罢丑补迟鈥檚 the finding of a from the Hoover Institution, based on its 鈥溾�� project. Hoover researchers held nine in-person focus groups across seven states 鈥� Colorado, West Virginia, Minnesota, Pennsylvania, Indiana, New Mexico and New York 鈥� and talked with 82 participants, from parents and teachers to leaders of nonprofit organizations and elected officials. The format combined short surveys with open-ended discussions, which allowed the researchers to gather a wide variety of information and hear the nuance behind it.

Of course, 82 participants across nine sites is a small sample, so the findings should be seen as qualitative and exploratory rather than nationally representative. Still, the responses identify some consistent patterns and offer some potential solutions. 

People don鈥檛 know how bad things are

The authors deliberately focused on communities where academic proficiency scores were low, in the bottom fifth of all schools statewide. Yet more than half of the participants weren鈥檛 familiar with how their local schools actually performed.

Focus group participants reported that they rarely heard news about student reading and math scores. Instead, they described district communications  as occasionally misleading. For example, one expressed concern that the local district was celebrating growth metrics that obscured persistently low performance. As another participant put it: 鈥淧arents can鈥檛 be involved if they aren鈥檛 informed. They can鈥檛 be informed if they aren鈥檛 invited.鈥�

Those who do know the ratings think their schools are failing

Among respondents familiar with the performance data, more than half rated their local district schools as needing improvement, or worse. When asked about the quality of different types of schools in their communities, participants gave district schools the lowest average rating, below charter and private schools and vocational programs. They described teachers ill-prepared for diverse classrooms, inadequate special education services and a striking absence of practical preparation for students in things like financial literacy or vocational and technical skills.

Communities want to help but feel shut out

A majority of participants said they want to be real partners in improving their schools, but fewer than a quarter said they think their districts actually want that. School boards, in particular, were rated as particularly unreceptive to community input.

The anecdotes reveal a repeating pattern: People show up to meetings, join committees, raise concerns 鈥� and are ignored, dismissed or labeled as troublemakers. In some communities, language barriers and unreliable translation services make things harder. In others, parents hold back out of fear that speaking up could affect how their children are treated in school. Overall, only about a quarter said they felt they could personally drive change. 

And yet, people are still willing to get involved. Nearly 90% of participants said they would join a community task force to improve their local schools. More than half said they鈥檇 take on an active or leadership role, and nearly two-thirds were optimistic about what a coordinated community group could accomplish. People may not think they can drive change on their own, but they still hold out hope for collective improvement efforts.

So what would actually help?

Participants had concrete suggestions like flexible meeting times, reliable translation services, transportation, modest stipends to recognize parents鈥� time commitments and protections against retaliation. Procedurally, they wanted to feel like they are being included early, not handed decisions after they have already been made.

None of this will be especially surprising to people who鈥檝e followed education debates over the years. This is not the first report to find that families are often excluded from decision-making.

Still, the Hoover research adds nuance and urgency. It offers a portrait of communities that are ready and willing to be involved, but are often blocked from doing so 鈥� and provides a set of suggestions for what changing that would take.

These scores are not just numbers; they signal lost earning potential for today鈥檚 children and weakened competitiveness for tomorrow鈥檚 workforce. The pandemic deepened the decline, but students were already behind. Without action, the cost will be measured in lost opportunity and billions in economic losses.

from Stanford shows losses in student achievement before and after the pandemic equal those during the pandemic, and that the losses are continuing. The study found restoring student achievement to 2013 levels would raise the lifetime earnings of today鈥檚 average student by an estimated 8% 鈥� producing dramatic and sustained gains for our nation鈥檚 economy.

For our kids to be more financially successful as they age into the workforce, schools have to reverse NAEP declines over the past decade. There鈥檚 no time to spare.

This year鈥檚 NAEP proficiency results for public school students show reading scores have reached their , with only 29% of eighth graders and 30% of fourth graders achieving a proficient score. While the slide in has slowed, scores still remain below pre-pandemic levels, and the performance gap between high- and low-performing students has .

Lower performances by today鈥檚 students mean a down the road; proficiency in literacy and numeracy has been linked to several , including more fruitful college opportunities and higher wage jobs.

The research from Stanford estimates learning loss over the past decade has cost our country over . This translates into having an average of 6% higher GDP every year for the rest of this century if students were still at 2013 NAEP proficiency levels.

At the individual level, the average current student can expect to have a lifetime income that is 8% below that of a 2013 graduate. Because disadvantaged students have suffered deeper learning losses, their incomes can be expected to fall by over 10%.   

For our students to earn more 鈥� and be able to compete with their peers worldwide 鈥� educators can鈥檛 leave their outcomes to guesswork. Schools need to ensure students are learning the fundamentals using evidence-backed methods 鈥� and constantly and consistently measure their progress using clear, objective standards.

Some states made noteworthy progress on NAEP this year: Mississippi, Louisiana and Tennessee. Each has a track record of high expectations and strong accountability.

These states use an that puts reading and math achievement front and center. They measure what matters 鈥� proficiency and growth 鈥� and they report results in a way families and educators can understand. Transparency and rigor are fueling their progress.

It has been very difficult to implement effective large-scale reforms, but we now have examples of getting strong increases in literacy and mathematical proficiency when evidence-based policy solutions are implemented faithfully. For example, states are seeing academic growth using the following three approaches.

First, states need to invest in effective personnel. They can do this by and by supporting strong teaching through professional development in evidence-based practices such as use of high-quality instructional materials and assessment data to inform instruction. Further, hiring of math and has shown success.

Using data from and , which are short assessments to flag struggling students early, has helped ensure schools are using necessary interventions with high quality instructional materials. While many successful states mandate the use of screeners, others can incentivize districts to use them by providing the materials for free.

