NYT’s Leonhardt: Learning Loss from School Closures ‘Is Undercovered’

On Thursday’s broadcast of MSNBC’s “Morning Joe,” New York Times Senior Writer David Leonhardt said that the crisis of the large and unequal learning loss from school closures during the coronavirus pandemic has been undercovered.

MSNBC Contributor Mike Barnicle asked, “I would submit that maybe it’s the most undercovered aspect of COVID, by both the print and electronic media not covering it, and by it, I mean the millions of children and the millions of households who have been stripped of two years of education, socialization. And it’s an incomparable loss, one that is very difficult to measure, but it is out there. You can find it no matter where you are in talking to parents of school-aged children. Why — well, first of all, do you think it is undercovered? And secondly, where do we go from here on that issue?”

Leonhardt responded, “It is undercovered. It’s deeply alarming. It is unequal. The data make clear that the largest learning losses have accrued to lower-income kids, they have accrued to black and Latino kids. There’s less data on this, but I am confident that the largest — there have been much larger learning losses among kids with learning disabilities. … And like a lot of these slow-moving crises, it’s hard to cover because there’s not a new piece of news every day.”

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