The feds released the scores on the first National Assessment of Educational Progress since the pandemic—9-year-old 4th graders—and it’s pretty good evidence that going to school is good for you, especially if you are black or Hispanic. The future laptop class didn’t take too big a hit from missing a lot of in-person school and doing school over Zoom, but the further down the social scale, the bigger the hit. Blacks dropped the worst, and Hispanics second most. Math scores took a somewhat bigger fall overall than reading. Low scorers dropped the most, although I’m not sure how to interpret that.
All this fits with the idea that school is good for kids from more chaotic homes.
My impression from Education Realist is that black and Hispanic parents were the ones most in favor of keeping schools virtual.
Here’s a graph showing 2022 math scores for 4th graders by race, breaking out the 10th percentile, 25th, 50th, 75th, and 90th. This isn’t a bad way to show both that there are big gaps between the races and that there is a lot of overlap. The median black score falls at about the 20th percentile among whites, but about 20% of blacks outscore whites.
