Perhaps, but there’s an explicit measurable link between weeks of school closure and loss of academic performance. It may not capture the whole picture, but COVID was a huge driver of the problem.

I am skeptical because while school was disrupted, it didn't last for that long. People are attributing ongoing problems to a cause that lasted about as long as summer vacation.

There were some studies that showed how length of closure affected academic impact: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S095947522...

A year of half-assed online work could have a pretty big impact. Many schools weren’t well prepared to run classes online.

Thanks, I haven't seen this study before. In table 2, it seems like the biggest impacts were on people that didn't speak the test language well, and strangely girls. The duration of school closure was negative, but not as negative as those other factors. I am having trouble explaining that. The non-native speaker element seems quite logical, but the large difference across genders and the relative insensitivity to closure duration is strange.

I agree, perhaps the gender effect has something to do with how girls are socialized and how that affects their learning process.

I also saw a separate Japanese study that showed more lasting effects in lower income families, with scores mostly bouncing back in others. But that’s Japan, hard to generalize with how they do schooling and out-of-school study.

I dunno, I think if the hypothesis is "School closing causes poor perforance due to learning loss", shouldn't the strongest explanatory variable be duration of closure? This weird inversion makes me think something else is going on. If gender is a bigger predictor than duration, then it is the fact of the schools closing at all more than the duration, which would point to another variable being dominant (duration was negative, so it is certainly part of the explanation).

One possible alternative explanation is that all the kids were stressed out of their minds because there was a killer virus on the loose and no one could focus in school or outside. If you want to guess at gender differences, one might be that girls care about other people more, and so were more stressed out by the thought of their parents or grandparents dying. I don't really think girls care that much more than boys though. There would need to be some kind of retrospective ethnographic study to figure out what the heck happened.

Another explanation could be that since the kids were used to distribute viruses to reopen the economy, their health suffered. There is ample documentation that women get long covid more frequently than men.

I’m comfortable assuming that both closure duration and gendered norms play a role. If closure duration plays no role, then we should just be able to go fully remote for all students with no adverse impact, right?

From speaking to parents during this time, many were unhappy with the rigor of remote work and the quality of instruction during this period.