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Students nationwide face lower earnings over their lifetime because of a loss of education during the pandemic, a Stanford economist said in a recently completed study, adding that the loss will be even greater for California students.
The average student across the U.S. will lose $70,000 in earnings over their lifetime if something isn’t done to offset the learning loss.
California students may lose more than $70,000 in lifetime earnings because earnings overall are higher in California than in many other states.
Economist Eric Hanushek at Stanford’s Hoover Institution said to offset the loss “we need more effective teachers.”
Hanushek is an international expert in the economic analysis of educational issues.
He said the quality of learning is more important than the quantity of learning when it comes to offsetting the loss. Quality depends on the effectiveness of teachers, he said.
To improve learning quality, he said, schools can provide incentives to its best teachers.
“You provide incentives to your better teachers to take on more kids,” Hanushek said in an interview Thursday.
Schools systems now have a lot of federal money available to them and that money could be used to provide the incentives, Hanushek said. The money could also be used to buy out the contracts of the least effective teachers, he said.
Schools have tried to promote additional or longer school days to make up for learning losses. Hanushek said that may not be effective.
Hanushek estimated the loss in each state’s gross domestic product over the rest of the 21st century due to what may be a lower-skilled workforce.
GDP is expected to be about 1.4% lower each year in California over the rest of the century than it would be if the learning loss did not occur, according to the study. In dollar terms, the loss comes to $1.3 trillion through 2099.
Hanushek calculated that amount by adding up the losses each year and reducing the future ones. The future ones were reduced by an amount to account for their uncertainly and because losses in the future are not as painful as present ones.
California’s gross domestic product was about $3.37 trillion in 2021, according to the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis.
“These losses are permanent unless a state’s schools can get better than their pre-pandemic levels,” Hanushek wrote in the study.
The immediate impact on California and other state’s economies will begin to be felt when current students finish school and become a substantial part of the labor force, the study said.
Because it will not be felt for years, people may ignore the impact.
“That is a mistake, because the economic impact is truly significant,” Hanushek wrote.
The study also said that disadvantaged children suffered greater losses in learning than other children and therefore may suffer greater losses in earnings.
“”You provide incentives to your better teachers to take on more kids,” Hanushek said in an interview Thursday.”
Do you remember learning about the Law of Diminishing Returns Eric? Sticking more kids in a teacher’s classroom, especially in this area, will not increase learning output for the additional students inputted into the class. In fact, like the Law states, the additional units will lead to proportional reductions in the learning output. I can attest to this after more than 20 years in the classroom
What California needs to focus on with the learning level extremes (far below grade level sitting next to far above grade level) we see in our classrooms is..
1. Lower class sizes (20 or less in all classes)
2. More homogeneous grouping. We have experimented for years with heterogeneous grouping, which is supposed to increase student learning through collaborative learning and teacher differentiation. Why not try a few years of matching kids in classrooms based on their reading levels so that books and class readings can be matched to what they can access. That way in a semester, maybe a class could work toward the goal of increasing the class reading level by an entire grade (if not two grades) without the teacher having to worry about modifying, or differentiating a grade level reading that half the class can not do. Right now the modifying/differentiating we have to do takes a tremendous amount of time and work. If that was not the focus, and instead we could pick class appropriate readings, read and discuss them as a class, we would end up in a much better spot than pretending that 3rd grade readers in an 11th grade class actually understood the 5th grade (to try and keep them up with a relevant level to college prep learnin) you specifically designed for them.
3. Make some learning a requirement for families. Family reading every night seems like a fair requirement for a society and community that cares about student learning and positive growth.