>Overall, the study shows that approximately 1 out of 500 children in the United States has experienced COVID-19-associated orphanhood or death of a grandparent caregiver.
What about the other 499 children who missed 2+ years of in-person classes?
That remains to be seen. The 2022 PISA tests suggests that in developed countries, children have missed on the equivalent of 0.5-0.75 of a year's worth of learning.
This happened everywhere, including in the places that only shut down in-person schooling for March 2020-May 2020, and opened up again in August 2020.
Maybe the effect of going through a pandemic was a stressful event harmful to school performance, independent of whether your schooling was in-person or remote?
>Education ministries the world over will envy the handful of rich places that have a cheery story to tell amid the gloom. In Japan, Singapore, South Korea and Taiwan, test scores not only held steady over the pandemic period, they actually ticked up in at least one of the three subjects in which pupils sat exams. Israel and Switzerland are among other countries that appear, at least as judged from these data, to have done reasonably well.
>Some of these outliers protected learning by keeping school closures short. Across the OECD’s dataset there is a modest association between the length of time schools stayed closed and children’s subsequent performance in tests. Teachers in Switzerland ran fully remote or hybrid timetables for only six weeks (the average among countries in Europe was around 29). Closures in Japan were also comparatively zippy: in 2020 schools in that country shortened their summer breaks in order to claw back some of the class hours that children had lost up to then. Singapore, likewise, decided to alter school holidays to maximise learning time.
They didn't loose those years. How do you even know it wasn't better for some at home than it was in school? Aren't you learning your whole life? Do you use everything you learned in school?
>They didn't loose those years. How do you even know it wasn't better for some at home than it was in school?
But did lose those years of in-class instruction, as the PISA tests have shown, post pandemic scores were down from historical trends. The article says that there was a correlation between lockdown intensity and/or catch-up school days and test performance, so I think it's fairly reasonable to conclude that lockdowns did cause a loss of learning.
>Aren't you learning your whole life?
You can also make money your whole life, but that doesn't mean it's totally fine to steal a year's worth of salary from you.
>Do you use everything you learned in school?
And did the pandemic related lockdowns conveniently only caused students to miss the knowledge that they didn't need?
Nobody stole anything from them, they were still learning. They maybe even learned something they otherwise wouldn't in school. Maybe some kids got a break from their bullies. Some spent more time with other grown ups or some spent it more outside. PISA tests are really not a measure of any kind of success in life.
What about the other 499 children who missed 2+ years of in-person classes?