Brown Economist Oster: We’ll See Impacts of Learning Loss ‘More or Less Forever’ Due to ‘Tremendous Failure by Adults’

On Tuesday’s broadcast of CNN’s “New Day,” CNN Contributor and Brown University Economics Professor Emily Oster stated that due to the “tremendous failure by adults” in handling schools during the coronavirus pandemic, we will see the impacts of learning loss “more or less forever” from students who dropped out and that making up the learning loss for children in school will take five, six years.

Oster said, “I think we will see this made up, and maybe that’s a glass half full way to put it. But I think it will not be fast. These declines are very large. They’re, in a sense, unprecedented, and if we think, well, they’ll be recovered in a year or two years, that’s probably overly optimistic. If we look five, six years out, I think we will start coming back. What is true is that there are kids who have, say, dropped out of school who will not ever make this up. So, we will be seeing long-term impacts of this, I think, more or less forever, but some of this will come back.”

Later, Oster responded to a question on what she would say to kids by stating, “I think one thing we should say is, I’m sorry. I mean, I think that this was a tremendous failure by adults that is going to affect kids probably forever in some sense. And so, I think one thing is, boy, we are sorry. And I think another thing we can say is, we’re doing everything we can and we should be doing everything we can to try to get back and to try to serve the needs that you have.”

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