![]() Among those showing the largest learning losses are this year’s crop of third graders, who were in kindergarten when the pandemic hit, a foundational year for learning to read. Parker caught COVID in first grade, missing two weeks of school.Īcross the country, federal data show, the disruptions wrought by the pandemic were accompanied by widespread learning setbacks, even in states that saw students return quickly to in-person learning. Noel was infected twice, forced to miss school again just this past fall because of a COVID-sickened child. “I have kids,” Noel said midway through the year, “that legitimately cannot read.” ![]() ![]() Three years later, Noel has more third graders than ever who are reading below grade level. Students and teachers got sick, social distancing made it hard to teach kids in small groups, and the pace of teaching ground to a crawl. students spent a year or more learning online, pandemic school in rural Kansas was as normal as it got.īut the upheaval still took a toll. The tiny, 900-student school system in Columbus pivoted to remote learning briefly in March 2020 before going back in person that fall, initially without masks. Halfway through the school year, with some of her students reading nearly 200 words per minute and others struggling to sound out around 10, she has had to make a lot of tweaks like this.Įxiting from the pandemic, the assumption might be that Noel’s students should be among the least scathed. “Because I’m not really good.”īekah Noel told her students to jot down answers for their partners if they needed extra help writing or spelling. “Do you want to read?” one of the third graders, Parker, asked his partner after the lesson on the Punic Wars.
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