As we continue to navigate a once-in-a-century pandemic, attention is shifting to the long-term health impacts of COVID-19—what health professionals call "long COVID." But as recent devastating student test score results made clear, we're missing a similar phenomenon playing out in classrooms across the country. School closures may be behind us, but our nation's students are at risk of struggling for years with lasting after-effects of the pandemic—what some of our fellow education researchers have termed "long COVID learning loss."
Headlines have focused largely on the short-term impacts of COVID-19 on students across the country, and with good reason. Test scores dropped, absenteeism surged, and mental health incidents reached crisis levels. Black and low-income students, who already faced disproportionate barriers to learning before the pandemic, were most impacted by learning loss during the pandemic itself. Initial data showed that decades of work to close the Black-white achievement gap have been virtually erased over the past two years.
But this has the potential to be much worse than a temporary, one-time setback. Our school system focuses classroom instruction on grade-level content, often with 25 or 30 students per class. There is very little opportunity for individualization, meaning that when a student starts falling behind, they often stay behind.
We can see this in data from the Chicago Public Schools (CPS). Students who fall behind their peers tend to stay behind. This is long COVID learning loss in action. Millions of students condemned to a host of consequences they'll carry with them into adulthood.
We cannot continue with this status quo.
Thankfully, unlike the ongoing health puzzle of long COVID, we do know how to address learning loss. It is possible to rapidly accelerate student learning by borrowing an idea that dates to at least the 15th century at Oxford University: tutoring.
"High-dosage" tutoring seems to be one of the most effective learning interventions ever studied. It gets its power from perfect individualization—having one teacher for every student guarantees that everyone gets exactly the type of instruction they need. It's no wonder U.S. Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona recently called on the nation's school districts to provide tutoring to all students in need of support.
But while we know tutoring works, we know much less about how to provide it at scale. Traditional one-on-one tutoring is pricey, and despite an infusion of funding from the American Rescue Plan Act, lower student enrollment is making it difficult for school districts to fund supplemental interventions.
The challenge the country needs to solve is not pedagogical but rather economic. How do we take the power of Oxford-style tutoring and scale it at a price point U.S. public schools can afford? The University of Chicago Education Lab showed us not only what's possible, but also how much further we need to go.
Several years ago, we partnered with CPS and a non-profit tutoring provider, Saga Education, to provide CPS students with 50 minutes of two-on-one instruction per day in school, every day of the school year. The results were dramatic. Using a study design of the sort that provides gold-standard evidence in medicine, we found that 9th and 10th grade students learned between two to three times what they'd normally learn over the course of a year. That's the equivalent of closing up to 50 percent of the Black-white test score gap in one academic year.
To bring tutoring to more students, we then partnered with Saga and CPS on a variant of this approach: give students tutoring only every other day; on off days, students worked with high-quality computer software intended to provide the same sort of individualized instruction and feedback as tutoring. The result: tutoring costs were cut by a third with no loss in effectiveness.
Despite these advances, high-dosage tutoring remains too expensive to deliver tutoring to every student who was affected by the pandemic, even with a one-time infusion of billions of dollars of federal pandemic relief to school districts. Nor are there enough tutors. We need a crash research and development (R&D) program to figure out how to dramatically increase the scale of tutoring's benefits. Our University of Chicago Education Lab team is partnering with MDRC and school districts across America on a massive R&D initiative; we hope many others join the cause as well.
Our work couldn't be more urgent. Millions of children across the country are on the brink of falling victim to long COVID learning loss—unless adults figure out a way to fix this. We must approach this challenge with the same energy and investment we've put toward the study and treatment of COVID-19. If ever there was a time to reimagine what happens in our schools, this is it.
Monica Bhatt is a senior research director at the University of Chicago Education Lab, a cutting-edge research organization focused on improving student learning and opportunity.
Jens Ludwig is the Pritzker co-director of the Education Lab and Edwin A. and Betty L. Bergman Distinguished Service Professor at the University of Chicago.
Jean Grossman a senior research fellow at MDRC and on the faculty of Princeton's School of Public and International Affairs.
The views expressed in this article are the writers' own.
Uncommon Knowledge
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Newsweek is committed to challenging conventional wisdom and finding connections in the search for common ground.
