Seriously, I have no idea why the onus is on the generation, the framing should be "education is massively underfunded, teachers are abandoned with ever increasing class sizes and ever decreasing agency, and kids are left with smartphones to fend for themselves in an environment where they may be shot and killed at any moment".

We, the older generations, have failed them.

Are you sure about the underfunding piece? Education funding is a larger share of GDP and higher in inflation-adjusted dollars than any time in the past. Maybe the funding is just poorly managed.

They sat at home for over a year during COVID doing busywork, during key developmental years, which probably had a bigger impact.

Edit for clarity: some states were fully remote for over a year, and I’m including partial remote weeks here.

Covid school closures lasted months in the worst cases, never years.

California still wasn’t all open in April 2021. So, over a year.

That's not true. Some of the biggest districts in the US stayed virtual over a year.

And even afterwards many went partially remote, which was just as disruptive.

Yes, some public health officials had trouble weighing the risks of COVID itself with the risks of implementing their mitigation strategies.

scores were dropping before

Perhaps, but there’s an explicit measurable link between weeks of school closure and loss of academic performance. It may not capture the whole picture, but COVID was a huge driver of the problem.

I am skeptical because while school was disrupted, it didn't last for that long. People are attributing ongoing problems to a cause that lasted about as long as summer vacation.

There were some studies that showed how length of closure affected academic impact: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S095947522...

A year of half-assed online work could have a pretty big impact. Many schools weren’t well prepared to run classes online.

Thanks, I haven't seen this study before. In table 2, it seems like the biggest impacts were on people that didn't speak the test language well, and strangely girls. The duration of school closure was negative, but not as negative as those other factors. I am having trouble explaining that. The non-native speaker element seems quite logical, but the large difference across genders and the relative insensitivity to closure duration is strange.

I agree, perhaps the gender effect has something to do with how girls are socialized and how that affects their learning process.

I also saw a separate Japanese study that showed more lasting effects in lower income families, with scores mostly bouncing back in others. But that’s Japan, hard to generalize with how they do schooling and out-of-school study.