New research is shining a light on the amount of learning students in Massachusetts missed out on during the pandemic, and what that may cost them in their future careers.
Education researchers at Harvard and Stanford have released analyses that show Bay State students, on average, lost 75% of a school year's worth of math, and 41% of a school year's worth of reading.
A further analysis performed by The Boston Globe found that the decline in math would mean a 1.6% decrease in lifetime earnings of Massachusetts students without "major intervention," which equates to about $23,840 per student. That could amount to more than $21 billion in lost wages for students across the state, according to the Globe
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In the research put out by Harvard and Stanford, Boston Public Schools came out a bit below of the state average, with 85% of a year of math lost and 41% for reading.
Experts told the Globe that since lower income districts showed more learning loss during the pandemic, there's potential for the income gap to only widen.
“There’s been a big increase in inequity,” Thomas Kane, a professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Education and one of the study's co-authors, told the Globe. “Weren’t [high-income students] already ahead? Yes, they were, but the point is, they’re even more ahead than before.”
The latest research to show the hit education has taken during the COVID era is based on the recently-released results from the National Assessment of Educational Progress.
