Dr. Eric Hanushek joined us Tuesday, January 23 to present on his study The Economic Impacts of Learning Losses due to COVID-19. The numbers are stark and permanent if nothing is done to fully catch students up to 2021 and not just settle with 2020 levels.
Dr. Hanushek estimates that as of February 2021, learning losses due to COVID-19:
- Will cost an average student six to nine percent of their lifetime earnings
- Will lower the GDP three to four percent or more than $27 trillion over the rest of the century. He stated politicians and education leaders “can’t ignore the economic losses.”
- Will be even worse for disadvantaged students, who will experience 50 percent greater learning loss than the average student. This means a nine to more than 13 percent lifetime income loss.
Dr. Hanushek also delved into potential solutions to helping with learning loss. This included individualizing instruction to meet the needs of the students, lengthening instruction time, reviewing and modifying collective bargaining agreements, and more effectively utilizing teachers and personnel. He said, “This generation has been harmed, seriously harmed.” He reiterated that we need to start planning for what education will look like in the future since it should not look the same as it did.
Dr. Eric Hanushek is the Paul and Jean Hanna Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution of Stanford University. He is a recognized leader in the economic analysis of education issues, and his research has had broad influence on education policy in both developed and developing countries. He is the author of numerous widely-cited studies on the effects of class size reduction, school accountability, teacher effectiveness, and other topics. He was the first to research teacher effectiveness by measuring students’ learning gains, which formed the conceptual basis for using value-added measures to evaluate teachers and schools, now a widely adopted practice. His recent book, The Knowledge Capital of Nations: Education and the Economics of Growth summarizes his research establishing the close links between countries’ long-term rates of economic growth and the skill levels of their populations. His current research analyzes why some countries’ school systems consistently perform better than others. He has authored or edited twenty-four books along with over 250 articles. He is a Distinguished Graduate of the United States Air Force Academy and completed his Ph.D. in economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.