amna: steve vladeck and joan biskupic, thank you so much. we appreciate it. joan: thank you.mna: it's well known that there were some big gaps in student learning tied to school shutdowns during the pandemic and difficult transitions with hybrid classes. but a big question remains, how much did federal aid help students recover from those academic losses? we now have some answers from new research and jeffrey brown dives into the latest. jeffrey: a pair of new studies show that the $190 billion the federal government gave in pandemic aid for schools help students catch up academically, but big gaps remain. here to tell us about them is laura meckler, national education writer for the washington post. thank you for joining us. in general terms, first, we did see some gains, even if moderate. tell us about it. laura: yes. we did see some gains. there were deep losses from the pandemic between 2019 and 2022, and we just saw those were across the board, rich districts, poor districts, but especially poor districts saw, big, steep losses. but we did start to see some improvement b