Remote Learning

U.S. students lag behind their peers in many industrialized countries when it comes to math, according to the results of a global exam released Tuesday.

Why it matters: U.S. students saw a 13-point drop in their 2022 Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) math results when compared to the 2018 exam.

The 2022 math score was not only lower than it was in 2012 but it was "among the lowest ever measured by PISA in mathematics" for the U.S., per the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) country note.

The most comprehensive global look at test scores since the pandemic shows learning loss is a stubborn worldwide problem, with American 15-year-olds experiencing similar or slightly less severe setbacks compared with peers in other countries. 

Economically developed nations saw substantial drops in reading and math on international exams, according to new data released Tuesday. U.S. scores also declined sharply in math but held roughly steady in reading.

U.S. students are lagging behind other industrialized students in math in a global assessment released Tuesday, according to Axios.

Students in the U.S. saw a 13-point fall in their 2022 Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) score compared to their 2018 results, according to Axios. The score was “among the lowest ever measured by PISA in mathematics” and comes as U.S. students are suffering learning loss following the pandemic.

In April 2020, with nothing else to do, my family took an enormous number of hikes. We all wore cloth masks that I had made myself. We had a family hand signal, which the person in the front would use if someone was approaching on the trail and we needed to put on our masks.  Once, when another child got too close to my then-4-year-old son on a bridge, he yelled at her “SOCIAL DISTANCING!”

Emily Oster, writing at the Atlantic, asks whether we can all just forgive and forget about what we said and did to one another during the Covid-19 pandemic. On the question of masks, school closings, and the efficacy of this or that vaccine, some people got it right, and some got it wrong. But litigating this forever is a waste of time, she argues. The headline is “Let’s Declare a Pandemic Amnesty.”

Forgiving a friend is different than forgiving Gavin Newsom.

Brown University Economist Emily Oster — who I deeply respect — has a piece out this morning encouraging forgiveness for actions and words over the past few years: “a pandemic amnesty.” And I do think Oster is right that, between friends and loved ones, we should strongly consider forgiving pandemic mistakes. At the same time, we absolutely need institutional and political accountability for our pandemic response.

Last week, the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) released new data showing a dramatic decline in test scores among American 9-year-olds since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. The data indicate a devastating learning loss among American schoolchildren, marking the largest decline in reading scores since 1990, and the first ever recorded drop in mathematics scores.

When students return to school in Uvalde today, just 15 weeks after the deadliest school shooting in Texas history, 19 students and two teachers will not be present.

In just more than three months since the massacre, residents have sought to help children return to normalcy with familiar back-to-school rituals, tinged by grief.

Multiple schools across the Uvalde School District opened this week, months after the Uvalde, Texas, school shooting that left 19 students and two teachers dead last spring.

The big picture: Robb Elementary, the scene of the horrific Uvalde school shooting, remains permanently closed.

"We're not going back to that campus," Uvalde Consolidated Independent School District Superintendent Hal Harrell said last spring, per Axios.

"We have plans for it to become something other than a school site,” Harrell said.

Anxious parents and teachers began arriving on Tuesday morning for the first day of school in Uvalde, Texas — three months after the massacre at Robb Elementary School that left 19 children and two teachers dead.

No students or staff will return to the site of the deadliest school shooting in almost a decade, which has been shuttered permanently and will be razed to the ground, but tensions are still high in the community amid ongoing security concerns.