For more than a year, news headlines have chronicled a staggering drop in student test scores, particularly in math. The pattern has been consistent across states. In Massachusetts, 37,000 more kids need substantial academic support in math this year, compared to pre-pandemic times.

To put that in perspective, if we put those children in a single school district, it would be the second-largest district in the state.

Inequity in academic achievement has spiked alongside Covid case counts. Students from low-income families, Black and Latino students, and those who were already struggling academically prior to the pandemic have tended to suffer the most. As a result, a recent analysis suggests that students in majority-Black schools are now a full year behind in math compared to their peers in majority-white schools.

Tangled up in the daily knot of bad news, reports of these worrisome trends are easy to wave away. Won’t students bounce back once schools get back to normal? Do tests measure anything meaningful in the first place?

Unfortunately, as we showed in a recent paper, test results do matter in a very practical sense. Students who fall behind academically are very likely to remain behind — and elementary school test scores are a strong predictor of meeting future milestones like high school graduation. Those correlations hold even when we account for factors like race and socioeconomic background.

Further down the road, this means that ever more Black and Latino students will be shut out from the high-paying STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Math) careers that will make up a growing share of the job market. Meanwhile, their white and more affluent peers, whose achievement suffered far less during the pandemic, will gain further advantage.

Why? Too few historically marginalized students will be ready to tackle the gateway topics for technology: advanced math and science classes like trigonometry, physics, statistics and precalculus. They’ll be less prepared to do well in college STEM courses and less hirable by tech companies upon graduation. Google is not going to hire coders who cannot code.

Read the full article about learning loss by Tim Daly and Dan Goldhaber at The Hechinger Report.