How Far Behind Will Home Schooled Pandemic Kids Be?

Due to the COVID-19, schools had to shut their doors a while back, and that meant school work was sent home with the responsibility of making sure it get's done falling on the parents.  Some parents ended up with a lay-off or were furloughed and that gave them more time to spend with their kids providing some sort of an educational structure.  What about the parents who were home and still had to work during the day, or the parents who just flat out don't care?

I bring this up because recently my girlfriend Penny, and her 8 year old daughter moved in with me.  Her daughter is in 2nd grade and every week had school work sent home, this needed to get done while Penny had to also work from home.  The amount of school work for the week sent home would take at the most, 2.5 hours to do.  No joke, it was almost nothing.  Now, you can take that couple of hours of educational assignments and maybe stretch it out and expand on it, if you have that time and skills as a parent.

Penny has done a good job helping her through the work assigned and adding more when she can.  I find it hard to believe though, that the work being sent home is equivalent in the structure and education that a kid would receive in a traditional classroom setting.  Maybe a couple of months won't be a major impact, but if this continues or gets worse, how can we ensure that all kids are getting as equal of an education that they should be?  The short answer in my opinion is, schools will have to open again this fall or we're going to quickly have kids half a year to a year behind.