Malkus, Public School Pandemic Response and Post-Pandemic Recovery (testimony) (House Oversight testimony, 2024-01)

Summary

Written testimony of Nat Malkus, Senior Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), before the House Committee on Oversight and Accountability Subcommittee on Health Care and Financial Services, for the hearing America's Report Card: Oversight of K-12 Public Education, dated January 30, 2024. The statement is titled Public School Pandemic Response and Post-Pandemic Challenges: Remote Schooling and Other Challenges Led to Pandemic Learning Loss and Post-Pandemic Chronic Absenteeism. It describes the Return to Learn Tracker, which monitored the remote instructional status of 8,600 school districts covering 88 percent of all public school students. It states that local voting patterns were more predictive of reopening decisions than local COVID case rates.

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Statement before the House Committee on Oversight and Accountability Subcommittee on
Health Care and Financial Services Hearing on “America’s Report Card: Oversight of K‐12 Public
Education”




Public School Pandemic Response and
Post‐Pandemic Challenges:
Remote Schooling and Other Challenges Led to Pandemic
Learning Loss and Post‐Pandemic Chronic Absenteeism


Nat Malkus
Senior Fellow



2:00 p.m. on Tuesday, January 30, 2024




The American Enterprise Institute (AEI) is a nonpartisan, nonprofit, 501(c)(3) educational organization and does
not take institutional positions on any issues. The views expressed in this testimony are those of the author.
Chair McClain, Ranking Member Porter, and members of the subcommittee: Thank you for
inviting me here today to share my testimony.
Shortly after the pandemic struck in March 2020, my work at the American Enterprise Institute
abruptly shifted to collecting data on schools’ pandemic responses. My team began by collecting
the first nationally representative data on schools’ responses in Spring 2020, and we continued
our work through the 2020–21 school year with the Return to Learn Tracker, which—on a
weekly basis—monitored the remote instructional status of 8,600 school districts, covering 88
percent of all public school students at the pandemic’s outset. Our “Return to Learn” data on the
duration of in-person, hybrid, and fully remote instruction has proven invaluable for
understanding how pandemic school closures affected students and contributed to the greatest
challenges facing them today. Since the beginning of the pandemic, the Return to Learn Tracker
has also gathered data on school masking policies, ESSER funding, public school enrollment
changes, and—most recently—chronic absenteeism.
Test scores make plain that the pandemic caused the largest negative shock to student learning
the nation has ever seen, and other indicators show that both schools and academic recovery
efforts are struggling. Average learning losses from the pandemic exceed those seen in New
Orleans after Hurricane Katrina but affected tens of millions of students instead of hundreds of
thousands. Achievement gaps that had been narrowing gradually over decades widened rapidly.
Students and districts that entered the pandemic behind academically were hit harder by the
pandemic and fell even further behind their peers. Achievement is not the only or even the most
important aspect of the pandemic’s effect on schools, but it is the obvious place to start.
Differences in the Pandemic School Reopening
Before the pandemic, test scores were showing some declines. The pandemic dramatically
worsened these declines. The pandemic declines in expected academic progress stemmed from
multiple factors, and a principal one of these was the duration of remote schooling, a factor over
which policymakers had the most control. Unfortunately, school reopening became politically
polarized before the first full pandemic school year even started, such that local voting patterns
were more predictive of reopening decisions than local COVID case rates. This was clear in
2020, as described in an analysis by Brookingsi:
       There is no relationship—visually or statistically—between school districts’ reopening
       decisions and their county’s new COVID-19 cases per capita. In contrast, there is a strong
       relationship—visually and statistically—between districts’ reopening decisions and the
       county-level support for Trump in the 2016 election.
Our Return to Learn Data show that this pattern played out throughout the 2020–21 school year.
The duration of remote instruction was weakly correlated with counties’ COVID case rates, but
strongly correlated with counties’ 2020 presidential vote share. ii Even in April 2021, when
COVID cases were low and vaccines widely available, only approximately one-third of districts
in counties that voted for President Biden had fully reopened, in stark contrast to the over 60
percent of Trump-supporting districts that had. Throughout the first complete year of the
pandemic, the highest percentage of Biden-supporting districts offering full in-person
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instruction—38% by year's end—never reached the lowest percentage of Trump-supporting
districts that did—40% in January.

