No Surprise: We’re Not Going to Remedy Massive Education Loss from the Pandemic. Sorry, Kids!

By James Pethokoukis

In This Issue

• The Essay: We’re not going to remedy massive education loss from the pandemic
• 5QQ: 5 Quick Questions for … Cameron Wiese, advocate for a New World’s Fair
• Micro Reads: the Immaculate Disinflation, AI and health, green lithium, and more …

Quote of the Issue

“Education then, beyond all other devices of human origin, is a great equalizer of the conditions of men — the balance wheel of the social machinery.” – Horace Mann

The Essay

👎 We’re not going to remedy massive education loss from the pandemic

A big part of the Faster, Please! mission is discussing and evaluating public policy on its potential to help create a better future for America and the world. And that doesn’t just mean a sci-fi tomorrow of nuclear fusion reactors, universal vaccines, space elevators, and Mars colonies. More simply, it means creating an ecology of opportunity where everyone has the chance to maximize their human potential and create lives of value as they see fit. Everyone, everywhere. That’s the goal.

And to effectively evaluate policy, we need to acknowledge trade-offs. That may seem like boilerplate, Econ 101 stuff, but it’s something policymakers too often ignore or underplay. Take, for example, one of the most momentous policy actions of our lifetime: the decision by many local leaders across America to close schools and hold classes remotely during the worst of the Covid-19 pandemic. These decisions were made in good faith for public health reasons, but the impacts went far beyond public health.

In the new NBER working paper “The Consequences of Remote and Hybrid Instruction During the Pandemic,” researchers Dan Goldhaber (University of Washington), Thomas J. Kane (Harvard University), Andrew McEachin (NWEA), Emily Morton (NWEA), Tyler Patterson (Harvard University), and Douglas O. Staiger (Dartmouth) — using testing data from 2.1 million students in 10,000 schools nationwide — calculate the impact of remote and hybrid instruction in widening gaps in achievement by race and poverty level.

They compared student achievement growth during the pandemic period (Fall 2019 to Fall 2021) to a pre-pandemic period (Fall 2017 to Fall 2019) to determine the “magnitude of the learning loss” and investigate “the role of remote and hybrid instruction in widening gaps in achievement by race and school poverty.” The results are as bad as many of you might guess:

While we have nothing to add regarding the public health benefits, it seems that the shifts to remote or hybrid instruction during 2020-21 had profound consequences for student achievement. In districts that went remote, achievement growth was lower for all subgroups, but especially for students attending high-poverty schools. In areas that remained in person, there were still modest losses in achievement, but there was no widening of gaps between high and low-poverty schools in math (and less widening in reading). … We estimate that high-poverty districts that went remote in 2020-21 will need to spend nearly all of their federal aid on academic recovery to help students recover from pandemic-related achievement losses.

The more you dig into this paper, the worse things look. High-poverty schools were more likely to go remote, and they suffered larger declines when they did so. Within school districts that were remote for most of 2020-21, high-poverty schools experienced 50 percent more math achievement loss than low-poverty schools. But these gaps did not widen in areas that remained in-person.

These headline results are hardly shocking. One of the strongest and most persistent findings of modern economics — clear since the 1950s — is that schooling does something important to help children become high-functioning adults, including as workers in an advanced, globalized economy. We’re not just warehousing kids all day long. Some recent research on the topic:

• A 2017 paper on school closing during the 1916 polio epidemic by economists Keith Meyers of the University of Arizona and Melissa Thomasson of Miami University found children ages 14 to 17 during the pandemic ended up with “less educational attainment in 1940 compared to their slightly older peers.”
• A 2018 literature review by the World Bank found “that the private average global rate of return to one extra year of schooling is about 9 percent a year and very stable over decades.”
• A 2020 calculation by economist Michael Strain, my colleague at the American Enterprise Institute, found that keeping kids home for another semester after the spring shutdown could represent a loss of over $30,000 per decade in future earnings for a typical worker who graduated high school but didn’t attend college.
• A 2021 study, “Learning loss due to school closures during the COVID-19 pandemic,” looked at the Netherlands as a best-case scenario for at-home learning given that it had a short initial lockdown period, equitable school funding, and globally high rates of broadband access. The finding of researchers: “Despite favorable conditions, we find that students made little or no progress while learning from home. Learning loss was most pronounced among students from disadvantaged homes.”
• A study earlier this year, “The triple impact of school closures on educational inequality,” predicts “large learning losses for children from low-income families. The grades of children living in the poorest neighbourhoods decline, on average, by half a point on the 4-point GPA scale. This loss for disadvantaged children is comparable to a change from a straight-B report card to getting a C in half of the subjects … whereas children from high-income neighbourhoods remain unscathed.”

