A new report offers the clearest picture yet of pandemic learning loss among U.S. students. But researchers warn that many of the nation's most vulnerable children aren't represented in the new data.

Transcript

RACHEL MARTIN, HOST:

Roughly 56 million children in this country were projected to attend school this fall. Some have returned to their classrooms, although many others are going to classes online from home. A new report out today measures how much kids are actually learning during all this pandemic disruption. For a majority of them, the study says things are actually not as bad as feared. That is not true, though, for the most vulnerable. NPR education correspondent Cory Turner is here. Good morning, Cory.

CORY TURNER, BYLINE: Good morning, Rachel.

MARTIN: First off, how do you even measure something like how much kids have lost, how much learning they have lost because of the pandemic?

TURNER: Yeah, well, you do it with this thing called the MAP Growth test. It's a low-stakes test that millions of kids take a few times every year in fall, winter and spring. My kids take it. It is the academic equivalent of a thermometer, basically. It's a way school districts can take their kids' temperature when it comes to learning so you can figure out who's doing well, who's struggling and even see, at least in terms of reading and math, what's tripping them up. Now, most kids did not take the MAP last spring because of the pandemic, obviously, but millions did take it this fall, not that long ago. And it's those results now that give us the first real temperature check we've had for kids mid-pandemic.

MARTIN: And what are the results here?

TURNER: Yeah. So let's start with reading. Researchers compared kids' skills this fall in, let's say, third-grade reading to the performance of a different group of kids who took third-grade reading before the pandemic. And what they found really surprised them. So looking at their sample of more than 4 million kids, the pandemic had little effect on reading skill. According to the report, kids on average are performing similarly to how other kids did pre-pandemic. Beth Tarasawa is head of research at NWEA. That's the not-for-profit behind the MAP test. And here she is describing her initial reaction to that.

BETH TARASAWA: Wow, this wasn't as bad as we predicted and others had, particularly in reading. All things considered, given the craziness that we are in, there was some optimism.

TURNER: Now, in math, Rachel, the news wasn't quite as optimistic. The current pandemic class of students performed about five to 10 percentile points lower than the pre-pandemic comparison group. But that's still what Tarasawa describes as a moderate drop. It's also important to note when comparing kids to their own performance on these tests, they're not literally falling backwards. They're still making gains in reading and math both, just not at the same pace in math that they were before the pandemic.

MARTIN: Interesting. So, yeah, some reason for optimism, but, I mean, this is an important thing to talk about here. You have done a lot of reporting on really vulnerable students, Cory, who are still struggling to even just log on each day, I mean, even if they have access to a computer, right? I mean, how could they even take a test like this?

TURNER: Yeah, this is one of the big questions I had when I first got this report. And the short answer is we're not sure because many of our most vulnerable kids clearly didn't take this test. Beth Tarasawa, again, the head of research at NWEA, told me roughly a quarter of students were missing from their sample. And she said that these children are, in her words, more likely to be Black and brown, more likely to be from high-poverty schools and more likely to have lower performance in the first place. And so she told me this fact is screaming that we have to be very cautious about making too much of this good news. And, you know, Rachel, it could be a warning sign of what we already know about this pandemic, that it hurts most those who have the least.

MARTIN: NPR's Cory Turner, thank you.

TURNER: You're welcome. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.

Tags: Series: The Coronavirus Crisis