Washington Post: Four Years After COVID, Students Still Losing Ground
From the Washington Post:

For a time, it appeared as if academic recovery from covid was underway. Now, new research shows that many students are actually sinking even deeper.

Together, data from three large testing companies paints a more pessimistic and troubling picture than prior reports…

In math, Renaissance (which administers Star assessments) found that first-graders had recovered to pre-covid levels of achievement, and there was steady progress from grades two to six. But the gaps between where scores used to be and where they are now widened in math for grades eight through 12.

“Not only has there been no progress in closing the initial covid impacts, average performance in those grades is even farther,” a summary of the results said. “It’s as if the pandemic or some other factor is continuing to result in lower and lower performance.”

The losses were less steep in reading, Renaissance found, and students were not as far behind. Grades one and four had caught up, and grades three and five through 12 were making steady progress. Grade two had made no progress, a finding that researchers were not sure how to explain.

Read the Washington Post article here.

School Choice Has Not Destroyed Public Education in Arizona
According to school choice guru Matt Ladner, the proliferation of choice options in Arizona has not led in any way to the “destruction of public education” so often predicted by critics. In a piece at Next Steps, Ladner points out that since 1993 — just before the implementation of school choice — Arizona has not only added over 800 new public schools, but public school enrollment has increased by 200,000 students. Crucially, total revenue for these districts has quadrupled during that time (it has more than doubled when accounting for inflation). Read more at Next Steps.

Private School Enrollments on the Rise

From Education Week:

In 2022, the most recent year for which Census data were available, 84 percent of the 54 million U.S. children ages 5 to 17 attended public schools, which include traditional public schools as well as charter schools. Another 11.8 percent attended private schools.

The remainder is listed as attending neither, and could have dropped out of school, not started attending school yet, or participated in homeschooling, for which data collection is inconsistent state to state.

Those figures represent a small but notable shift that’s taken place in recent years. A decade earlier, in 2012, the share of public school students was 86.3 percent, and the share of private school students was 10.6 percent.