Learning Loss and Renewal After the Pandemic

This virtual panel will bring together experts to discuss learning loss for students during the pandemic, as well as the potential impacts of disruption on future academic achievement and economic opportunity. As part of the Project Hometown series, this panel will enrich our understanding of the strategies implemented to mitigate or pre-empt the negative impacts on students and their future educational and economic opportunities.

The goals of the session are as follows:

To understand the potential impacts of learning disruptions during the pandemic on future academic achievement and economic opportunity
To understand policy issues and responses that address these impacts
To understand the role of the community ecosystem to support learning recovery

This forum is part of Project Hometown, a Chicago Fed initiative created to better understand the challenges facing the people and communities we serve. Through these discussions, we examine how our hometowns can recover from the pandemic, overcome longstanding inequities, and grow stronger.

Robin Newberger

Policy Advisor,
Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago

Moderator

Robin Newberger is a policy advisor in the Community Development and Policy Studies Division at the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago. Her areas of interest include small business growth, financial well-being, and economic opportunity in low- and moderate-income neighborhoods. Newberger is the author of various articles on community development finance, mission-oriented financial institutions, and strategies for neighborhood revitalization. Before working at the Chicago Fed, Newberger wrote for the Economist Intelligence Unit in Quito, Ecuador. Newberger received a BA from Columbia University and a Master of Public Policy from the Harvard Kennedy School. She also holds a chartered financial analyst designation.

Betheny Gross

Research Director,
WGU Labs

Panelist

Betheny Gross is the research director at WGU Labs, an affiliate of Western Governors University. Her research has focused on the innovation and improvement of K-12 education systems. Recently, she has led studies of personalized learning initiatives, public school choice, out-of-school learning, career-connected learning, and district transformation and improvement. In the past year, she studied school districts’ response to Covid-19 and potential opportunities for innovation and change as education systems emerge from the pandemic. Over nearly 20 years in the field, she has also advised and consulted with district leaders and community partners to formulate strategy and implement reforms.

Eric Hanushek

Paul and Jean Hanna Senior Fellow,
Hoover Institution of Stanford University

Panelist

Eric Hanushek is the Paul and Jean Hanna Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution of Stanford University. He is a recognized leader in the economic analysis of education issues, and his research has had broad influence on education policy in both developed and developing countries. He is the author of numerous widely cited studies on the effects of class size reduction, school accountability, teacher effectiveness, and other topics. Hanushek was the first to research teacher effectiveness by measuring students’ learning gains, which formed the conceptual basis for using value-added measures to evaluate teachers and schools, now a widely adopted practice. His recent book, The Knowledge Capital of Nations: Education and the Economics of Growth, summarizes his research establishing the close links between countries’ long-term rates of economic growth and the skill levels of their populations. His current research analyzes why some countries’ school systems consistently perform better than others. He has written or edited 24 books along with over 250 articles. Hanushek is a distinguished graduate of the United States Air Force Academy and completed his PhD in economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Megan Kuhfeld

Senior Research Scientist,
NWEA

Panelist

Megan Kuhfeld is a senior research scientist with NWEA. She seeks to understand students’ trajectories of academic and social-emotional learning and the school and neighborhood influences that promote optimal growth. Her work covers a range of topics, including longitudinal growth modeling, achievement gaps, and summer learning loss. It has been featured in Education Week, the Los Angeles Times, the Journal of Research on Educational Effectiveness, and Applied Psychological Measurement.

Prior to joining NWEA, Kuhfeld completed a PhD in quantitative methods in education and a master’s degree in statistics from the University of California, Los Angeles. Her dissertation was funded by a grant from the American Educational Research Association, and she was the recipient of the 2017 Brenda Loyd Outstanding Dissertation Award from the National Council on Measurement in Education. She also worked at Child Trends, a nonprofit policy institute; the Population Research Center at the University of Texas at Austin; and CRESST, where she provided psychometric support to the Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium.

Ann Whalen

Policy Director,
Advance Illinois

Panelist

Ann Whalen is policy director at Advance Illinois. Prior to joining Advance Illinois, she was the associate chief of academics at Denver Public Schools, responsible for leading central academic teams. In this role, Whalen oversaw the teams responsible for academic strategy; curriculum and instruction; professional learning; accountability, assessment, and evaluation; and library services, extended learning, education technology, and competency-based learning.

Over the period 2015–17, Whalen served under Arne Duncan and John King as the acting assistant secretary in the Office of Elementary and Secondary Education at the U.S. Department of Education. At the U.S. Department of Education, Whalen also served as a special assistant in the Office of the Secretary in 2009–10 and then as the director of the Implementation and Support Unit in 2010–14. Before she joined the Obama administration, Whalen served as deputy to the chief education officer of Chicago Public Schools in 2006–09 and as the deputy director of special initiatives for the chief executive officer of Chicago Public Schools in 2003–06.