Delainey Tidwell says she loves reading. The tricky part for her is understanding the words on the page.
“I would read one sentence over and over again,” said the 9-year-old fourth-grader.
Though she returned to school in August 2020, repeated quarantines left her mostly on her own at home. Her father is a construction supervisor who has to be on site. Her mother works from home but gets few breaks during the day. Delainey sometimes had to care for her little sister during virtual school.
Delainey’s difficulty with comprehension is also hurting her in math class, where she struggles to understand word problems, said her mother, Danyal Tidwell, who pins some blame on the pandemic. “We want to give her every resource we can between school and home, because we want her caught up,” Mrs. Tidwell said.
For two years, schools and researchers have wrestled with pandemic-era learning setbacks resulting mostly from a lack of in-person classes. They are struggling to combat the learning loss, as well as to measure just how deep it is. Some answers to the second question are becoming clear. National data show that children who were learning to read earlier in the pandemic have the lowest reading proficiency rates in about 20 years.
Children learning to read have been badly hampered during the pandemic. Schools are mounting efforts to make up ground but aren’t sure what will work. https://t.co/efQtJF1x9F via @WSJ
— Robert F. Sylvester (@Worldnut) September 6, 2022