Reacción a "Reactions: pandemic caused educational delays equivalent to a third of the academic year"

During the covid-19 pandemic, according to the UN, more than 1.6 billion students in 190 countries remained locked indoors without being able to attend school. Far from being the ideal situation, the gap between the haves and have-nots widened. The gap between the most and least affluent families deepened: schoolchildren who had no computer at home, those who shared a single computer for all their siblings, those who had no internet connection at home and those who do not even have an environment available at home to study. Kitchen and living room tables became makeshift libraries, but without the silence and working atmosphere that we know is so necessary for learning. 

The education gap also widened, and countries' treatment of the return to the classroom was a crucial element in bringing performance levels back to normal. To give a couple of examples, the policies implemented in Spain kept schoolchildren at home for the last term of the 2019-2020 school year, while in other countries such as Chile schoolchildren were kept at home in 2020 and 2021. 

The study aims to find out to what extent the learning progress of schoolchildren has slowed during the pandemic. To meet this objective, the authors conducted a meta-analysis of 42 studies carried out in 15 countries (Australia, Belgium, Brazil, Colombia, Denmark, Spain, United States, Italy, Mexico, Netherlands, United Kingdom, Sweden, Switzerland and South Africa) and the results could not be more interesting: that our students have a delay in the level of achievement that is maintained over time, that this delay has affected mathematics more than reading and that those who have suffered the most are students with lower incomes. 

On the other hand, as a meta-analysis study, it has the limitation of the selection of studies and the levels of risk accepted by the authors. Perhaps it would have been advisable not to consider both critical risk studies and those with a high risk of bias. In any case, it is clear that this methodological decision considerably affects the size of the sample available for analysis and its representativeness in geographical terms. 

One might expect that schoolchildren would be able to catch up with the learning they have lost at the beginning of the pandemic as they have already joined the classroom. However, previous literature in this regard suggests that learning deficits are difficult to compensate for and tend to persist in the long term, so it is urgent that schools and decision-makers focus their efforts on new programmes, innovations and reinforcements that will help our students overcome the detrimental effects that the covid-19 pandemic created in their development.