Reconnect

Afterword: How We Choose

In May 2022, Tom Kane, an education professor, economist, and director of Harvard's Center for Education Policy Research, wrote in Atlantic magazine to describe the findings of a study he'd helped lead. He and his colleagues had studied test results of 2.1 million students from 10,000 schools in 49 states, comparing their yearly pre-pandemic progress to their progress on the same assessments during the pandemic.

The results were consistent with almost every other serious study: the pandemic had been devastating for student learning, and its disparate impact on students already living in poverty was a double injustice. On net, students had lost 13 weeks of learning in low-poverty schools and 22 weeks of learning in ...