen in decades, according to a new report from the National Center for Education Statistics. Nine year old students scored dramatically lower in math and reading in 2022 than they did in 2020. Here discusses DR Peggy. Carr, Commissioner of the National Center for Education Statistics. Peggy, Welcome back to the show. Just how telling is this report when it comes to the pandemic effect on the educational development of young Children? Well, it is very sobering. We see declines that are consistent across the entire distribution. All students are declining. We've been worried about our lower performing students for a while, but these results show that all students, regardless of where they sit in the academic achievement chain, are showing declines as a result of what we're picking up in this study. How much of this had to do with virtual learning and the lack of in person teaching during covid. For many students it was over a year and could other factors also played a role here. We did have some interesting questions on the survey. We asked students who did, um, primarily remote learning, did they did they have access to teachers in comparison to, say, higher performing students and, well, you know, the low income students. Um, and the students who who have been struggling for a while said not as often. So there are some concerns about what was happening doing remote learning. I'm glad you mentioned that. Can you break down the results change the results by race and ethnicity? Well, we saw declines for black students, white students, Hispanic students and particularly for Math. We saw them in reading too, but they were severely pronounced. And math, you know, the literature is very clear that um, math is more sensitive to what goes on instruction in school than is reading. And that may be why we're seeing what we're seeing the next question. The important question. What can be done? How do we get kids back on track? Well, you know, we've been talking about this all day. I think one obvious thing is that we need strategies that work. We know from other data that we have collected that there are strategy strategies around high dose tutoring, double dose tutoring that has different names that seem to work. Teachers are telling us from the work that they've been doing with students this summer, that it has some impact. We've got to figure out how to scale that up. That would be number one. But there are others. We have to think about the whole child. There are studies that we are looking at that says that students are suffering social socially and emotionally. Students are asking for more mental health services and teachers are noticing it too. So we have to look at the whole child that's number two and then we've got to fix this resource problem that we have and target the resources where they're most needed. Can we talk about this a little more? Do you think kids would need to spend more time in schools to make up for the lost time, especially when it comes to socializing? Like you mentioned a moment ago. Is that something that kids, parents, teachers would be even willing to do? Well? You know, the willingness of the teachers, I think maybe is there, I mean they did a yeoman's job doing the height of this pandemic, but they're tired. They're stressed. We have data to show that um, today we have more teacher vacancies than we did prior to covid. Even the teachers are asking for mental health services. So I'm not going to say that the will isn't there? But you know, they, they are, they are stressed. Absolutely. And we respect and love our teachers so much. We know the pandemic had a negative effect on students progress. We anticipated that, but this report showed that it was even worse than we originally thought. Yeah, I I think I was not surprised. I have to say that we were going to see declines. Uh, the scope did give me pause and how pervasive it was. The higher performing students have been holding their ground, but not in this report. Uh, and again, more so for reading. We did see some, I'm sorry, more so of the math. We did see some bright spots and reading where the city's somehow were able to hold onto their reading scores. Uh Parts of the region of the country, we're holding onto their reading scores. So there's some hope that we as a community know how to pull together when the tough gets going. I have less than a minute Peggy but I want to ask you, do you think the pandemics effects here will will eventually be erased? Or is this something permanent that we have to deal with? Well, you know, the states are telling us their state scores are out. Uh they've been calling us and telling us that they've been seeing some uh rebound that there's been seeing some improvement now. They collected data in 21 when we did not. So we may be missing it because we went from 20 to 22. So maybe we're gonna see some some improvement as we move forward. We need to hold on and continue to collect these data. We have state data for the nape program coming out in october Then we're going to take another look at these data. Peggy is such a pleasure talking to you. Thank you for shedding light on this disturbing report. Dr Peggy. Carr Commissioner of the National Center for Education Statistics. Please come back soon. Thank you again