On: Plunging test scores are a slow-moving catastrophe

[dghlsakjg]

If I missed a year of fifth grade in 2020, I have had 5 years to recover any lost progress and should do better in 10th grade than the kids that just missed a year. Especially when you consider that many of the topics being tested against are not even introduced until after 5th grade. Sure you might miss out on some arithmetic, but you have had half a decade to correct and your trigonometry scores should be better than students that missed out on trigonometry the same year.

I think the pandemic had some effect on the current cohort of 15 year olds, but it should not be as large of an effect as the students who were 15 in 2020.

If I missed a week of math class at age ten would it have the same effect on a test given when I was 15 as if I had missed a week of math class just before the test? Your position seems to be that missing math class at any point in your schooling is a permanent unrecoverable setback

[yorwba → dghlsakjg]

No, my position is that a recoverable setback will nonetheless remain unrecovered if there is no restorative force driving the recovery.

A student who is bad at arithmetic will tend to struggle to learn trigonometry. A good teacher can realize this and allocate time to arithmetic practice instead. But this time has to come somewhere. As long as the number of teaching hours remains the same, they have to sacrifice something else. So if the students are all caught up in arithmetic, they will be behind in trigonometry by the same amount.

To fully catch up without sacrifices, students who studied less would need to study correspondingly more to compensate, but there was no concerted effort to make that happen, although the opportunity certainly existed.