Will Flanders and Miranda Spindt:

For the past two years, families across the country have been dealing with regular shutdowns of in-person learning in their schools. While people have speculated on what the effects of losing face-to-face class time would be on academic progress, we are beginning to have the data necessary to determine the extent of these effects. Recent data from Wisconsin allows us to conduct one of the first comprehensive analyses of this question.

Using newly available data from the 2021 administration of the state’s Forward Exam, combined with data gathered on school closures at the district level from the Fall of 2020, we describe the nature and impacts of school closure. The key findings of this research include:

• Districts that remained closed for in-person learning saw significant declines in math proficiency. Math proficiency was approximately 4.8% lower in districts that were closed for in-person learning in Fall 2020.
• Districts that remained closed for in-person learning saw significant declines in English proficiency. English/Language Arts proficiency was 1.6% lower in districts that were closed for in-person learning in Fall 2020.
• Districts with a higher percentage of African American students were more likely to remain closed in fall 2020. Our results show that the higher the percentage of African American students in a district, the more likely that district was to remain shut down for in-person learning.
• Districts with a higher percentage of economically disadvantaged students saw larger performance declines. A district with 100% low-income students would be expected to have proficiency declines of more than 6% in math and 7% in ELA relative to a school with no low-income students independent of closure status.
• More than 257,000 students in Wisconsin spent at least part of the 2020-21 school year without in-person learning. This represents approximately 30% of all students in the state.