Hi, I'm Dan Pramak, and welcome to a special four-part weekend edition of Axios Recap,

focused on the unique challenges of Back to School in 2020.

These are tied to an Axios deep dive, presented by Pearson, and this particular episode digs into the loss of learning

and its long-term implications for students, schools, and the economy.

That conversation with Axios' Kim Hart in 15 seconds.

We're joined now by Axios' Kim Hart, who edited this weekend's deep dive on Back to School

in a pandemic age. Kim, we talk about all these kind of externalities and all these different

pieces of back to school, but the loss of learning is the biggest one. Is there a way just on

the pure education side to measure what was lost in the spring and what could be lost in the

upcoming school year? There was a pretty well-known study that came out in the

spring by NWEA, which is a nonprofit that creates academic assessments for the K-12 world.

And what they found was pretty stunning. Their preliminary results from looking at what the

learning loss from the COVID school closures in the spring showed,

was that students would have returned to fall this year with roughly 70% of the learning

gains in reading and less than 50% of the learning gains in math in some grades relative

to a typical school year. So they're not just sliding the typical summer

slide. This is more than double the typical summer slide in learning these very fundamental skills.

And that was already a cause for concern and alarm. But that was, again, when we thought we were all

going back to school in person. And so we're adding on this extra layer of uncertainty and disruption around a lot of schools.

Many schools going to virtual learning environment and staying there for the foreseeable future

or going into some sort of hybrid situation, which has some level of disruption as well.

You and I both have school-age kids.

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