America’s schoolchildren need an ‘Operation Warp Speed’

The COVID-19 pandemic created a once-in-a-century education challenge that is at least as hard to solve as the related public health challenge. Between 2019 and 2022, American schoolchildren lost an average of three quarters of a year of schooling. The most disadvantaged kids fell even further behind.

As we argue in a newly released paper from the Aspen Economic Strategy Group, despite the existence of promising solutions like “high-dosage tutoring,” the most recent data also suggest that the country has made essentially no progress in overcoming this pandemic learning loss. America’s response, unfortunately, has been to give up before we even really get started.

As part of the American Rescue Plan passed in March 2021, Congress set aside roughly $190 billion in the Elementary and Secondary Emergency Relief (ESSER) program over four years to help schools recover. In less than a year, this critical financial help to school districts will end unless Congress acts to extend funding. That would be a mistake that widens economic inequality and slows economic growth.

It doesn’t have to happen. It is as if Operation Warp Speed were shut down a few months in, long before the COVID vaccine was developed, because some arbitrary bureaucratic deadline was reached.

If we want to dramatically change how fast students learn, schools must dramatically change the nature of schooling. Unfortunately, the federal government gave school districts too little time and too little money to address the scale of the learning-loss problem.

In January 2022, U.S. Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona suggested that tutoring efforts would be a good use of ESSER funding. Why did he recommend that? Because the data show that this is one of the best and most effective ways to help kids learn. Our University of Chicago-based research team partnered with the Chicago Public Schools and the non-profit Saga Education to carry out several studies of high-dosage tutoring. We see that for a few thousand dollars per student it’s possible to double or even triple the amount they learn per year in a given subject. But this type of tutoring requires schools to do things that are very different from what they are accustomed to doing.

To get students to participate at high levels, tutoring must be done during the school day. But schools aren’t used to carving time out for new things during the school day. Instead, they’ve tried to often do the tutoring after school or even virtually with students at home. That almost never works.

Tutoring works best with a structured curriculum, partly to help students learn content they don’t know that’s below their current grade level. Yet schools are used to the idea of tutoring as homework help.

Schools are also used to thinking that successfully teaching children requires lots of prior experience and training. This may be true for regular classroom instruction, but when schools stick to their usual human resources playbook and hire regular teachers to tutor, the result is that tutoring is too expensive to give students much of it. Saga’s experience showed that paraprofessionals can be effective tutors at just a fraction of the price of teachers.

High costs are the enemy of high dosage. Schools are just starting to learn these lessons from their firsthand experiences.

From the beginning, ESSER funding wasn’t nearly enough. Yes, $190 billion sounds like a lot of money, but consider it in context: The U.S. typically spends close to $800 billion on K-12 schooling every year, and the $190 billion was spread out over four years. Thus, ESSER funds add up to the equivalent of just a 6 percent increase in total school spending per year. It doesn’t help that, on top of cutting off these resources, the recent budget deal cut between the Biden administration and Congress limits any growth in federal education spending. 

While schools need more time and more money to implement and expand high-dosage tutoring in an effective manner, they also need to be held accountable.

The things schools need to change to dramatically to accelerate student learning are hard. In the chaotic aftermath of the pandemic, it’s understandable that understaffed schools have so often taken the path of least resistance. But to avoid creating lifelong educational scars for our kids we need to also nudge — or even push, if necessary — to make sure schools follow through on implementing one of the closest things we have (for better or worse) to a “COVID learning loss” vaccine.

What happens if America can’t make these changes? We risk squandering the potential of an entire generation of 50 million students. The result would be something like 2 to 9 percent lower lifetime income for these kids. The lost earnings due to lower math scores alone is projected to add up to $900 billion. And because learning loss was worse for non-white and lower-income students, we risk dramatically increasing economic inequality.

The failure to give schools more time and money would be the equivalent of calling it quits on overcoming pandemic learning loss. That would be like quitting a race just when you get to the starting line.

An English expression comes to mind that every school child would normally know, even if now they might not because of pandemic learning loss: “penny wise and pound foolish.”

Jonathan Guryan is the Lawyer Taylor Professor of Education and Social Policy at Northwestern University and Faculty Fellow of the Institute for Policy Research. Jens Ludwig is the Edwin A. and Betty L. Bergman Distinguished Service Professor at the University of Chicago. Both are co-directors of the University of Chicago Education Lab and research associates at the National Bureau of Economic Research.