Billions at Stake: Combating Students’ Learning Loss

Leading experts on the links between academic success and the economy say that today’s K–12 students will lose billions of dollars in future earnings because the COVID-19 pandemic messed up their learning time and daily lives. This will cost the economy trillions of dollars in lost economic activity.

Some district leaders are still trying to help kids find good jobs that match their interests while ensuring they stay caught up on basic skills like reading, writing, and math. This task has become more complex over the past few years.

Congress established the National Assessment Governing Board to administer the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP). This week, the board released a brief highlighting new studies that paint a “dire” picture of the country’s economic future. These studies are based on the fact that students’ NAEP scores have dropped sharply over the last few years, bringing them back to levels seen in the 1990s.

The 25-person group, mostly teachers, academics, and public officials, wants policymakers and supporters of K–12 students to pay more attention to the recent drop in NAEP scores as a sign of bigger problems coming to society. “The affected students are mostly still in school, which could be why the economic problem hasn’t gotten the attention it needs,” the brief says.

Researchers examined how NAEP scores, also called the “Nation’s Report Card,” have been decreasing lately. They analyzed those numbers using well-known formulas that show links between a state or country’s GDP and its people’s level of education and skills.

Engineer Eric Hanushek, who studies school finances at Stanford University, thinks the U.S. will lose $31 trillion in business. Those losses would be much more significant than the effects of the Great Recession on the economy.

Two other researchers, Tom Kane at Harvard University and Douglas Staiger at Dartmouth College, came to a different conclusion. They found that the 48 million kids in public schools during the 2020-21 school year will lose an estimated $600 billion in lifetime income.

Hanushek says that states’ economies will suffer in proportion to how much their kids’ NAEP scores dropped between 2019 and 2022. The most drastic drops in economic activity will happen in Oklahoma, Delaware, and West Virginia. In Utah, Idaho, and Alabama, earnings will drop the least.

Hanushek found that, on average, students across the country will earn almost 6 percent less in their jobs than they would have if the pandemic had not happened. Some students could lose as much as 9 percent of their future earnings.

These numbers should make policymakers and school managers more worried about the long-term effects of “learning loss,” Hanushek told Education Week.

His words were likened to the government of the place you live, adding a new 6% tax to the income of everyone who attended school during the pandemic. “There would be a riot if the government said that.”

Schools are trying to help students find essential and profitable jobs.

School districts are doing many different things to help kids recover from the pandemic and lessen the damage that experts say could happen if nothing is done.

Many people have spent the extra government aid money on tutors, mental health counselors, and programs that extend the school day and year. Kane, Staiger, and other researchers think that these measures to help students get back to school have undone about a third of the math and a quarter of the reading they lost. However, the recovery has not been smooth.

Other school districts are putting more effort into preparing older kids for life after K–12 school. The rural Elma district in Washington state has a 2,000-hour apprenticeship program approved by the U.S. Department of Labor that lets students learn about a job and workplace of their choice while also meeting state-mandated learning requirements.

The district is using new state laws that let competency-based education models work. These models measure student progress by how well they master skills instead of how much time they spend sitting in class. Almost every state now has similar laws.

Chris Nesmith, director of the 1,700-student district in the rural western part of the state, said that the pandemic made it clear that schools should meet students where they are instead of forcing them to learn in a way that doesn’t work for everyone.

Nesmith added that the project also includes mental health. He is also co-leader of Redefining Ready, an AASA (The School Superintendents Association) initiative that supports efforts to help students succeed after K–12, whether they go to college or get a job.

“Our system forces students into this hopeless environment in a certain way. “Then we’re like, ‘Your mental health is bad now, let’s talk about it,'” Nesmith explained. “Perhaps we shouldn’t let students feel so hopeless that to sit through class, they think they have no purpose or value.”

It doesn’t matter if COVID-19 is to blame; kids need more help.

Ken Wallace, who has been the director of the Maine Township school district in Illinois since 2009, doesn’t think COVID is the main reason students may find it hard to work hard and contribute to the economy.

In the early days of the pandemic, parents in the less-poor schools in his area bought devices for their children and hired certified teachers to set up makeshift learning pods. In schools with higher poverty, students shared bedrooms and cared for younger siblings while their parents did jobs they couldn’t do from home.

“That difference in the world between who has and who hasn’t is the most important factor that will affect how well kids do financially in the future,” he said.

Wallace was very interested in predicting how much money students would make in the future long before the outbreak. About 6,200 students in the district each have a career plan, including an expected return on investment based on a calculator tool from the Indeed.com job site.

Wallace told them, “We want to ensure that the cost of your education is less than your first year’s pay.”

Wallace said that he was motivated to lead this project after becoming obsessed with a piece of data that showed that, after house debt, student loan debt had become the second most common type of debt among Americans. Students of color and low-income students have to pay more for their student loans than other students.

“We told the kids there was only one thing to do.” “Where are you going to school?” we ask those in their junior and senior years. ‘What are you going to do?'” Wallace told me.

However, after college, many graduates are underemployed, need more schooling, or choose a job path different from what they thought they would do in college.

But that only works if they thought of one in the first place.

Nesmith says there is a focus on “depth of learning,” not just “breadth of learning.” The apprenticeship program in the Elma district is one example of this. He thinks it is a fundamental way to help stop the worst effects of the pandemic and the other problems that K–12 kids face today.

Hanushek suggests schools focus on rewarding the best teachers with bonuses and other rewards to keep up the good work. Others who want to help improve public schools say they should get more money and fix huge differences in income between states, districts, and even schools.

Researchers and area leaders agree that now is the time to act, no matter the method used.

Nesmith said, “I think the further we get from the pandemic, the more resistant we’re going to get” to actual efforts to help kids do well in life and reach their full potential. “This was a problem before the flu.” We had to deal with the problem because of it.

Related articles from your friends at Your Career Place.

https://yourcareerplace.com/uncategorized/embarking-on-a-journey-towards-a-new-career/

https://yourcareerplace.com/how-to-increase-your-learning-speed-using-context-based-learning/