The start of the 2021–22 school year reflected these same divides. Despite high COVID rates,
nearly all districts reopened with full-time in-person schooling—a tacit admission that the
previous year’s early reopeners had made the right call—but districts showed similar divides
over school masking, data we also captured as part of our Return to Learn Tracker. iii Although
masking decisions may seem less consequential, they underscored a more significant reality in
schools: the prioritization of restoring normalcy to schools. The gradual return to normalcy in
schools followed the same patterns as closures the preceding year, potentially exerting an
additional impediment on student academic progress and recovery.
Though politically polarized, these differences were likely less attributable to narrow politics and
more related to local attitudes regarding the right way to respond to the pandemic. For instance,
county-level masking behavior, measured in summer 2020 before any schools reopened, were
much more predictive of remote and hybrid schooling in 2020–21 and masking policies in 2021–
22 than weekly local COVID case rates were. Similarly, other static attributes, measured early or
late in the pandemic, were also more predictive of closures and masking policies than local
COVID rates were. These patterns suggest that although the strong connections between local
politics and district responses—both in terms of school reopening in the first pandemic school
year and masking policies in the second—are clear, the causes of school districts reactions are
not, as several interconnected factors were more predictive of remote and hybrid schooling than
were local COVID case rates.
The Clear Connection between Remote Instruction and Learning Loss
In contrast, the connection between the duration of school closures and pandemic learning loss is
quite clear. The Education Recovery Scorecardiv (ERS) gathered state test scores from millions
of third through eighth grade students in 29 states between 2019 and 2022 to examine learning
loss at a large scale. Combined with AEI’s Return to Learn data, ERS data show that the third of
districts that were most in-person during 2020–21 lost 44 percent of a typical year’s progress in
math, compared to 60 percent in the most remote third of districts—a difference of over one
third. Fortunately, losses in reading were smaller, but their relation to differences in the duration
of remote instruction were even stronger. Similar patterns by duration of remote instruction are
clear in numerous studies.v Numerous federal assessments that capture students’ academic
progress, including the NAEP assessments (often called the Nation’s Report Card), also show
large declines in scores, but because the federal government did not systematically collect school
closure data, these assessments do not capture differences by the duration of remote instruction
as much as many would like.
The lack of federal data collection also means we have a less clear view on how school closures
affected students’ learning and other outcomes. Most studies that measure learning loss do so by
comparing student performance well before the pandemic began with student performance well
after all schools had reopened. These studies do not typically have data on student performance
between these two endpoints, making it harder to examine the sources learning loss. For
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example, the ERS data referenced above come from spring 2019 and spring 2022, and show
significant gaps between more and less in-person districts; however, gauging the importance of
extended closures requires attention to that fact that these declines stemmed both from spring
2020 closures—which happened for all school districts and during which learning losses were
greatest—and from closures during the 2020–21 school year, when district instructional offerings
varied widely. Since total academic progress differences stemmed from a uniformly fully remote
spring 2020 and a differentially remote 2020–21 school year, the differences between
instructional offerings in the first full pandemic school year appear significant.
However impactful, though, the duration of remote learning was not the only source of difficulty
for schools and students over the pandemic: The instability of quarantines over the 2020–21
school year hampered learning, and would have been more difficult for schools offering in-
person instruction; chronic absenteeism spiked during the pandemic—and remains high—and
undoubtedly hampered academic progress for students as well as for teacher and administrator
capacity; the introduction of novel instructional practices to allow similar instruction for students
who opted out of available in-person learning posed a steep learning curve for teachers and
students and were instituted without sufficient time to work out the kinks that come with
substantial changes to technical and instructional practices; additionally, the introduction of
millions of new devices, and their adoption for much larger portions of instruction than teachers
and students had been accustomed to, posed challenges during an already difficult time. Even for
schools that resumed in-person instruction early, the pandemic continued to present significant
and diverse obstacles to instruction and student learning. We know now that those obstacles have
turned into durable challenges that continue to plague the nation’s schools today.
Federal Data Collection and Pandemic Relief for Public Schools
I will now note, but not belabor the fact, that the federal government did not collect and report
data comparable to what Return to Learn captured on instructional offerings or masking policies.
In my view, these were obvious errors. The lack of masking data are a good example, especially
considering the CDC retained controversial guidance that all students mask indoors nationwide
for much of the 2021–22 school year.
In February 2022—just days ahead of the state of the union address—the CDC replaced its
guidance recommending universal masking with new guidance, which recommended just 37
percent of public school students should be under mask mandates. This sudden shift resulted not
from a rapid change in the scientific consensus on COVID but from the CDC’s own decision to
link masking recommendations to county-level data on local COVID risks — data that the CDC
had been reporting for the entire school year.vi
Our Return to Learn Masking data show that prior to February 2022, many students attended
districts where the new guidance would have not have recommended mask mandates. Indeed,
even with the September delta wave and the December Omicron surge, had it been in place all
year the CDCs updated data-based guidance would have recommended mask mandates for an


