A report conducted partly by Harvard University has shown that red states were right to stick with in-person learning during the pandemic: Students in schools that returned to the classroom earlier lost less ground academically than those that continued online instruction longer.
Researchers from Harvard University, the National Center for Analysis of Longitudinal Data in Education Research at the American Institutes for Research, NWEA and Dartmouth College, found that students in high-poverty schools spent more time in remote instruction in 2020-21, and that these students suffered larger academic losses when they did.
But the real issue was not poverty; it was remote learning, Harvard professor Thomas Kane told The Harvard Gazette.
''Where schools remained in-person, gaps did not widen,'' he said. ''Where schools shifted to remote learning, gaps widened sharply. Shifting to remote instruction was like turning a switch on a critical piece of our social infrastructure that we had taken for granted.''
''Interestingly, gaps in math achievement by race and school poverty did not widen in school districts in states such as Texas and Florida and elsewhere that remained largely in-person,'' Kane said.
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, a Republican, announced in November 2020 that schools would remain open the next spring, saying, ''Closing schools due to coronavirus is probably the biggest blunder in modern American history.''
A CNN map of states in March 2021 showed Florida, Texas, Arkansas and Iowa with schools ''ordered open,'' with many others with no order either way. Some blue states, such as California and Hawaii, had partial closings in effect.
The researchers found that districts that spent more weeks in remote instruction ''lost more ground than districts that returned to in-person instruction sooner,'' he said. ''Anyone who has been teaching by Zoom would not be surprised by that.''
''The striking and important finding was that remote instruction had much more negative impacts in high-poverty schools,'' he added. ''High-poverty schools were more likely to go remote and their students lost more when they did so.”
High-poverty schools that taught remotely for more than half of 2021 saw losses of ''about half of a school year’s worth of typical achievement growth,'' Kane said.
Researchers analyzed data from 2.1 million students in 10,000 schools in 49 states and plan to follow up on the progress of the schools studied.
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