Math Knowledge Is Another Casualty of the Pandemic

Shalinee Sharma can track the impact of Covid-19 on students’ math achievement on a daily basis by checking Zearn, the nonprofit company of which she is chief executive and co-founder. Students go to Zearn to take math lessons and to earn badges, which they get for a perfect score on a quiz. Early in the pandemic she and her staff noticed that high-income students were using Zearn more than ever, but the low-income students that Zearn is most concerned about were dropping off. The gap seemed to narrow at the start of this school year, but lately it has widened again.

“The spring was a catastrophe,” Sharma says, with the rich/poor gap briefly reaching 50 percentage points. “We were traumatized by what we were seeing in the data.” When the gap shrank to 5.5 percentage points in September, she says, “My team was really happy. We were over the moon.” In the latest weekly data, the gap reached almost 17 percentage points. “It’s not on a good trend line. It’s trending apart again.”