Finally, Alabama has shown that it is possible to begin turning around the math problem. Two years after passing the , Alabama has returned to for fourth grade NAEP math, jumping from last in the nation in 2019 to 31^st this year. This comprehensive math law includes such as elementary school math coaches; increasing the amount of math instruction per day to 60+ minutes; and the adoption of high-quality instructional materials.

Students aren鈥檛 going to catch up if states don鈥檛 make their progress a priority. Some states are leading the way, but more policymakers need to focus on improving student outcomes using tested methods that raise the bar and measure progress. The nation鈥檚 collective economic future depends on rewarding effective schools and reversing the achievement slides of the past dozen years.

The problem is that people of various ages have different educational experiences, different jobs and different circumstances, affecting how they develop and retain their skills.

In , my colleagues and I find that skills typically rise until the 40s, after which reading skills gently fall and math skills more steeply. Even here, however, the story is not so simple. These averages mask the fact that any decline is closely tied to how much the skills are used. 

Simply put, people who read and do math on a regular basis hold on to those skills at least into their 60s.

Economists are interested in understanding this  because reading and math skills are closely related to economic outcomes. More highly skilled individuals tend to earn more, and countries with more skilled populations grow faster. Here is the big issue: Most developed countries of the world have aging populations. Does this then imply worse economic outcomes as we go forward?

The research challenge in answering this question has been a lack of appropriate data. For the most part, existing data on age and skills do not come from observing a representative sample of people as they age. Instead, they come from comparing the skills of different people of different ages, say one at 30 and one at 40, and assuming that after aging for 10 years, the 30-year-old will look like the 40-year-old.

But these two people grew up in different circumstances, with differing quality schooling and other factors that might affect their skills. Thus, any effects of aging are mixed up with other societal factors.

We overcome this problem by using unique German data that follow a representative sample of 3,263 adults over a three- to four-year period. At the initial survey and again at the later survey, the individuals are given the same reading and math test. Thus, it is possible to observe directly the impact of age on skills. 

What we found was that skills, on average, continue to increase into the 40s, and they never dip below the levels the individuals enjoyed in their 20s.

Perhaps the more important finding is that even this later decline is not inevitable. These average patterns hide the dramatic differences in aging between those who use literacy and numeracy skills consistently at home or work and those who do not. The survey data asked about the frequency of doing separate items such as 鈥渃alculating prices, costs, or budgets鈥� for math or 鈥渞eading letters, memos, or e-mails鈥� for reading. 

Those with above-average usage never showed declining skills at least until age 65, when our data ended. Those who weren鈥檛 much using math or reading skills peaked in their early 30s.

Interestingly, based on assumed high-skill usage, some previous analyses followed the skill patterns for white-collar and highly educated workers. When we look at these factors, we find the same answers: Among professionals or highly educated individuals, those who use the skills never show declines with age, but those who do not use the skills do, in fact, start to decline. Women show a sharper drop in numeracy skills as they grow older than men, perhaps based on educational background or career choices.

While our results, in principle, offer some consolation for countries with aging populations, they also highlight the importance of policy attention toward not only the accumulation of skills in schools, but also their retention through using those skills and pursuing lifelong learning.

Fostering expanded learning opportunities takes on increased importance with such societal changes as the broad introduction of various forms of artificial intelligence, which could force a large number of people to change what and how they are doing their work. Unfortunately, while the idea of lifelong learning is frequently discussed in policy contexts, little has been done to make it a reality. 

The Hoover Institution provides financial support to 社区黑料.

After expressing opposition to the pro-voucher movement he embodied, she added, 鈥淪ide note 鈥� Corey A. DeAngelis, the face of school choice, was a model that catered to the gay community鈥� and included a black-and-white photo of what appeared to be a shirtless DeAngelis in a suggestive pose. 

At the time, the revelation didn鈥檛 cause a stir or interfere with DeAngelis鈥檚 hectic schedule as a leading lobbyist for 鈥渇unding students, not systems.鈥� He his book, 鈥淭he Parent Revolution,鈥� which earned from Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump. And and other conservative outlets continued to feature him and that schools focus too much on the 鈥淟GBT鈥檚 as opposed to the ABC’s.鈥�

But that abruptly ended Friday when , a far-right fringe account on Substack, reported that DeAngelis had a gay adult film career under the pseudonym 鈥淪eth Rose鈥� and appeared in a 2015 film set in a college. The Betsy DeVos-backed American Federation for Children, where DeAngelis has been a senior fellow pushing school choice bills since 2021, quickly erased him from its website. 

鈥淲e have placed the employee on leave as we investigate this matter further,鈥� a spokeswoman for the pro-school choice group said.

Has anyone heard from Corey DeAngelis in the last few days? He normally tweets at me incessantly- he鈥檚 been very silent. Hope he鈥檚 ok.

鈥� Randi Weingarten (@rweingarten)

Known for aggressive online rhetoric aimed at school districts, unions, and particularly American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten, DeAngelis has been uncharacteristically silent on social media since the news broke and didn鈥檛 return texts or a phone call from 社区黑料. His on Thursday referenced a video of Vice President Kamala Harris talking about children being 鈥渙f the community.鈥�

鈥淭hey think they own your kids,鈥� he wrote.

Online and in person, DeAngelis has been an avid culture warrior and perhaps the most visible face of a brand of school choice that paints traditional districts as failing institutions that are forcing left-wing ideas on students. 鈥淪chool choice defeats the woke mind virus,鈥� he commented in response to from House Speaker Mike Johnson featuring a 鈥渓esson plan鈥� parody that included 鈥渄rag queen story hours鈥� and transgender students鈥� participation in school sports.聽

He frequently browbeat Democratic opponents to and trolled them when they blocked him.

