Many families don’t know how much the pandemic harmed their child’s learning; that’s a problem

Credit: Allison Shelley for American Education

There is an emerging consensus around three facts about the impact of Covid and its aftermath on children:

1. The pandemic substantially harmed children’s academic achievement relative to earlier cohorts.
2. There is a gap between reality and how parents and families understand the academic damage done to children.
3. In part because of fact No. 2, there is not enough participation in pandemic recovery interventions to solve fact No.1.

To reverse this trend, we need to change how we talk about and approach efforts to get student learning back on track.

On objective measures of performance, students are not all right.

Children’s academic performance on standardized tests shows they are months or years behind comparable pre-pandemic cohorts and not catching up over time. Younger children and those from economically disadvantaged and underserved racial backgrounds have been harmed the most. California student achievement fell on both state and national tests, wiping out years of progress. These losses will have long-term effects, both for the children themselves and for broader society.

Unfortunately families’ main sources of information about their children — report cards and other school-based sources — are not painting the same picture. Schools eased grading expectations during the pandemic and likely haven’t returned to pre-Covid standards. The representative education surveys we conduct indicate that school-based sources are telling 75-80% of families (depending on subject) that their children are doing fine, earning mostly B’s and above. As a result, less than 20%  of parents/caregivers, in California and nationwide say they’re worried about their child’s academic performance. (While 70% of our responding sample are parents, the other 30% are grandparents, aunts/uncles, some siblings, etc.)

And while more and more schools and districts nationwide are providing programs designed to support students’ academic recovery — like tutoring and summer school — these programs are not reaching all the children who need support. These programs are challenging to operate and often require families to enroll their children, but participation in many districts has been low. A plausible explanation for why so few parents enroll their children is they don’t know their children are behind.

There is lots of blame to go around (and we’re guilty of contributing to it with our articles illustrating low parent interest in enrolling their children in programs!).

But where’s the traction to turn things around? We know that not enough students are participating in supports offered outside the school day to quickly bounce back to pre-Covid achievement levels — and there was a great deal of inequity pre-Covid, so that shouldn’t even be the end target. On the other hand, the structural obstacles to dramatically improving children’s learning at scale through standard school-day instruction have proven more formidable than anyone anticipated due to challenges such as staffing shortages, union contracts, the length of the school day and year. We need to focus on the reality of the situation to provide concrete, realistic suggestions that educators and caregivers can actually implement.

For example, our own research shows too few caregivers know their children need support. In June, we learned that only a quarter of families in California — and nationally — say their child had been identified as needing additional help or support in any subject area. But school leaders estimate that half of all children entered the 2022-23 school year below grade level in at least one subject.

And among that 25%, many more California caregivers than the national average report not knowing in which subjects their child had been identified as needing support — which could include anything from small-group instruction to individualized education plans. For example, 6% of families nationally do not know whether their child was identified as needing extra support specifically in math, 4% for reading and writing. In California, those same percentages of not knowing in which subject the child needs extra support are 27-28% respectively. School districts must do more to ensure that children below grade level are identified and put on track for intervention and make sure parents know in which areas their child is struggling and how to avail of the support they need.

Another example from our survey: Just 34% of Californian families think tutoring is helping their child a lot (32% feel tutoring helps some or a little bit, 34% report they don’t know). These results indicate that tutoring quality needs improvement in California. This is harder to address, but these results could, for example, encourage schools to ask families about which aspects of tutoring are and are not helpful, and address their specific concerns.

A third example from our survey is that though about half of families report their child’s school offered mental health services or tutoring during the 2022-23 school year or summer school after, there is still unmet interest. Among those with children not offered summer school in 2023, 30% of Californian families report they would have enrolled their child. A third of Californian families would also have enrolled their child in tutoring if offered. Just shy of 20% of families in California would have enrolled their child in school-based mental health services. Meeting this unmet interest could be the hardest of the three examples for schools to address, though understanding that the unmet interest exists may help districts continue to refine outreach to parents.

There are major structural reasons for why districts and schools are struggling with the enormous task of catching students up on half a year of math and reading . While $190 billion in education recovery dollars may seem like a lot in the abstract, it’s no match for the barriers to recovery that districts are facing. Magical thinking about how to get us back on track won’t cut it anymore; we need targeted analysis and realistic interventions that can help students catch up.

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Morgan Polikoff is an associate professor at the University of Southern California’s Rossier School of Education.

Anna Saavedra is a research scientist in the Center for Applied Research in Education within the USC Dornsife Center for Economic and Social Research. USC is a private research university located in Los Angeles.

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