Clermont, Florida Correspondent — The losses are measurable now and unevenly distributed, which is the important half.

The assessment data from this autumn shows the gap widened most for the students who were furthest behind to begin with, and widened most in mathematics.

Fund what has evidence behind it. High-dosage tutoring — meaning several sessions a week with the same person, not a website — extended time, and early literacy. Districts received an enormous amount of federal money in March with a requirement to spend a fifth of it on this, and a great deal of it is going to buildings and technology instead.

That’s the accountability question and it’s live right now.

Prescott Valley, Arizona Correspondent — The evidence is no longer anecdotal and the response has to be specific.

I’d single out the students on individualized programs again, because a year of undelivered services isn’t a deficit that catches up. Districts owe compensatory services under the law and most of them haven’t calculated what they owe, let alone provided it.

I’d also warn about the measurement problem. A lot of districts didn’t test in 2020, so the baseline is missing, and the comparison being made is to a projection rather than to a measured prior year.

That’s still enough to act on. It isn’t enough to rank districts against each other, and it’ll be used that way.

Gastonia, North Carolina Correspondent — The losses are real and the answer is time on task and serious tutoring for the children who fell furthest.

What concerns me is the staffing. High-dosage tutoring requires people, and the same districts that can’t fill teaching positions are being asked to hire tutors at scale with money that expires in 2024.

You can’t build a program on a workforce you don’t have with money that disappears. What that produces is a contract with a vendor, and the vendor evidence is considerably weaker than the evidence for a person in a room.

Bismarck, North Dakota Correspondent — Measure honestly, then add time and targeted help.

Our districts were open most of last year, so our losses are smaller and they’re still there. That’s worth stating, because it suggests some of this wasn’t only closure. Absences, illness, staff turnover, and a year of disruption inside open buildings did damage too.

Which means a policy aimed only at the districts that stayed remote will miss a lot of the children who need it.

Long Island, New York Correspondent — Respond with time, measurement, and an end to the position that asking about scores is unkind.

Extended day, summer programming, phonics that actually runs, and a stop to promoting students who can’t read on the theory that retention is worse. Sometimes it is. Doing neither is worse than both.

Boards that kept buildings closed past the point the risk was understood owe a recovery plan with a date on it.

The legal exposure is real and growing, incidentally. Compensatory services claims are being filed and districts are settling them, which is the accountability mechanism arriving through litigation because it didn’t arrive any other way.

Jacksonville, Florida Correspondent — Open, measure, tutor, in that order.

We lost the year. Losing the measurement is how you lose the next three, and there’s real pressure right now to suspend testing again on the grounds that the results will be discouraging.

Discouraging is the information. A district that won’t test is a district that has decided not to know, and you can’t tutor a gap you refuse to locate.

Tyler, Texas Correspondent — Coaches see the child who never came back to the building. That’s the part that isn’t a test score.

Enrolment dropped and a meaningful number of those students haven’t been located. Not transferred, not homeschooled on paper — gone from the system.

That’s a different problem from a reading deficit and it’s more urgent. You can remediate a child you can find.

Las Vegas, Nevada Correspondent — Shift parents can’t homeschool a district.

Our district was remote longer than most and the ledger includes more than scores. Absenteeism, students who disengaged entirely, and a rise in adolescent crisis calls the district reported itself.

Extended time for the ones who vanished, and a refusal to treat the portal as though it had been a year of school.

I’d rather be rude about it now than discover it in hiring in 2030.

Myrtle Beach, South Carolina Correspondent — The losses are real and the recovery money has an expiry that nobody is planning around.

Districts got a large sum in March 2021 that has to be obligated by 2024. What that produces is a hiring surge for positions that can’t be sustained, and then a cliff.

If the intervention works you’ll want to keep it, and there’s no plan to. That’s the design flaw and it was in the bill.

Knoxville, Tennessee Correspondent — Add time, measure it, and put the money where the evidence points.

The county version is that our capacity constraint is people rather than dollars. We have the federal money and we cannot hire enough certified staff at the salary the county pays, and the surrounding districts are bidding against us for the same shortage.

So the money produces a bidding war among neighboring districts for a fixed pool of teachers, which redistributes rather than adds. Nobody designed that either.

Owatonna, Minnesota Correspondent — The evidence is sufficient to act and I’d act on the youngest first.

A child who missed the year in which reading is taught is in a different position from a tenth-grader who missed a year of content. The first is a foundation and the second is a chapter, and they need different responses.

Most of the money is being spread evenly across grades because that’s administratively simpler, and it’s the wrong allocation.

Sheffield, Jamaica Correspondent — I’d repeat the point I made a year ago and note that it has aged badly.

For much of my region remote instruction was not an alternative that was chosen. It was unavailable, because there were no devices and no connection, and for a substantial number of children the past two years contained very little schooling at all.

Our losses will not be measured, because we lack the assessment infrastructure to measure them, and they will therefore not be remediated. I raise it because American policy discussion about learning loss is now well developed and the tools being built are good. Some of them would transfer. Nobody has been asked.