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average of 61 percent of students between September 2021 and when the new guidance was
announced in February 2022.
In my view the federal government should have collected and presented data transparently and
based its guidance on clear data-based rationales. It is also my view that although many state and
local districts stuck to what they viewed as the right way to respond to the pandemic, the lack of
responsiveness on the part of localities stemmed in part from weak federal guidance.
The federal government’s response to the pandemic—including on school closures, pandemic
learning loss, student well-being, and chronic absenteeism—has primarily taken the form of
relatively sparse guidance and historically unprecedented spending, most notably from $189.5
billion in ESSER funds. ESSER funds were an enormous expenditure yet came with few
guardrails or guidelines for what the funds should be spent on. My Return to Learn team tracked
the district allocations of ESSER dollars, and would have attempted to track how these important
and historic investments were used. However, the three laws providing ESSER funding included
no functional reporting mechanism to gauge how districts were using the funds, making any
systematic tracking essentially impossible. Other groups have attempted to track how these funds
have been used and done invaluable work but found the task extremely challenging.vii Indeed, it
has been difficult to determine how much of ESSER funds have been spent by districts, but
recent research suggests more than $50B still needs to be obligated by this September.viii
There was a requirement that 20 percent of the $123B in ESSER III funds that came from the
American Rescue Plan be used for districts to “ respond to students’ academic, social, and
emotional needs and address the disproportionate impact of COVID-19 on underrepresented
student subgroups.”ix In reality, even this requirement was so broadly written that it provided
little guidance, and the groups that have tracked these funds have found it difficult to establish
whether even this minimal requirement was met. Oversight of government spending is not my
primary expertise, but this strikes me as difficult spending to oversee.
It should be noted that there are regular political fights over federal education spending: whether
there should be more or less of it and what constraints and oversight are appropriate. These fights
can be healthy out workings of America’s system of government. However, if one were to devise
an expenditure to erode confidence in the federal government’s ability to spend education
funding wisely and to advantage, it would be hard to do better than ESSER. Even though its
targets—recovery for American public schools—are vitally important, its allocations are
enormous, its guidance minimal, and its reporting requirements nonfunctional.
Today, learning loss remains a grave concern, major pandemic era problems are becoming post-
pandemic problems, and additional resources may indeed be part of a comprehensive solution to
problems that have major economic and human costs. Nonetheless, holding politics aside, the
unprecedented expenditures we have made cannot be clearly tied to commensurate benefits.
Indeed, even though some benefits undoubtedly came from these expenditures, some of these
expenditures were undoubtedly wasted. At a time when prudent investments in schools may be
warranted, the track record of federal pandemic recovery spending looks more dubious than ever.

