“This is a disaster. The bottom has fallen out, and the results are as bad as you can imagine,” said Michael Petrilli, president of the conservative Thomas B. Fordham Institute. “We haven’t seen this kind of academic achievement crisis in living memory.”
STUDENTS STRUGGLING THE MOST — Overall, the students most affected are the second and third graders who were still learning to read when the pandemic began, and the tweens who couldn’t grasp the shift from procedural to conceptual math when the lessons were delivered virtually, a Curriculum Associates analysis of student performance on its test shows.