When President-elect Trump left office in early 2021, the pandemic was at its height. Now he returns as American children and schools are struggling to overcome its lingering impact.

Learning loss and chronic absenteeism are proving to be stubborn problems, and education experts say Trump is currently more focused on culture war issues than raising test scores.

“The first question is, do they want to deal with it at all? Do they have any interest at all in using the power of the U.S. Department of Education to actually improve schools? Or are they only interested in pursuing, you know, an expansion of school choice, a weaponization of Title IX and the expansion of culture war nonsense,” said Morgan Scott Polikoff, a professor of education policy as the University of Southern California.

Despite the fact that schools have been fully open for years now, students have not been able to rebound completely from the closures and remote learning they experienced in 2020 and 2021.

Research from the nonprofit NWEA over the summer showed students going into high school are still a full year behind academically. The data showed that in almost all grades, test score gaps had widened compared to pre-pandemic numbers by an average of 18 percent in math and 36 percent in reading.

It would take,........

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