But the news of DeAngelis鈥檚 alleged past ultimately came not from his many critics on the left, but rather has its origins in an intra-MAGA dispute involving right-wing Texas groups that trade in conspiracy theories and oppose Gov. Greg Abbott鈥檚 plan for school vouchers.

The Texas Freedom Coalition, which is run by Fields, calls itself a network of 鈥減atriots鈥� who opposed COVID lockdowns. They view vouchers as another form of government overreach.

Fields gave Current Revolt, a far-right site that has , credit for digging into gay porn sites to find the film and other photos. But she told 社区黑料, 鈥淢y post is what caused several people to start asking questions about his past.鈥�

A screenshot of what appeared to be a policy expert for DeAngelis with the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization raised red flags for her and other conservative parents who view talk of 鈥済lobal鈥� partnerships as a threat to U.S. independence. One of UNESCO鈥檚 is 鈥渋nclusive and equitable quality education.鈥�

鈥淪chool choice isn’t merely a lucrative scam; it’s a cunning ploy to enable government oversight of all educational avenues through a web of regulations and accountability tied to public funding,鈥� Fields wrote in her July post about DeAngelis. 

DeAngelis any connections to the U.N. group.

Mary Lowe, a conservative activist who split from Moms for Liberty 鈥� another 鈥� over the issue of school choice, was also skeptical. She said she never understood why conservatives flocked toward DeAngelis after in 2020, 鈥淚 didn鈥檛 vote for Trump 鈥� and I鈥檓 not a Republican.鈥�

But Gov. Greg Abbott and pro-voucher advocates like the Texas Public Policy Foundation 鈥� who have for years to pass a school choice law 鈥� embraced DeAngelis鈥檚 take-no-prisoners style of advocacy. Following other states with similar laws, they want Texas to give parents roughly $10,000 a year to spend on private school tuition or homeschooling. At Republican lawmakers鈥� invitation, he testified before the Texas House education committee on the topic of 鈥減arent empowerment鈥� in 2022, despite the fact that he was single with no children at the time.

鈥淥ur moms鈥� intuition was like 鈥楾here is something missing to this story,鈥欌�� said Lowe, who founded a new group, Families Engaged for Effective Education, after leaving Moms for Liberty. 鈥楾here is something not right here.鈥� 鈥�

DeAngelis a 鈥渟lick salesman鈥� for the school choice movement.

It wasn鈥檛 until last week, however, that news linking DeAngelis to porn films spread like wildfire on social media.

Immediate reaction to the graphic images spread on porn-related websites and among who saw the scoop as 鈥溾�� for one of their bitterest foes. , an Oklahoma City attorney, asked how Oklahoma Gov. Kevin Stitt and state Superintendent Ryan Walters 鈥渨ho are so anxious to privatize Oklahoma public education never vetted Corey DeAngelis?鈥� DeAngelis supported their campaigns in 2022, and Walters similarly accuses public schools of spreading 鈥渨oke gender ideology鈥� in schools and frequently posts examples of what he considers left-wing indoctrination.

The school choice grifters at the American Federation for Children deleted Corey DeAngelis off their site

鈥� Jess Piper (@piper4missouri)

The Hoover Institution, a Stanford University think tank where DeAngelis has been a visiting fellow for the past year, no longer lists him as an expert, but retains his articles on the site. There have been no changes to his profiles on the sites of two libertarian organizations where he鈥檚 been a contributor, the and the .

On his Eduwonk blog, Andy Rotherham, co-founder of Bellwether, a think tank, 鈥渁 little grace鈥� toward someone he described as a 鈥渄eeply troubled person.鈥� But he argued that , which include about drag shows and Pride festivals, are 鈥済oing to be hard for his allies to defend.鈥�

Other school choice advocates were already pointing fingers back at traditional public schools.

鈥淲hat’s better? A person with a sinful past trying to do a virtuous thing?鈥� , a conservative Latino broadcaster and political analyst asked on X. 鈥淥r those claiming virtue, like defenders of gov-ed’s debauchery, who knowingly push evil today?鈥� 

But others said the episode serves as a warning to education activists who place too much faith in one polarizing individual to carry their message.

鈥淥ftentimes these character traits go hand in hand. Being a very outstanding speaker and charismatic leader 鈥� comes with a degree of narcissism,鈥� Morgan Polikoff, a University of Southern California education professor, who is gay, told 社区黑料. 鈥淭he feeling that you’re above reproach can lead to questionable judgment.鈥�

Disclosure: Corey DeAngelis wrote several opinion pieces for 社区黑料 between 2018 and 2023. The Hoover Institution, where DeAngelis served as a visiting fellow until this month, provides financial support to 社区黑料. Andy Rotherham sits on 社区黑料鈥檚 board of directors.

What has been the result?

The Hoover Institution鈥檚 A Nation at Risk +40 project brought together a dozen scholars in an attempt to better assess the real-life impact of these efforts. Each author dug deep into a key education reform initiative 鈥� standards-based accountability, new governance models, changes in teacher training and development, technology implementation and countless others 鈥� with the goal of cataloging what was tried and what happened as a result.

While each paper in the series speaks to a specific chapter of America鈥檚 school reform story, a critical added analysis was provided by the Hoover Institution鈥檚 Margaret 鈥淢acke鈥� Raymond, who took on the task of looking across this series of reports to better understand what, if anything, they collectively tell us about school reform more broadly.

Her conclusions? 

While 鈥�40 years of scattershot reforms, have on the whole, failed to improve student learning,鈥� she writes, there are indeed some high-level takeaways that 鈥渉old the potential for illuminating future directions鈥� in school reform.

Specifically, Raymond鈥檚 findings suggest that policymakers can improve their odds of substantive and lasting policy impact by tackling six challenges related to planning, engagement, consensus building and implementation.