So perhaps the actual shocking finding in that first paper, “The Consequences of Remote and Hybrid Instruction During the Pandemic,” is the estimate of what it would take to recover from pandemic-era educational losses. Again that finding: “We estimate that high-poverty districts that went remote in 2020-21 will need to spend nearly all of their federal aid on academic recovery to help students recover from pandemic-related achievement losses.”

That’s not going to happen. The paper cites a Georgetown University analysis of the nearly $200 billion in federal dough provided to state and local education agencies throughout the pandemic, including the March 2021 American Rescue Plan. Only a bit more than a quarter of that funding will be spent on “academic recovery,” with the remainder “planned for facilities, technology, staffing and mental and physical health.”
“I’m afraid that while school agencies are planning a range of activities for catch-up, their plans are just not commensurate with the losses,” Harvard’s Kane told The New York Times.

I asked about the prospects for “academic recovery” in an upcoming Political Economy podcast with AEI education scholar Rick Hess. Here’s a (rather bracing) sneak preview of that chat:

Pethokoukis: So what are we doing to catch these kids up? Or is that really ever going to happen?

Hess: No, it’s not going to happen. We have no idea how to catch these kids up. I mean, we’ve been trying really hard to reform American education, certainly since A Nation At Risk, 39 years ago, and arguably for at least a half-century. Look, it’s not like somebody has the right answers, and in some school of education somewhere they’ve got them locked away in the closet, and now we’re finally going to crack them out. The reality is, we don’t have any good solutions to help kids catch up.

In fact, the solutions we have that are most promising are the ones that are right now under attack from the education establishment. We have seen charter schools launched which used really crazy strategies. They set high expectations. They expected kids to work hard. They extended the school day. They were very diligent about who they hired. And those same schools are now rapidly retreating from the things that made them successful.

So, what are we doing? Well, we put more than $200 billion, through COVID emergency funds, into K-12 education. What are school districts doing with it? Well, they’re using it to give teachers bonuses. They’re using it at the collective bargaining table, giving unions larger raises than they would’ve. They are adding more bodies across the board, although they don’t know what they’re going to do with those bodies when these funds run out.

Look, we’ve been trying to tutor kids for the better part of what, three millennia? I believe these guys, Plato and Socrates, had some thoughts on the value of tutoring. It’s great. It’s powerful. … The problem with tutoring is it’s hard to find enough good tutors. It’s hard to keep the tutors you’ve got. It’s hard to train the tutors to be effective. It’s hard to match the kids with tutors that work. The tutoring is swell, but the idea that somebody’s got this recipe that’s going to get these kids where they need to be is, I think, wishful thinking.

We would need a lot of tutors, right?

So, they had this thing. It was called Apollo 20. Houston had this terrific superintendent years ago named Terry Greer. He met Roland Fryer, who did this wonderful work on this stuff at Harvard. They built Apollo, like the moon launch. I think it was at fifth grade and ninth grade, they decided to do targeted tutoring. I think tutors were working two on one or three on one with kids — just fifth and ninth grade, just selected schools. They still needed hundreds of tutors. And the problem is, in order to afford these tutors, you can’t pay that much, because you need hundreds of these guys.

So, they were paying something like $20,000 or $24,000 a year, and you were mostly getting graduate students or retirees. Even so, they were losing more than 50 percent of their tutors a year. So the idea that in a place like Birmingham, Alabama, or New York City, that you’re going to just going to find thousands or tens of thousands of tutors who are going to line up, get trained, show up, do their job reliably for a year or two years or three years — even if we had the recipe to help make this tutoring successful, the logistics of it are really remarkably tough.

I’ve hardly been the only person over the past two years warning about the dangers of education loss from remote schooling, especially for poorer kids with possibly dodgy internet access, no quiet place to study, and/or no parent able to help during the day. And when I did, the frequent social-media response I got was something akin to “Once the pandemic is over, we’ll get those kids caught up. See you on the other side.” But there was never a plan, certainly not any plan nearly commensurate with the problem, to do that. I wonder if the full realization of that reality — or a willingness to concede that obvious reality — might have altered policymaker decision-making in some way since the spring of 2020. An intriguing and extraordinarily frustrating counterfactual.

