It is an even greater shock that D.C. students’ learning has improved more rapidly over the past 15 years than that of students in 20 other urban districts whose performance we have assessed. What’s the reason for the shock? The fact that it’s the near-universal approach of the 13,000 public school districts in the United States to pay teachers on the basis of experience and extent of graduate education — not position or performance.
Op-Ed
Education Next.
By identifying, enabling, and incentivizing our best classroom teachers, we can revive flatlining student achievement.
Education Next.
Historical earnings patterns make it is possible to estimate what the learning losses documented by NAEP will cost the average student in the Covid-cohort: 6 percent lower lifetime earnings than those not in this cohort. In other words, the pandemic learning losses for this cohort are equivalent on average to a 6 percent income tax surcharge throughout the students’ working lives.
The Hill.
The entirely expected recent data on COVID-19 learning losses should not be allowed to paper over more fundamental education problems. Release of the long-term NAEP test scores last month confirmed what we already knew from earlier NAEP releases: that achievement test scores plummeted across the country after COVID-related school closures in early 2020.
But virtually no attention has been paid to the fact that there were major NAEP losses —heavily skewed against disadvantaged students — well before the COVID shutdowns.
Wall Street Journal.
By far the largest economic costs of the Covid-19 pandemic in the U.S. will come from shortfalls in student learning from school closures, inferior hybrid and remote instruction, and the general disruption of normal schooling. Primary and secondary schools are now struggling to return as much as possible to where they were in March 2020. But the learning losses will be permanent if we just restore the pre-existing schools.
National Review Capital Matters.
Countries around the world have taken wildly different paths to manage the COVID-19 virus. Some, such as Sweden, have mostly kept their schools open, while others, such as the U.S., have closed many of their schools. While the closing of schools may help slow the spread of the virus, it comes with a cost: reduced access to education. In a new study reported in an OECD paper, we explored those costs. Unless schools actually get better than they were in 2019, existing research indicates this will lead to permanently lower future earnings.
Washington Times.
The single most important way to ensure that everybody can participate in the modern economy is to ensure that they have the skills that are demanded by the economy. If in September schools miraculously return to what they were in February, the current cohort of students would see their lifetime earnings reduced on average by 3% to 6%. Moreover, disadvantaged students would face an even larger loss, because their experiences over the past several months have been worse than those of more advantaged students.
Education Week.
The nation is stuck with a bad deal on teacher salaries: salaries insufficient to attract new teachers who can fuel improved schools and yet not even high enough to satisfy current teachers. One result has been uncompromising rhetoric replacing viable solutions. The Chicago teachers' strike continued the strife that played out last year from West Virginia to Los Angeles. Sequential appeasement of these outbreaks of union combativeness and teacher frustration will almost certainly not help the students and will likely make teachers worse off in the long run.
The Hill.
Nobody is talking about schools resuming completely to normal this fall, but the economic problems caused by the pandemic would not be solved even if they did. In an analysis that we authored and that was discussed last weekend by education ministers of the G-20, we ind the cohort of K-12 students hit by the spring closures has been seriously harmed and already faces a loss of lifetime income of 3 percent or more. The nation also faces a bleaker future.
The Indian Express.
Is India doing enough with its vision for education for the masses (and not just for the elite) to realise its full potential? This question is even more critical in the face of a skills gap and a jobs crisis in India, given the modern economy’s rapid adoption of industrial automation, robots and AI.