Overcoming Impulsiveness: Policymakers are under pressure to act and can be quick to embrace a reform strategy that has found success elsewhere. It worked there, the thinking goes, so it should work here. The research suggests, however, that local policymakers do not always take the time to determine whether their chosen approach is a good fit. Were the factors that led to that success in place in the new locale? If not, then what? Policymakers need to resist the urge to move quickly, and instead devote the time and resources necessary to understand how reform success can be accomplished for the specific populations they serve.

Moving Beyond the Margins: Policymakers who understand the challenges that come with large-scale reform sometimes focus on more marginal quick-win strategies, hoping these will prove easier to execute. Efforts of this kind can have impact and are typically cheaper and easier to launch. But policymakers can overlook that in their sheer 鈥渄eath by a thousand cuts鈥� volume, marginal efforts can also produce reform fatigue and resistance. Worse still, the bandwidth they consume is then unavailable for broader, more systemic change. Small-scale approaches have their place 鈥� especially when structured as pilots from which lessons can be learned 鈥� but four decades of marginal reforms haven鈥檛 moved the needle. Approach them with caution.

Creating Coherence: Policymakers seldom take the time to understand how a proposed reform will interact with or impact efforts that are already on the books. As Raymond notes, reforms tend to be 鈥� 鈥榖olted on鈥� one after another, without regard for how they fit together.鈥� Each one, then, has the effect of 鈥渄iluting the impact of the others.鈥� Before enacting something new, policymakers would do well to engage stakeholders in more fully understanding the potential impact of launching yet another reform approach. Better yet, they should undertake a detailed inventory of existing efforts, study their results both in the near term and over time, and aggressively phase out initiatives that no longer meet their objectives.

Addressing Impatience: The steady drumbeat of electoral cycles creates pressure to demonstrate quick results. Policymakers seldom appreciate, though, that in some instances 鈥� the adoption of new curricular materials, for example, or the creation of new teacher preparation programs 鈥� measurable impact can take years to materialize. Impatience for results can undermine an initiative’s long-term success and sends a message to the forces of the status quo that if they just hold out long enough, 鈥渢his too, shall pass.鈥� Policymakers need to maintain reform momentum over the long term, which typically requires sustained (and often bipartisan) coalition building and deep levels of ongoing engagement.

Prioritizing Implementation: Raymond鈥檚 findings suggest that countless education reform initiatives have been put to sea with great fanfare, only to be dashed to pieces on the rocks of implementation. The journey of a reform idea from the capitol steps to the classroom door is far longer and more hazardous than most policymakers realize. As a result, they hardly ever craft detailed implementation roadmaps identifying who is responsible for which mission-critical actions at various levels. They seldom build feedback loops to track implementation progress and rarely utilize small-scale pilots to identify potential roadblocks in advance. Absent unrelenting attention to the day-to-day work of implementation, policymakers should have little hope for sustained and meaningful change.

Ensuring effectiveness. 鈥淎part from formal pilots,鈥� Raymond reports, 鈥渕ost reforms launch without considering how to learn from them.鈥� New initiatives are rarely accompanied by a plan for research and analysis, and policymakers seldom conduct in-depth program evaluation. As a critical first step, policymakers need to determine the key metrics they intend to track as indicators of success. If they are making progress, how will they know? From there, procedures need to be put in place for regular reviews of the relevant data, including feedback from stakeholders. The critical question for policymakers: If their reform is clearly not on track to success, what do they do then?

In the conclusion to her study, Raymond notes that the Hoover Institution鈥檚 analysis of four decades of school reform has produced 鈥渁n impressive record of what not to do.鈥� To help policymakers put these lessons to good use, Hoover has crafted an education policy that is organized around the six key challenges described above and asks policymakers a series of questions to help them test their thinking. The education reform movement has seen some successes over the past 40 years, but policymakers also have plenty to learn from failures. The Hoover Institution鈥檚 new toolkit will help them do just that.

Released this morning through Stanford鈥檚 right-leaning Hoover Institution, the report prior by its author, one of the nation鈥檚 most cited experts on education finance. Hanushek has cautioned since the emergence of COVID that the prolonged experience of virtual instruction would meaningfully harm the skills and earning potential of today鈥檚 students.

His newest release builds on those predictions by examining the math performance of U.S. students on two standardized tests. One, the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), is a worldwide exam comparing American 15-year-olds against adolescents in dozens of other countries; the other, the National Assessment of Educational Progress (often referred to as the Nation鈥檚 Report Card) is administered to fourth- and eighth-graders around the United States.

The PISA results, revealed in December, showed U.S. math scores falling significantly between 2018 and 2022, offering more evidence of what federal officials have called a COVID-era 鈥渃risis鈥� in that subject. But because other countries saw even larger declines, America鈥檚 international ranking actually moved upward slightly, leading Education Secretary Miguel Cardona to the Biden administration鈥檚 emergency assistance to schools during the pandemic.

In an interview with 社区黑料, Hanushek was much less sanguine, pointing to K鈥�12 students鈥� persistently mediocre performance in math over the last few decades. After overlaying the NAEP math scores of individual U.S. states onto PISA鈥檚 international scoring system, he found that even test takers in the top-scoring state, Massachusetts, ranked below their counterparts in 15 other countries. The lowest-performing American jurisdiction, Puerto Rico, placed below developing nations like Kosovo, El Salvador and Cambodia.

鈥淧eople in the past , ‘Massachusetts is doing pretty well, maybe we could get New Mexico going like that too,鈥欌�� Hanushek said. 鈥淏ut if our best-performing state school system is 16th in the world, compared to the average kids in other countries, that doesn’t seem good to me.”

In general, the analysis shows, the top-line U.S. math ranking on PISA rose primarily because the pandemic鈥檚 disruptions to schooling were much more acutely felt in countries like Slovenia and Norway, which had been among the top performers on earlier iterations of the test.

