There are piles of research on just how much the COVID pandemic and its school shutdowns affected learning. The short answer is: a lot.
But there is more recent testing and other numbers to indicate that students are recovering some of the learning they lost while school was out or online. They've still got some ground to cover, and the learning losses are unevenly distributed by race and family income.
Matt Barnum, who covers education for Chalkbeat, synthesized much of the recent findings in a recent piece on the site. He stops by to go over some of the findings.