And we don’t even know how badly they have failed because we suspended tests. BTW, Evers wants to suspend testing for another year. These poor kids are going to pay for these decisions for the rest of their lives.

Those responses came from a survey of 3,227 Wisconsin parents and students in 16 Wisconsin districts — most from the northern, rural part of the state — conducted by Curtis Jones, a senior scientist at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee’s Socially Responsible Evaluation in Education program. It found nearly half of the students were failing to keep up with homework as much as they had before the pandemic.

 

As the first full semester of U.S. students learning under the pandemic comes to a close, experts like Jones are particularly concerned about young people who already were behind. Only 15% of survey respondents said their child was learning as much as before the COVID-19 crisis. Some policymakers are pushing for a massive tutoring effort to help students catch up.

 

“Any type of negative impact on the education system hits people who have privilege less hard,” Jones said. “They can pick up that slack themselves. People who have less privilege, it’s more impactful. It hits harder.”

 

The full scope of the pandemic’s effect on academic progress is still unknown in Wisconsin. As part of a pandemic relief bill, the state Legislature suspended student testing requirements for the 2019-20 school year and prohibited the Department of Public Instruction from issuing school and district report cards covering this school year.