This is the Kato Daily Podcast for Thursday, October 27th, 2022.

I'm Caleb Brown.

It was anticipated as elected leaders and school administrators closed school doors but is still a devastating

fact. Large declines in reading and math scores on the National Assessment of Educational

Progress. He does Colleen Ronsich discusses what it should mean for parents going forward.

It was definitely anticipated that there would be declines and pretty significant

declines, but even with that, I think that the level shocked a lot of people.

It's the biggest decline in math since the NAEP testing started back in 1990, and reading levels

have fallen back to 1992 levels. So I think that while it was

expected there'd be steep declines, the magnitude of those was shocking to most

observers.

In terms of policy responses, I mean this has been characterized by people on the right as,

well, this is what you get for having closed schools for so long. How do you think about it?

I think there's more at play than that because you can't have remote learning or virtual classrooms that work quite well. I think what happened

here was a lot of times it was remote instruction that was kind of by the seat of their

pants and that was understandable in the very beginning, but then it lingered too long.

So classes stayed closed even when a lot of schools were reopened, a lot of, especially more

of the public schools and there is a lot of evidence that the

teachers unions were big drivers of this and you had schools like the Catholic

schools which is that's the only private school whose scores are broken out in the nape. They tended to be to reopen

much earlier and then they had better results. So there is evidence to point to the fact that having the remote instruction played a role in this, but it wasn't the entire story.

I can imagine that parents who have seen this play out and are concerned about how their own kids

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