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This is particularly troubling given the ongoing challenges schools are facing, the chief of which
I turn to next.
Chronic Absenteeism Is the Greatest Post-pandemic Challenge for Public Schools
In testimony before another committee last year, I pointed to academic recovery as the greatest
priority for public education. Academic recovery remains an enormous challenge, one perhaps
greater than I knew then. Indeed, although students need to learn faster than they did pre-
pandemic to catch up from pandemic losses, last year most students learned at a slower pace than
their pre-pandemic peers.x
Despite the importance of learning loss, however, today I offer different testimony. Although
learning loss should be a top priority for schools, I now believe that chronic absenteeism is the
greatest challenge schools face. Chronic absenteeism—the percentage of students missing 10
percent or more of the school year—exploded over the pandemic, rising from 15 percent in 2019
to 28 percent in 2022. The Return to Learn Chronic Absenteeism data collection, the most
current and comprehensive data collection on pandemic and post-pandemic chronic absenteeism
, show these increases in every state and across all student demographics. Regrettably, 2023 saw
little improvement, with 26 percent of students chronically absent in the 39 states reporting
data.xi
Chronic absenteeism stands apart from pandemic learning loss in important ways. The pandemic,
a one-time event, disrupted regular schooling and led to lingering learning loss, but the obvious
pandemic drivers of that loss have ceased. Chronic absenteeism, however, persists and affects
one in four students across the nations. It has an ongoing and corrosive impact on the students
affected and the culture in their schools. Teachers, grappling with absenteeism, must divert
valuable class time to help chronically absent students catch up, leaving less time for those with
regular attendance. Chronic absenteeism disrupts fundamental routines, erodes a culture of high
expectations, and is undoubtedly hampering academic recovery.
Moreover, as I detail in a paper to be published by the American Enterprise Institute tomorrow,
chronic absenteeism disproportionately affects districts with lower achievement and higher
poverty rates—the same districts hit hardest by pandemic learning loss. Chronic absenteeism
rates also vary by race, with 2022 rates for Hispanic and black students sitting at 36 and 39
percent, respectively. These rates are even worse in more challenged districts. For instance, in
urban districts, the rates for Hispanic and black students reached 41 and 46 percent, respectively.
Addressing chronic absenteeism is crucial for overcoming learning loss. Interventions like
tutoring or extended learning time will have limited effectiveness if students are not attending
school regularly. Additionally, tackling chronic absenteeism may prove a more promising tack
for addressing learning loss than interventions like tutoring or extended learning time. Unlike
these interventions, tackling chronic absenteeism doesn’t require that parents and students do
anything that they weren’t already doing before the pandemic. It just requires that they return to
pre-pandemic behavioral patterns. That return may not be so easy, but it falls to all of us—


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federal, state, and local leaders; school and district leaders; teachers; and of course, students and
parents—to make sure that it happens.
Current levels of chronic absenteeism threaten the productivity of American schooling. At the
modest rate of decline seen between 2022 and 2023, we may not see a return to pre-pandemic
rates until 2030. However, there is additional reason for worry here. We saw a 2 percentage point
decline between 2022, the year that Omicron brought COVID case rates to record highs, and
2023, the first truly post-pandemic school year. If the huge declines in COVID cases between
those years spurred only a small decline in chronic absenteeism, should we expect greater
declines in coming years, or smaller declines?
What can be done to address chronic absenteeism? I will not pretend to have simple or
universally effective prescriptions. Rather, in what follows, I will simply describe basic measures
that, though not sufficient, I believe are necessary.
First, we need to bring both carrots and sticks to address the problem. Pre-pandemic research has
shown both that several “carrot” approaches can be effective and that the more resource-
intensive and expensive interventions have larger effects. Unfortunately, none of these effects are
up to the scale of the current crisis. Moreover, because post-pandemic chronic absenteeism has
different causes than pre-pandemic chronic absenteeism had, there is reason to believe that many
of the interventions that were effective before the pandemic would be much less effective now.
Of course, districts should bring supports to serve students’ needs and make school more
attractive to students; however, positive supports alone will not do. We should accompany
supports with persistent and frank communications to parents whose children regularly fail to
show up, and there should be consequences when parents fail to fulfil their moral and legal duty
to ensure their children attend school regularly.
Second, we need clear leadership on this issue from those at the top to support the work of lower
level leaders. At no time has there been a consistent and clear message that the era of exceptional
pandemic-era school practices is over and that all parties must return to the work of education in
earnest. This needs to change. To give school district leaders and local officials political cover to
push for a return to a culture of regular attendance, the president, the secretary of education, and
governors, should make clear that pandemic-era exceptionalism is over. Without support from
local leaders, it will be hard for principals, building leaders, and teachers to ask and, when
necessary, demand that families and students do their part.
Third, teachers—as overworked and burdened as they are—have more relational capital with
students and families than anyone else. They need to use that relational capital to effectively
communicate the need for consistent attendance. Of course, schools and districts should monitor
and identify students falling short on attendance, but no letter, text or email will have the power
that regular and personal communication from teachers will. I understand this is a lot to ask of
teachers, but I suggest that if they do not do this important work to restore attendance, the rest of
their work will be even harder.