Overall, students in relatively higher-scoring countries on the 2018 PISA exam sustained larger losses during COVID than those in countries that hadn鈥檛 done as well previously. Hanushek called the trend a 鈥渟traightforward鈥� validation of the importance of high-quality schools: Canadian students stood to lose more from weeks or months of online classes than those in less-effective Philippine schools.

鈥淚f you weren’t learning very much in school before the pandemic, you didn’t lose as much,鈥� he said. 鈥淚f you were learning a lot in school before the pandemic, you tended to lose more.”

The United States, long mired in the middle of the international pack, saw somewhat smaller math declines between 2018 and 2022 than the PISA average. Meanwhile, in spite of the clear trend, high-achieving East Asian countries like Taiwan, Singapore, Japan and South Korea actually improved in the subject during the pandemic. 

The learning loss exhibited in both NAEP and PISA strongly suggests that the long-term prospects of affected students will be substantially worse than they would have been otherwise. Martin West, a professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, said this is largely due to the very nature of the American economy, in which skills and educational attainment are more highly prized than almost anywhere else in the world.

鈥淭he U.S. is a society in which skills really do matter for economic success,鈥� West said. 鈥淲hat that means is that the impact of learning loss on individual students through their earnings is going to be larger in the U.S. than it might be in a society like Sweden.鈥�

Wide state variation

Hanushek鈥檚 total calculation for the cost of learning loss, a staggering $31 trillion through the year 2100, is a figure that would dwarf the economic damage wrought by the business closures and layoffs necessitated by COVID鈥檚 spread, or even the years of stalled dynamism following the Great Recession. 

The projection is based on prior economic research into the connection between students鈥� test scores and future earnings. Hanushek further posits that the aggregate slowdown in innovation and human capital development will tend to slow the U.S. economy鈥檚 growth over the long haul, burdening even those who didn鈥檛 experience learning loss themselves.

The analysis estimates a far greater toll than that of another prominent prediction. In 2022, economists Thomas Kane of Harvard and Douglas O. Staiger of Dartmouth used eighth-grade math results on the NAEP exam following the pandemic. While that estimate pointed to a 1.6 percent decline in students鈥� future earnings, Hanushek and co-author Bradley Strauss believe that slump will fall between 5 and 6 percent.

Staiger said his paper with Kane represented a 鈥渓owball estimate鈥� while Hanushek鈥檚 offers an upper-bound projection, adding that most of the discrepancy between their findings likely stemmed from Hanushek鈥檚 broader lens on overall growth in addition to direct earnings. Whatever their differences, however, he noted that even marginal losses in productivity could eventually amount to considerable squandered potential.

鈥淭here are some that find smaller effects of test scores on economic growth, particularly for high-income countries like the U.S.,鈥� Staiger wrote in an email. 鈥淗owever, as Hanushek and Strauss make clear, even small impacts of the learning loss on future economic growth impose enormous costs on society.鈥� 

If Hanushek鈥檚 analysis proves correct, those costs will be borne unevenly. The largest state economies, such as California, Texas, New York, Florida and Pennsylvania, are all projected to absorb losses greater than $500 billion; their disproportionate burden reflects both the scope of their learning setbacks to this point and the number of future workers living in each. 

Individual income losses are also projected to differ considerably depending on location. By the paper鈥檚 calculations, students affected by the pandemic will lose less than 2 percent of their lifetime earnings in Utah, where math scores fell the least between 2019 and 2022. In West Virginia, Delaware, and Oklahoma, where they fell the most, former students could forgo an average of 9 percent of their career income.

Sarah Cohodes, an economist at the University of Michigan, said that the inequity of learning loss was a cause for particular concern. While the math performance of all students suffered between 2020 and the present, the losses were especially large for those who were already struggling or navigating critical life changes when COVID emerged. She referred to her own daughter, who wasn鈥檛 yet enrolled in a K鈥�12 school when the pandemic began, as an example.

“She lost a year of preschool, but she’s going to be fine 鈥� she hung out with me and went to all the parks in New York City,鈥� Cohodes said. 鈥淭he people I worry about are the ones who were transitioning between elementary and middle school, or who graduated from high school and missed out on some of the final preparations for what comes next.”

Hanushek, whose preferred strategy for learning recovery is to provide financial incentives to top teachers in exchange for taking on more students, observed that the worst-off students were likely the high schoolers who graduated or dropped out over the last few years. The unsuccessful efforts to mitigate their academic reversals, whether led by state or federal officials, were evidence that education authorities 鈥渉ave not really taken seriously the magnitude of this event,” he argued.

“My calculation is that 17 million kids [affected by the pandemic] have already left school,鈥� Hanushek said. 鈥淥nce they’ve left school, we have little hope of ever fixing their problems. Universities or firms are not going to make up for the lack of learning that these kids suffered, and each year that goes by, we lose four or five million more kids that will never recover.”

Disclosure: The Hoover Institution provides financial support to 社区黑料.

In 1983, the release of the groundbreaking A Nation at Risk report ignited a nationwide movement for educational reform. Marking the 40th anniversary of this pivotal moment, A Nation at Risk +40 sets out to delve deeper into the reforms that have shaped the modern education landscape. This research initiative aims to draw valuable insights, examine the evidence of reform impact, and offer lessons for today’s education policymakers.

The series, , features an array of distinguished authors, each dedicated to exploring critical aspects of school reform. By examining key questions, they seek to shed light on the path taken by education systems nationwide:

• What kinds of reforms have been attempted and why?
  
• What is the evidence of their impact?
  
• What are the lessons for today’s education policymakers?

