How Test Publishers Are Poised To Profit From Pandemic

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How Test Publishers Are Poised To Profit From Pandemic “Learning Loss”



Learning loss is not only a catchy phrase, it has become a focus of federal policy. The $1.9 trillion stimulus bill signed by President Biden on March 11 requires states to spend at least 5% (or approximately $6.5 billion) to address learning loss. Public school districts must set aside 20% of their funding to address it. Further, the bill allocates $100 million to the Institute of Education Sciences, the non-partisan statistic-gathering arm of the U.S. Department of Education, to study learning loss. The bill includes additional allocations for summer school, after school and other supplementary programs that could fit under the umbrella of “addressing learning loss” or helping students “catch up academically.”

The investment in education made by the Biden administration is important and necessary but the use of those funds bears watching lest we see a repetition of a disturbing historical pattern. Allocating money to address learning loss is fraught with problems since the term itself is at best controversial and at worse misleading.

Learning loss has become more of a marketing catchphrase than a term that captures what students have faced in the last year. The marketing of learning loss, however, has been fairly effective in getting money allocated that will almost certainly end up benefiting the industry that coined the phrase. Ostensibly, learning loss is a term that sprung from educational research that identified and quantified an effect of pandemic-related disruptions on schools and learning. In actuality, it’s the result of campaigns by test publishers and Wall Street consultants.

A month into the pandemic, NWEA, one of the largest state test publishers, predicted that a massive “Covid-19 slide“ was coming and that the result would be terrible. Early attempts at branding the concept as Covid-19 slide didn’t catch on but led to the introduction of the term “learning loss,” which did catch on.

The introduction of these terms out of context of the research that created them leads to misinterpretation of their true meaning. Learning loss, for example, has been digested and filtered through common knowledge to take on at least three meanings: evaporation of previously acquired knowledge, predicted loss of career opportunities, and predicted or measured standardized testing performance losses.

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