Why covid-19 will ‘explode’ academic achievement gaps - The Washington Post

Why covid-19 will ‘explode’ academic achievement gaps - The Washington Post

Why covid-19 will ‘explode’ existing academic achievement gaps

The Washington Post published a story saying that millions of students are at risk for severe learning loss during the coronavirus epidemic and discussing some of the unprecedented steps to help them catch up. This post is a follow-up of sorts, looking at exactly why achievement gaps will “explode,” according to the scholar and author Richard Rothstein, who wrote it.

Rothstein, whose research and writings on segregation in America have been important, is a distinguished fellow of the nonprofit Economic Policy Institute and a senior fellow emeritus at the Thurgood Marshall Institute of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund and of the Haas Institute at the University of California at Berkeley.

He is the author of a number of books, including his most recent, the award-winning “The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How our Government Segregated America.”

A former national education writer for the New York Times, Rothstein also wrote books including “Grading Education: Getting Accountability Right” and “Class and Schools: Using Social, Economic and Educational Reform to Close the Black-White Achievement Gap.” In 2013, Rothstein wrote a report titled “For Public Schools, Segregation Then, Segregation Since: Education and the Unfinished March.”

This first appeared on the community development website Shelterforce, and Rothstein gave me permission to republish it.

By Richard Rothstein

The covid-19 pandemic will take existing academic achievement differences between middle-class and low-income students and explode them.

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The academic achievement gap has bedeviled educators for years. In math and reading, children of CONTINUE READING: Why covid-19 will ‘explode’ academic achievement gaps - The Washington Post