Similar trends were observed in a study focusing on Connecticut and Rhode Island, where absences for English learners increased by 4 percent. Just as striking, data from Florida showed that Spanish-speaking students at schools that were more exposed to heightened immigration enforcement experienced both lower academic achievement and fewer disciplinary incidents.
It is an assessment largely shared by the equally prominent University of Virginia researcher James Wyckoff, who released his own paper looking at similar trends earlier in the year. That study asserts that the roots of learning loss began even earlier than is typically assumed, in the years spanning the Bush-Obama transition, and notes an abundance of potential explanations (including smartphones, Great Recession-related school funding cuts, and the implementation of Common Core standards).