“Education is the cornerstone of a thriving society, and for the past four decades, we have witnessed a tireless pursuit of reform to ensure our education system is stronger and more resilient. A Nation at Risk +40 illuminates where we have come since the groundbreaking report of 1983, offering invaluable insights and evidence-based practices for navigating today鈥檚 challenges,鈥� said Hoover Institution Director Condoleezza Rice. 鈥淭his research initiative serves as a guiding light, empowering policymakers, educators, and stakeholders to safeguard the future of American education.” 

The authors of A Nation at Risk +40 have undertaken extensive research, bringing expertise from diverse fields, including education, policy, and academia. Their collective efforts culminate in a rich tapestry of insights, aiming to inform and guide the decisions of policymakers, educators, and stakeholders in the education sector.

Against the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, with schools across the United States facing unprecedented challenges, A Nation at Risk +40 offers more than a retrospective analysis. The series also provides relevant and research-driven guidance for navigating the current landscape and crafting strategies for a stronger, more resilient education system.

As the nation grapples with the educational effects of the pandemic, A Nation at Risk +40 bears witness to four decades of reform striving to improve education outcomes. By documenting this journey and distilling its wisdom, the series illuminates a path forward rooted in evidence-based practices and a commitment to safeguarding the future of American education.

All significant harms. But then there鈥檚 the bottom-line figure that appeared last winter: $28 trillion.

罢丑补迟鈥檚 , to the children whose academic abilities were set back during the COVID-era, totalling about $70,000 per person over the course of their careers. The figure was reached by Stanford economist Eric Hanushek, based on the cratering eighth-grade math performance measured by last year鈥檚 National Assessment of Educational Progress. And it could be permanent if schools don鈥檛 do something about those diminished skills.

One of the studying American education, Hanushek has spent over 40 years studying how schools lift kids鈥� achievement and whether test scores translate into later-life success. A longtime fellow of the conservative Hoover Institution, he won for Education Research in 2021, which brought a $3.9 million award for new projects. He is also deeply involved in some of the biggest ongoing debates in education policy, including whether the achievement gap between rich and poor students .

Above all other issues, Hanushek is tied to the question of whether spending more on schools will consistently result in better student outcomes. He has been both resolutely skeptical of the proposition and influential in the statehouses and courtrooms deciding whether to increase education funding. Over the last decade, a raft of studies have offered new evidence that increasing expenditures on schooling does, in fact, lift achievement 鈥� a in a lengthy review released this spring, while still insisting that the amount of dollars expended matter far less than the quality of the interventions they underwrite.

Money is also at the center of what the veteran researcher calls his 鈥渟imple and complete鈥� fix for COVID-related learning setbacks, detailed in . But rather than paying to lengthen school days or fund tutoring programs, Hanushek advises that districts spend remaining pandemic relief aid on incentives for the best teachers to take on extra students; he also proposes buying out the contracts of their least effective colleagues. 

In a conversation with 社区黑料鈥檚 Kevin Mahnken, Hanushek talked about how the most advanced economies reward skill (and punish the lack of it), why he believes voluntary learning initiatives tend to increase achievement gaps and what the United States could do with $28 trillion.

鈥淭he cohort that suffered these learning losses isn’t going to be around for much longer,鈥� he said. 鈥淲e’re graduating 3.5 million of them each year, and they’re going away without any real chance of recovery.鈥�

This conversation was edited for length and clarity.

Can you contextualize actually means? It’s a sum so large as to be almost mystical.

Sure. You know that we had a recession because of the pandemic, when businesses closed. The total cost of that is about 1/15th the same amount, maybe $2 trillion. The best estimates I’ve seen of the effects of the 2008 recession are something like $5 trillion. And if you want a third option, $28 trillion is a little more than one year of America’s GDP. So it’s as if you closed down the economy for a whole year. 

Am I right in thinking about this as essentially a huge number of deferred opportunities for growth, like businesses that don’t expand or innovations that are slower to arrive?

It’s everything about the economy. But a better way to think about it for most people is that everybody who was in school during the pandemic will experience 5鈥�6 percent lower lifetime earnings. It’s almost like a 5 or 6 percent added tax, with this cohort earning less than the cohorts immediately ahead of it and immediately behind it, because they’re just less skilled. Unless we do something about it. 

But how confident are we that these test results are really measuring skills that are important in later life? Do we have proof that there’s an actual relationship between student scores on NAEP or state exams scores and their future economic activity?

Historically, people haven’t looked so much at the effect of test scores or cognitive skills on earnings because we just haven’t had much data. We’ve [Organisation for Economic Co-Operation and Development], and it shows that the U.S. rewards economic skills more than almost any other country on earth.

But consider that in reverse. It also means that the U.S. punishes the lack of skills more than almost any other country on earth. What this is essentially showing is that employers really do pay attention to the skills people have. Those skills determine how well people can adapt to new jobs, and they help determine how capable people are in actually doing their jobs. Nobody objects to the idea that people who are smarter generally earn more. And while there is a lot of variation around that 鈥� from NBA players, who often don’t finish their degrees, to college graduates who find themselves driving taxis 鈥� that’s the kind of relationship we would expect to see.

Is that connection between demonstrated academic achievement and economic success just a result of the highly knowledge-based economies that prevail in rich, Western countries like the U.S.?

Precisely. One country is Singapore, and Singapore basically doesn’t do anything except for knowledge-based industries.

If it’s so clear that increased educational attainment is linked to better economic prospects, does it worry you that we’ve seen the last few years?

We don’t know if that’s going to last. But in the short run, it’s a potential concern that people aren’t going off to get more skills. Part of it is that in the current economy, it looks like you can get a huge reward from going straight into the labor market after high school. But it just won’t compare with the reward from going to college.