5QQ

💡 5 Quick Questions for … Cameron Wiese, advocate for a New World’s Fair

Cameron Wiese wants World’s Fairs to again become what they were for most of the 20th century: globally important events that inspired attendees to imagine and invent a better future. (I’ve commented on this issue previously in this newsletter.) As Wiese wrote in a wonderful essay not long ago: “[World’s Fairs] promoted a collective vision for a better world — reminding us how connected we were and how far we could go if only we went together.” Wiese is executive director of World Fair Co., a private effort to revive and reimagine the World’s Fairs here in America, and host of the Build the Future podcast.

1/ The US hasn’t hosted a World’s Fair in decades, but the fairs are still happening in other countries. Why is it so important to bring them back to America?

World’s Fairs have a long and storied history in America, but few know how important they were in shaping our country. In 1893, Chicago hosted a Fair that drew 27.5 million guests — nearly 40 percent of the U.S. population before there were cars, planes, or highways. Guests saw a city illuminated by electricity for the first time, marveled at the architecture that would inspire the City Beautiful movement, and rode the world’s first Ferris Wheel.

In the decades that followed, the American World’s Fairs continued to amaze guests from around the globe. They debuted the steam engine, the telephone, the Model T and its assembly line, broadcast television, and touchscreens accelerating their mainstream adoption. They are responsible for symbols of progress that stand to this day, like San Francisco’s Palace of Fine Arts and Seattle’s Space Needle. They spread the ideas of some of history’s most influential people like Walt Disney, Amelia Earhart, Booker T. Washington, and Albert Einstein. They inspired millions of American children, including Carl Sagan and Neil DeGrasse Tyson, to marvel at our universe and the cosmos.

The Fairs were a place that brought together people from all different backgrounds and created common ground to discuss our country and our future. Today, what we need now more than ever is to come together and have a conversation about a future worth building. By bringing the Fairs back to America, we can promote a collective vision for a better world — reminding us how connected we all are and how far we can go if only we go together.

2/ How have World’s Fairs changed over the years and why does that matter?

Today, World’s Fairs have been rebranded as “International Expositions” that occur every five years. Over the past few decades, their focus and structure has shifted from a cohesive narrative about the future and industry to more of a showcase of individual nations. Each nation has the opportunity to creatively brand itself, share infrastructure projects, and promote their foreign investment opportunities. While this model serves its own important purpose, we’re now missing the cultural value that the original Fairs brought: an exciting and hopeful narrative for what the future holds.

3/ What work are you doing on this project, and how optimistic are you that the US will host a World’s Fair in the next decade or so?

My goal is to recapture the impact that the earlier Fairs had. It’s simply not enough to bring the current version of the Fairs to the US, or even to re-run the playbook that was successfully used for past US Fairs. The world has changed — particularly the ways that information and ideas are shared – so the Fairs must be reimagined to meet the needs and challenges of our time.

To make this reimagining happen, I’ve brought together a small team to rethink every piece of the Fair. From the physical infrastructure to the integration of different technologies to the guest experience, we’re focused on telling an exciting and compelling story about our future that not only gives guests hope, but inspires them to be a part of building it.

There’s obviously a lot that needs to go right, beyond redesigning the Fair. We’ll need to partner with the right cities and work with stakeholders in every industry and in policy. But we’re cognizant of these needs, and we’re working on a timeline that has me quite optimistic that we’ll host a World’s Fair in the next decade or so. The faster the better. 

4/ Why are World’s Fairs still relevant in the digital age? Can’t we just do “exhibits” on YouTube or in the metaverse, especially since so many innovations today are in software?

In the planning of every World’s Fair, there were skeptics who insisted that the day of the Fairs was over. But time and again, this has been proven untrue. Expo 2020 in Dubai drew 24 million guests from around the world, and Shanghai in 2010 hosted 73 million. And if the past two years have taught us anything, it’s that humans crave real, in-person experiences, which is why we’re seeing so much enthusiasm for the return of music festivals, sports games, and theme parks. It speaks volumes that when given the opportunity to go fully digital, people overwhelmingly demanded the return of in-person experiences.

To be fair, past and even current models of the Fair, which did and do rely on exhibits, are losing relevance in the digital age. When it comes to pure information sharing, digital tools have an effectiveness and scale that in-person Fairs can’t compete with. But that’s why we’re doing things differently, and actually leveraging the advantages of the digital age to our benefit. We’re combining these technologies with in-person experiences to create a product that’s more than the sum of its parts. This will not only show up in the Fair’s physical design, but also in remotely-accessible versions of the Fair that can reach kids around the globe.

