Lance Izumi, senior director of PRI’s Center for Education, recently delivered the following speech to the Northern California Lincoln Club.
There is so much going on in education, both in California and nationally, that I thought I would give an overview of some of the key issues facing us and what the future holds in store, especially in regard to homeschooling, which is the subject of my new book The Homeschool Boom.
First of all, I think we should ask where are we right now? What exactly has happened to our children during the pandemic and the ever-changing policies of the public school system?
Thankfully, we are starting to get some real data on the learning losses suffered by children.
For example, the prominent research firm McKinsey & Company released a study in July that not only showed huge learning losses among American children due to the pandemic, but also shocking estimates of the long-term economic impacts these learning losses would have on the United States.
According to the McKinsey researchers, students, on average, fell behind five months in math and four months in reading by the end of the 2021 school year.
More troubling, the researchers found that the pandemic had widened achievement gaps between student demographic groups.