There are variations in the returns [to college]. You can go into some college programs that ultimately don’t pay off, at least if you pay the full tuition. But on average, college graduates are earning something like 75 percent more than high school graduates, and that differential is large enough that people who get fixated on the cost of tuition and debt cost are really making a huge mistake if they don’t go to college. The differential more than compensates for the cost of getting that college degree.

Could you please explain the “simple and complete” way of addressing learning loss?

Every time I mention my preferred strategy, people sort of turn away. [Laughs] People are much happier saying, “Let’s do exactly what we’re doing already, but just a little bit more of it.” And it boils down to lengthening the school day, lengthening the school year, trying some tutoring here and there. But even if you could implement that 鈥� which nobody knows how to do 鈥� the data suggests that it wouldn’t make up for the kinds of losses that kids have suffered. It’s just not a strong enough treatment.

Something everyone mostly agrees with is that teachers are really important, and that effective teachers are very, very valuable. People start to disagree when you ask, “What do you make of that?” My answer for dealing with the current learning losses of the COVID cohort is to try to get our most effective teachers to just work more intensively by taking on a few more kids. You can, in fact, provide incentives from the existing ESSER money 鈥� which will be around for at least another year 鈥� and provide them with help in grading, essentially lighten the load and make it possible for them to teach more kids.

The place where everybody stops listening is here: We know that our most ineffective teachers are just harming kids. If we could take some of the ESSER money and buy out the contracts of our least effective teachers, the combination of those things could be enough to make up for the learning loss we’ve seen. 

We’re almost completely back to normal schooling. But the cohort that suffered these learning losses isn’t going to be around for much longer; we’re graduating 3.5 million of them each year, and they’re going away without any real chance of recovery. So we have to do something that’s quick 鈥� we can’t wait to hire and train a new group of teachers, or wait to figure out which kinds of instruction might help them the most. We just don’t have the time. But my point is that our current workforce is good enough to make up for this! We have, on average, a really good teaching force, though we don’t use the most effective teachers enough, and we overuse the least effective teachers.

The issue of urgency is obviously critical, but I wonder if it really supports your point. Given the logistical and political difficulties of that kind of approach, it seems much simpler to increase the quantity of instruction students receive 鈥� by providing tutoring and lengthening the school year, for instance 鈥� than by improving the quality through the strategy you describe.

The problem is that nobody is willing to actually make it mandatory that people stay longer in school. Los Angeles had a voluntary program to try to add four days to the school year, and . But even if they did, what would it mean? Say a quarter of your kids actually show up for two extra days: What do you teach them, and how do you integrate that with their normal classroom instruction? You could, at best, improve their soccer skills. 

Voluntary added days generally expand variation in academic performance because the kids who need [extra schooling] the least are the ones who tend to show up for voluntary learning days. It’s people at the top of the academic scale who take advantage of voluntary activities, and the people at the bottom don’t. That’s why I said before that we don’t know how to implement things like tutoring and supplemental instruction at scale. We have a few examples of it working, but we don’t know how to put it into 100,000 schools.

Does it surprise you that, in the five years since the Janus ruling, the organizing strength of teachers’ unions seems to have risen in much of the country? Teacher pay became something of a national issue during the summer of 2018, and now you see Republican governors excited to announce pay raises.

It鈥檚 a huge obstacle that you can’t get schools and teachers’ unions to agree to anything. We have a strike going on in Oakland Public Schools, where the union is trying to wring the last bit of money out of the pandemic; they’ve been offered over 20 percent pay increases over three years, but they don’t think that’s enough. [After nearly two weeks of school closures, on May 16.]

One of my favorite books on my bookshelf is called . It has a 1962 copyright. The thesis of the book is basically that if you pay all teachers the same amount, you’re likely to get either very underpaid math teachers or very overpaid PE teachers; you tend to see the former, and that’s where some teacher shortages come from. It’s a problem that certainly exists, and in my opinion, the biggest shortage is a shortage of highly effective teachers that we would like to keep in.

Do you think there’s something positive in the settlement we’ve reached in the U.S., wherein we hire lots of teachers but have largely deferred salary increases? I’m reminded of written by your frequent collaborator, Ludger Woessmann, which found that students earn better grades and stay in school longer when they have an adult mentor in school 鈥� that seems like something that small class sizes would foster, no?

It can be very important to build close relationships [between students and teachers]. The problem is that everything we measure suggests that reducing class size is not the most important thing, and that having an effective teacher in a classroom is so much more important than having a slightly smaller class. 

People get excited if they can see anything positive in the data about smaller classes. But the impact is so small relative to the impact that great teachers have. As you mentioned, teachers are now concerned about low salaries. But has to do with hiring more people too; it’s just hiring more people and paying them more. There are demands for more ancillary people in schools, like counselors and nurses, and they want to put caps on class size as well. So no one’s given up on quantity, which is the thing that unions like. Unions make their money by having more people, so they’re always happy to push for smaller class sizes.

If I could change the subject slightly: We’ve , which radically changed the way it evaluates and pays teachers. It’s much more related to effectiveness in the classroom now than under the traditional salary schedule. The other thing they did was introduce an incentive scheme to get the best teachers, measured by prior performance, to work in the lowest-performing schools in Dallas.

We found two things from this experiment. One is that the most effective teachers were willing to do that for relatively modest average salaries. The second was that once they moved to the lowest-performing schools, the worst schools in Dallas began approaching the citywide average within two years. This is a policy that has been shown to work, and work at scale where you can turn around entire schools.

But the unfortunate thing they did was say, “Oops! Now that these schools are performing well, they aren’t eligible for the program anymore.” They took the incentives away, and the best teachers left because there are lots of easier places to work. And they will if they don’t get paid.

You’ve got on Dallas’s pay-for-performance reform. It reminded me of the debate over Washington, D.C.’s IMPACT teacher evaluation system, which people have said is really hard to replicate, in part because was so fierce.

