Summers: Must Combat ‘Trillions’ in Cost of Learning Loss with Ending Move Away from Testing over Equity Concerns, Harder Grading

During an interview aired on Friday’s edition of Bloomberg’s “Wall Street Week,” Harvard Professor, economist, Director of the National Economic Council under President Barack Obama, and Treasury Secretary under President Bill Clinton Larry Summers stated that the education system needs to be improved in the wake of learning loss due to school closures during the pandemic and part of that is fixing soft grading in the Ivy League, ending social promotion, and stopping “the move away from testing because we don’t like the messages that tests send relative to our social aspiration,” and said that the lost earnings from learning loss are “comfortably into the trillions of dollars, and not just a few trillion.”

Summers said, “[W]hat a generation of economic research has now shown is that human capital is the most important determinant of our economy’s long-term growth and the most important determinant of the fairness and equity with which incomes are distributed in our society. And so, when we see six months or a year’s loss in children’s achievement, that’s a 5% to 10% decline in the value of human capital for tens of millions of children. And if you add up what that value is in terms of the lost earnings down the road, it’s comfortably into the trillions of dollars, and not just a few trillion. So, we’ve gotten some really very, very discouraging news, and it points up the importance of our doing much more and much better on what we’re doing in the whole education system. We can’t fix what happened. We can’t fix the non-learning that took place when kids were at home during COVID. We can do everything we can to double down on learning going forward.”

He continued, “And that’s about how our schools are organized, that’s about who’s staffing and teaching in our schools, that’s about making sure they’re adequately resourced, and in my view, that’s absolutely, critically about accountability for everyone, accountability for those teaching and administering in the system and also accountability for the kids. Whether it’s the fact that close to 50% of all of the grades in the Ivy League are A — straight A, not A- — or whether it’s social promotion in too many of our schools, or whether it’s the move away from testing because we don’t like the messages that tests send relative to our social aspiration, we have got to get more serious about actual knowledge acquisition in our education system at every level.”

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