Catching up on the @empowerk12 report showing Covid learning losses for public school students in DC. (Note that the graphs were created using @empowerk12 data from in the report.) https://twitter.com/empowerk12/status/1339729738009604098

Data are from about 50% of students in grades 3-8 in public DC schools. 41% of students were flagged as taking too long or going too fast and were excluded. Their analysis is based on approx 32% of students in grades 3-8. Results may change (for better or worse) with full sample.

Students had lower fall-to-fall growth post-Covid than the year pre-Covid. Student growth fell more in math than in reading/English language arts (ELA), and growth fell more for some subgroups more than others.

It appears that all groups lost in math, which gives more evidence to the theory that kids work more on reading at home than math. Which also might be why ELA scores are sometimes more correlated with family income than math scores. What do people have against math?

It also appears that non-at-risk, Latinx, and IEP students grew more in ELA post-Covid than in pre-Covid? It could be (a) issues with this sample, (b) differences in student populations over time. Or hell, kids read more at home? The latter seems like a stretch.

In terms of relative standing (compared with all other students in the US pre-Covid), the differences for pre- and post-Covid show a loss of learning but don’t look so dramatic.

The groups that seemed to have lost relative ground the most are the middle achievers. The bottom quintile group is still in the bottom but fares slightly worse. The high-achieving group actually makes ground in math, vomit. And the middle groups have lost ground.

Overall, data indicate that students aren't learning as much at home as they would in-person (duh), and some groups are more negatively impacted than others. On an optimistic note, many kids in the US are in the same boat and 2020 is almost over.