There was a bit of blowback in Dallas as well. Mike Miles was the superintendent who devised the entire Dallas system, and a somewhat grumpy school board to put it in place. Then, just as it was starting to come together, he left. So there’s no doubt, this is politically difficult.

The question is, are you willing to give up $28 trillion and settle for having the 31st-ranked school system in the world because it’s politically difficult? I’m not somebody who needs to make my living by politics. But it’s clear that the rewards of adopting these policies are so, so large, even if there are also political costs. Someday I hope the teachers’ unions also see that it’s in their interest to make some marginal changes to the old “no differentiation” policy.

I realize that’s just your estimate, and it’s not as though it would be dropped as a lump sum in the national checking account; but if the value of restoring lost learning is anything approaching $28 trillion, it could fund all our K鈥�12 schools many times over.

The cost of the current U.S. education system is about $750 billion, so you’re talking about potentially funding that system for decades with the money that you could get out of this. Frankly, we have to get some people who are willing to lead in this time of crisis.

Are there any useful lessons from the catastrophe of the pandemic 鈥� or perhaps technology, including advances in virtual and asynchronous learning 鈥� that we might use to improve schools going forward?

The thing I learned was sort of the opposite. 

It became very clear that having a teacher in the classroom is much better than hybrid instruction that only sometimes has a live, in-person teacher. And hybrid instruction, in turn, is better than fully remote instruction. There鈥檚 noy doubt that we gained a greater appreciation of the importance of the classroom teacher, even in these kinds of chaotic circumstances. We had other ways of trying to teach, but we couldn’t do away with effective classroom teachers. 

We did mobilize the tech industry to try to improve virtual instruction in a variety of ways, and maybe we’ll come out a bit ahead from that. But I worry that we won’t try to learn from when and where virtual instruction works best, and when and where it doesn’t work. 

Do you think the public sector, including federal entities like the Institute of Education Sciences, needs to take a more active role as a catalyst for breakthrough learning platforms and technology? Given the mixed record of ed-tech generally, I wonder if we actually have reason to be hopeful.

Sure, I like what IES has been doing. The amount of money we’re talking about there is pathetic, really, compared with the size of the problem. We have systematically underplayed any role of research and evaluation in education compared with other industries. But education is the base industry for most of this other stuff that we’re pouring money into.

The most recent NAEP release shows decades’ worth of progress 鈥� this time in civics and U.S. history 鈥� essentially erased since the beginning of the pandemic. I’m wondering whether you think the gains of the last 25 years or so, often characterized as the “education reform era,” were all that big to begin with.

Reform has been less reformist than many of us would have liked. It hasn’t accomplished what we wanted.

On the latest NAEP release, the thing that I thought was most important is that we really expanded the gaps in scoring. The top end of the scoring distribution did okay in social studies, but the lower-performing students fell further. What we’re seeing just reinforced these gaps, the spread-out distribution. At the bottom end, it seems that some eighth graders don’t even know what the separate branches of government do; they barely know the difference between the legislature and the executive. That’s very worrisome to me because the U.S. has thrived by having a common society. We might be losing some of that, and the polarization we see in our politics can only be heightened by these kinds of results.

The expanding achievement gap, which we’ve seen on other NAEP tests, is really concerning. Forty percent of eighth-graders scored below the NAEP Basic level in U.S. history, for example.

Yeah, and NAEP Basic is really basic. On subject-matter tests like these, kids scoring below that level really don’t know much at all; on math and reading tests, they’re kind of hopeless because they are not likely to be able to go on past eighth-grade knowledge. In the math test, it’s also roughly 40 percent of eighth-graders in the country scoring below Basic. That’s not a position you want to be in.

There’s been an enormous amount of newer research from scholars like and on the effects of education funding on school outcomes, with much of it suggesting that money really does matter. As perhaps the single figure most associated with the opposing view, are you getting ready to wave the white flag?

You get very different effects across these studies, and it’s not well understood when money has a big effect and when it doesn’t. There’s no reason to infer from some of this recent work that we can be assured of a great achievement gain, or a lifetime earnings gain, by simply putting more money into the existing system.

At a certain level, this is largely a political debate because Kirabo Jackson and Jesse Rothstein recognize that how you spend money is also really important. My view is that how you spend money is considerably more important than how much you spend. We’re currently spending something like $17,000 per kid on education, and an extra $300 is not going to make much difference unless you spend that money well. 

I’m reminded of that argued that the positive effects of school finance reforms are mostly driven by states that also adopted test-based accountability.

Yeah, it was very simple and straightforward that if you put more money into systems with good accountability for outcomes, you get much larger results. Part of the problem is that the current federal accountability law, ESSA, is loosening accountability all over the place and . What states have done since 2016 is backing off holding teachers responsible for student outcomes. This has negative effects on learning. 

The effects of spending have been argued endlessly over the last few decades. What are the biggest questions you’d like to see investigated going forward?

One of the developments coming out of the pandemic is that schooling is going to start becoming very different. It’s clear to me that just doing what’s called homeschooling is not going to be the answer, but parents have often looked for something different than what they got during the pandemic and even before the pandemic. You have lots of political fighting over education savings accounts and choice.

I don’t think any of these things is going to be the answer, but understanding the possible choices is important because choices are going to expand for lots of people. We don’t understand where they’re going to go and what the effects of those choices are going to be. 

If states continue to expand school choice, does it become harder to improve policy through the districts? It seems like the lever of traditional public schooling will just move fewer students in the future.

Well, if we had everywhere, we’d still see 80 percent of kids enrolled in traditional public schools. I like having more choice, and I think it’s important. It’s important to improve the charter sector as well. But the traditional public schools are still going to be there for the rest of my lifetime, and probably yours too. So we still have to be concerned about how we operate traditional public schools because they’re the backbone of our economy.