One of my partners here at Northern Trust mentioned that her children would be returning to school next week. That seemed early to me; when I was a student in the Chicago public schools, classes didn’t restart until after Labor Day.
The arrival of the new academic year prompted me to revisit a piece that we wrote in 2023, which detailed the damage that the pandemic had done to young students. In the years immediately following COVID-19, achievement scores skidded, suggesting that online learning was a poor substitute for time in the classroom.
Unfortunately, achievement still has not recovered from the impact of the pandemic. The U.S. National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) finds that aptitude in reading and math remains below 2020 levels. Reading scores are at their lowest since 1975; math scores are at their lowest since 1990. Students in the lower deciles of the rankings have lost considerably more ground than those at the top, narrowing pathways to prosperity.
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Delayed mastery of these skills hinders progress in higher-level subjects. Deficiencies are appearing further into the educational cycle: a widely-discussed study from the University of California, San Diego found an alarming fraction of incoming freshmen could not meet middle-school math standards.
Labor force potential is a product of population and productivity. The decline in educational attainment will hinder the kind of intelligence building that can enhance competitiveness, which is at a premium in the era of artificial intelligence (AI). And the risks of greater economic inequality are rising; in a world where demographics are declining and productivity is paramount, we cannot afford to leave children behind.
Carl Tannenbaum is the Chief Economist for Northern Trust.
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