students have lost 13% of learning

BarcelonaThis week it has been two years since the State educational centers closed due to the pandemic and did not reopen until after six months. For the first time, a study has quantified the school bill of covid: students of the pandemic generation have lost 13% of the learning of a course. But the problem has been concentrated in public schools and among students who, before the pandemic, obtained more good grades. Specifically, the report, published by the Cotec Foundation and the EsadeEcPol Center for Economic Policies, concludes that students in public schools learned 54% less mathematics than usual, that is, the equivalent of half a school year, while that the students of the concertada hardly even noticed it, because the loss was 7%. In fact, the ownership of the center is the most decisive factor in explaining the drop in school performance, even more so than the student’s socioeconomic level.

Despite the fact that the study does not explain the causes of this difference (the data does not allow us to understand why), the researchers point to several hypotheses: “The concerted ones have more autonomy and also depend economically on the families. This may have meant that, before an emergency situation, they will react faster to satisfy them,” Andreu Arenas, professor of economics at the University of Barcelona and one of the study’s authors, told the ARA. In fact, the report confirms the study by UAB researchers Xavier Bonal and Sheila González, who found that the reaction of the concerted centers was higher than that of the public ones during the first two weeks of confinement, precisely because they had to justify the payment of fees, as well as the fears of the Síndic de Greuges, who has already warned of the unequal conditions of 2nd year high school students in the face of selectivity because the reduction in attendance had been applied “unevenly” according to the center ownership.

The study by Cotec and EsadeEcPol is based on the results of the basic skills tests in the Basque Country, but the authors of the research consider that the data can be extrapolated to the rest of the State because the schools were closed for the same time, the conditions of the resumption were similar and the educational systems are quite comparable. Thus, they have taken the results of the tests in the 4th year of primary school and in the 2nd year of ESO in 2021, after confinement, and have compared them with the evolution that the students made in previous generations. Based on this analytical model, which is called “differences in differences”, they have verified that learning loss has differences depending on the tenure, but also according to the subject: while in mathematics it is very important (25% in total), in Basque is quite important (15%) and in Spanish it is almost imperceptible.

More discomfort, more problems at school

The researchers have drawn two more conclusions. On the one hand, there has been a “convergence” among students, because children with better results in 4th grade suffer a greater learning loss than those who, before the pandemic, had poorer grades. “Perhaps it is because of the curricular compression, because the level has been adapted so that everyone can reach it,” says Arenas. On the other hand, the “great overlap” between learning loss and emotional distress: the students who have lost the most are those with the most emotional problems, which, says the researcher, makes it necessary to give a “comprehensive approach” to the consequences of the pandemic.

In this line, the authors of the study reproach the governments for the “great absences in the design of measures” to diagnose the situation of the students. “Evaluation and monitoring continue to be the great pending issue in public policies on education during the pandemic,” says the report. Arenas points out that it is important to do a “stricter follow-up” of all the measures that are taken to see “if they work or not.” Even so, the good news is that the learning loss is approximately half of what has been detected in other countries, which is attributed to the fact that Spain was one of the countries where the earliest return to the classrooms took place.

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