PBS News Hour

AMNA NAWAZ: Well, the school year has either ended or is just wrapping up in most of the country.

As another year finishes, there are still real concerns about learning loss dating back to the pandemic and the ongoing struggles for students to catch up.

Laura Barron-Lopez has our latest conversation on that subject.

LAURA BARRON-LOPEZ: Amna, the federal government gave schools $190 billion to help them reopen, recover and respond to the impacts of the pandemic.

That aid can be used for tutoring, adding teachers, summer learning and other ways of helping.

Some of that money has been spent for those purposes.

But fears remain about the long-term impact of learning loss from remote schooling.

Alec MacGillis has been reporting on efforts to deal with this, including in Richmond, Virginia, as part of a joint story for "The New Yorker" and ProPublica.

He joins me now.

You have reported extensively on the magnitude of learning loss, and including in Richmond, Virginia, as well as other places across the country.

How big is that gap?

And is it among all students?

ALEC MACGILLIS, ProPublica: The gap is just enormous.

I mean, it's really kind of hard to -- for us to comprehend just how enormous this gap is.

I have talked to a lot of experts in this field.

And they're just completely alarmed by how enormous the achievement gap has gotten, the disparities have gotten in these last couple of years.

We have actually been very successful in this country in closing some of the racial and economic disparities in our schools in the last couple of decades.

And they have just blown completely wide open over these last couple of years, largely because of the school closures and the shift to remote learning.

There's just a lot of evidence now that, the longer that a district stayed closed, the worst the learning loss was.

And it just so happens that a lot of the districts that stay close the longest were in -- were in our cities and urban centers, where you have a lot of Black students, a lot of Hispanic students who have now suffered by far the most from the shift to remote learning.

LAURA BARRON-LOPEZ: You report that, in some districts, schools are grading students more generously or giving them more opportunities to improve their grades.

Does that mask the problem?

ALEC MACGILLIS: It does.

There's what one of the experts I spoke to call the emergency gap, where a lot of families, a lot of parents are not aware of just how dire the situation has become, because they're seeing their kids still getting decent grades, because there's been -- there's been a general recognition among teachers that kids have, of course, been through a lot, and that we should kind of take it somewhat easier on them as a result.

And -- but, meanwhile, you're seeing these standardized test scores that have just fallen off a cliff for a lot of -- lots of students in this country, really to a degree that the researchers and economists have never seen before.

One economist describes this as having just a massive economic effect, on par with the Great Recession.

Basically, because skills and learning in this country are so directly tied to income, you're going to see a lifelong effect for the students and the communities in which they live, really a lifelong loss to their economic well-being and livelihood.

LAURA BARRON-LOPEZ: And you took a particular look at Richmond, Virginia, where the student body is nearly entirely Black.

And there was a push for year-round schooling, essentially a 20-day -- or -- sorry -- a 200-day calendar.

What was behind that push?

ALEC MACGILLIS: What was behind that push is the recognition that there's just been so much time lost, and that the key, the real challenge now is finding additional time to make up some of that lost ground.

Richmond schools stayed closed the longest of any district in Virginia, and the test scores reflected that.

One estimate is that students there lost two years in math, math learning.

And so there's a big push to basically add time to the calendar, to somehow extend the school year, add more days to the school year for some students, and shrink the summer vacation, so there's less of that summer slide, somehow just build more time into the calendar for either all the students or at least some of the students.

And so I went there to tell that story of how this one city was trying to make up for the lost time.

LAURA BARRON-LOPEZ: That extended calendar came from a few places, some school board members, some parents.

White people in particular appeared to be more opposed, some teachers.

Why did they oppose it?

ALEC MACGILLIS: There were various arguments against the extended calendar and the shorter summer break, including very practical things, like, well, we already scheduled our summer vacation.

We have already got a summer job.

We don't -- we don't want to have to change those plans.

Then -- but then there was a more general sense of, why are we change -- disrupting the way things have always been done at a time when there's already been so much disruption?

We just need to get everyone back to normal, back to the normal routine.

The argument on the other side, of course, was that this is exactly the moment when we need to do something different, because we have lost so much.

That's exactly the time when we need to really just completely change the way that things have always been done, because what was done before simply is not going to be enough to make up all of that lost ground.

LAURA BARRON-LOPEZ: And, in the end, roughly 1,000 of the district's 22,000 students will be in school this summer for those extra 20 days that are on the calendar.

What's your takeaway from the struggle to approve this one pilot project for such a small number of students?

ALEC MACGILLIS: Yes, in the end, only two schools ended up getting this one -- this one pilot, such a very, very small kind of step forward for this one city.

And, to me, it just was a sign of how -- really how strong the complacency and the inertia have become on this issue.

There's been -- we're almost not really even really talking about it anymore.

And it's been it's been really striking how much the national educational debate has shifted culture war issues, how much that's been driving the media coverage of schools.

Meanwhile, we're seeing this epochal crisis in learning loss and this widening achievement gap.

And there's just been this real reluctance to just look it in the eye and recognize how much we have to do.

So -- but, meanwhile, I did see some of these educators in Richmond who did recognize this and were fighting as hard as they could to move forward.

And it's going to be very interesting to see how these couple schools in this one city now fare with these extra 20 days that they're getting.

LAURA BARRON-LOPEZ: That's Alec MacGillis with new reporting in "The New Yorker" and ProPublica.

Thank you so much.

ALEC MACGILLIS: Thank you.