And this approach actually creates a lot of value for digital and software innovations. Even impactful software can often feel abstract, and removed from people’s lives. By providing real-world experiences where guests can see these innovations being applied, the Fair can connect people with technology and foster an understanding of how it improves their lives. With our model, guests will get a life experience that they share with their friends and family; where they taste things they’ve never tasted, touch things they’ve never touched, hear things they’ve never heard, and find themselves immersed in a story about the future that is enabled by technology. 

5/ What is the best-case long-term impact you envision for a US-hosted World’s Fair?

If done right, the World’s Fair can be the catalyst for us to translate the hopeful stories we tell about the future into the real world. For that to happen, people need to leave the Fair with renewed hope; they need a vision of where we’re going, paths to get there, and the belief that they have a role to play.

We’ve actually reimagined our Fair with this long-term impact as a primary goal. Without getting into too much detail, we have components of the Fair that are intentionally designed to not only show people what a beautiful and abundant future can look like, but also highlight the technologies and projects being done today that will enable that future.

No matter what people are most passionate about — whether it’s food, energy, transportation, space, climate, computing, cities, or something else — they’ll leave the Fair with a sense that the future is bright and that there are clear ways for them to participate in building it. 

My hope is that in 2080, the people who have solved today’s most pressing problems will look back on the Fair as the moment they decided to act.

Micro Reads

🔥 Wars, plagues, and inflation – Michael Feroli, JPMorgan | “In an effort to understand the spike in inflation that has occurred over the last year, some commentators have drawn comparisons to the inflations associated with World War II and the Korean War. … We’re not claiming this is the final word in the story, but in our preliminary investigations we find the war parallels with the pandemic-era inflation unconvincing. What does this mean for the outlook? The most obvious conclusion is that expecting an easy disinflation from the normalization of spending and employment patterns might be wishful thinking. … Ending that inflation may require a slowdown in the labor market that is far from immaculate.”

📱 GDPR and the Lost Generation of Innovative Apps – Rebecca Janßen, Reinhold Kesler, Michael E. Kummer, and Joel Waldfogel, NBER | “Using data on 4.1 million apps at the Google Play Store from 2016 to 2019, we document that GDPR induced the exit of about a third of available apps; and in the quarters following implementation, entry of new apps fell by half. … [We] find that GDPR reduces consumer surplus and aggregate app usage by about a third. Whatever the privacy benefits of GDPR, they come at substantial costs in foregone innovation.”

🌏 China’s erratic policies are terrifying investors – The Economist | “Beijing’s unpredictable, often-shocking policy swerves in recent years have made it all the more conceivable that the country’s most prominent entrepreneur could suddenly be accused of attempting to ‘split the country and subvert the state’. President Xi Jinping’s increasingly ideological campaign to rid China of the Omicron variant of covid-19 is threatening to throttle economic growth this year.”

⚕ What I Learned about the Power of AI at the Cleveland Clinic – Adam Thierer, Medium | “Tissue samples will now be able to be shared among much larger teams of medical experts, who can — with the help of algorithmic systems — work together at a distance to better understand and use all the information they will have at their fingertips. … He also talked about how algorithms are being used to detect irregular heartbeats and diagnose degenerative brain disease (Alzheimer’s, dementia, Parkinson’s) in a way that will improve or save many lives. Others from the Clinic talked about the many ways AI helps with stroke detection, and will grow even more sophisticated in coming years.”

⚡ The Salton Sea could produce the world’s greenest lithium, if new extraction technologies work – Katie Brigham, CNBC | “Traditionally, lithium extraction involves either open-pit mining or evaporation ponds, which work by pumping lithium-containing brine to the surface and waiting for the water to dry up. Both of these methods have huge land footprints, are often very water intensive and can create a lot of contamination and waste. But at the Salton Sea, three companies are developing chemical processes to extract lithium in a much cleaner way, taking advantage of the Salton Sea’s rich geothermal resources. Near the lake, there are already 11 operating geothermal power plants, 10 of which are owned by Berkshire Hathaway’s renewable energy division, BHE Renewables.”

👷‍♂️ Less immigrant labor in US contributing to price hikes – Nicholas Riccardi, AP | “After immigration to the United States tapered off during the Trump administration — then ground to a near complete halt for 18 months during the coronavirus pandemic — the country is waking up to a labor shortage partly fueled by that slowdown. The U.S. has, by some estimates, 2 million fewer immigrants than it would have if the pace had stayed the same, helping power a desperate scramble for workers in many sectors, from meatpacking to homebuilding, that is also contributing to supply shortages and price increases.”