Hello and welcome to another episode of the weeds. I'm your host Dylan Matthews and today we are bringing you an episode of a totally different show called today explained some of you may have heard of it.

Our colleagues that today explained recently reported on a new study about pandemic learning loss.

The study is from the Center for Education Policy at Harvard and is one of the most expansive looks at learning loss to date. They use data from over 2 million students across 10,000 elementary and middle schools.

The today explained team has been reporting on COVID in schools for months and they've been checking in with one particular school, Kramer Hill Elementary and Camden New Jersey.

You can find more episodes in the series on Kramer Hill at Vox.com slash today explained.

Lately a lot of the talk about schools in the United States has been about school shootings because of what happened in Yvalde, Texas a few weeks ago, but it is June, which means something a lot more hopeful is happening at schools across the country.

Let's green heart is green graduates give them a hand. Today explained has spent the last school year checking in with an elementary school in Camden, New Jersey.

Today we go to graduation at Kramer Hill Elementary.

As you get older, it doesn't get easier in terms of things being less uncertain. Rather uncertainty gets more and more frequent in your life.

And what I want you guys to do is make sure that as you go to high school and the rest of your life, you look at uncertainty and take it as an opportunity to try your best.

Previously on today explains.

I've been dealing with helping kids get back on track after a year plus of quote unquote remote learning, but now they're all back.

They've been back for weeks, so it felt like a good time to ask how that experiments going.

So we sent today explains Miles Bryan back to school.

Yeah, I went to Kramer Hill Elementary school. It's in Camden, New Jersey, just across the river from where I live in Philly. And a couple of fast facts. It's a K through eight school. So it has kids ages, you know, five to 13 to 14.

The school has about 800 kids and more than 90% of them are black and Latino. Most of their families are living under the poverty line.

So when you talk about kids that are at the biggest risk of learning loss during COVID, these kids are in that group.

So ever since last August, I've been checking in on the school and specifically on the eighth grade class and the eighth grade class.

Perhaps the most important because those are the kids who are going to be graduating.

Yeah, I was interested in them because they had to make this huge transition right from middle school to high school, which is always really important.

And often really hard for kids, but this group of kids, you know, hadn't been in the classroom consistently together since like the sixth grade.

So they had this even bigger challenge than normal. And it wasn't just you who was concerned about those kids.

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