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Finally, we ask much of schools and of teachers, and it is only fair that political leaders, the
research and advocacy community, the media, and schools also call on students and families to
meet their responsibilities to ensure regular school attendance. The behavior that was the
standard just a few short years ago would be a huge improvement from the current state of
affairs, and it is not too much to ask of families. If we are unwilling to ask this of them, who
should we blame if the current plague of absenteeism remains with our schools for the near
future? Our federal, state, and education leaders must lead on this issue for the sake of our
schools and students, and if they do not, they will abet the greatest challenge America’s students
are currently facing.
Thank you for the opportunity to give testimony in this important hearing. I look forward to
presenting these comments and evidence to the subcommittee and answering questions.



i
   Valant, J. (2020). School reopening plans linked to politics rather than public health. The
Brookings Institution. https://www.brookings.edu/articles/school-reopening-plans-linked-to-
politics-rather-than-public-health/
ii
    Malkus, N. (2021, July). 2020-21 Instructional Status Tracker. Return to Learn Tracker,
American Enterprise Institute. https://www.returntolearntracker.net/instructional_status/
iii
    Malkus, N. (2022, July). 2021-22 School District Masking Policy Tracker. Return to Learn
Tracker, American Enterprise Institute.https://www.returntolearntracker.net/mask-
requirements_edit-2022/
iv
    Kane, T. and Reardon, S. (2023). Education Recovery Scorecard.
https://educationrecoveryscorecard.org/
v
    Curriculum Associates. (2021a). Academic achievement at the end of the 2020–2021 school
year: Insights after more than a year of disrupted teaching and
learning. https://www.curriculumassociates.com/-/media/mainsite/files/i-ready/iready-
understanding-student-needs-paper-spring-results-2021.pdf;
Darling-Aduana, J., Woodyard, H. T., Sass, T. R., & Barry, S. S. (2022). Learning-mode choice,
student engagement, and achievement growth during the COVID-19 pandemic. AERA Open, 8,
23328584221128035.;
Goldhaber, D., Kane, T. J., McEachin, A., Morton, E., Patterson, T., & Staiger, D. O. (2023).
The Educational Consequences of Remote and Hybrid Instruction During the
Pandemic. American Economic Review: Insights;
Jack, R., Halloran, C., Okun, J., & Oster, E. (2023). Pandemic schooling mode and student test
scores: evidence from US school districts. American Economic Review: Insights, 5(2), 173-190.;
Kogan V., Lavertu S. (2021). The COVID-19 pandemic and student achievement on Ohio’s
third-grade English Language Arts assessment. Report prepared for the Ohio Department of
Education.
vi
    Malkus, N., & Audet, A. (2022). A Failure to Respond: Public School Mask Mandates in the
2021-22 School Year. American Enterprise Institute.
vii
    ESSER Expenditure Dashboard, Edunomics Lab, Georgetown University
https://edunomicslab.org/esser-spending/.

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viii
    FutureEd. (2024, January). Progress in Spending Federal K-12 Covid Aid: State by State.
https://www.future-ed.org/progress-in-spending-federal-k-12-covid-aid-state-by-state/.
ix
   US Department of Education, Office of Elementary and Secondary Education, “US Department
of Education Fact Sheet: American Rescue Plan Act of 2021.”
x
   Lewis, K., & Kuhfeld, M. (2023). Education's Long COVID: 2022-23 Achievement Data
Reveal Stalled Progress toward Pandemic Recovery. Center for School and Student Progress at
NWEA.
xi
   Malkus, N. (2024, January). District Chronic Absenteeism Tracker. Return to Learn Tracker,
American Enterprise Institute. https://www.returntolearntracker.net/chronicabsenteeism




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