After the coronavirus pandemic rocked America’s education system, interrupting learning for millions of children, a new report offers a glimmer of hope: By the end of last school year, many students had found a rhythm normal school growth. for the first time since the start of the pandemic.
Yet the pace was not fast enough to compensate for the heavy pandemic-related losses.
At this rate, elementary students may need at least three years to catch up to where they would have been had the pandemic not happened, and middle school students may need five years or more, depending on the report released Tuesday by NWEA, a nonprofit that provides academic assessments to schools. The researchers looked at the math and reading assessment scores of more than eight million students in about 25,000 schools. The report did not examine secondary schools.
“I don’t want to lose sight that this is something to celebrate,” said NWEA senior researcher Karyn Lewis.
“However – and this is a big though – we still have unfinished learning,” she said. “It’s going to take above-average growth to get us out of this hole.”
The federal government has made its biggest ever one-time investment in American schools — about $190 billion — to support pandemic recovery. But the latest estimates suggest many students may still need help long after the money runs out. School districts must allocate the last of their funds by September 2024.
Recovery is expected to take the longest for groups hardest hit by the pandemic, including low-income college students and Black, Hispanic, and Native American students. Research has found extended remote learning to be a key driver of lost learning, widening racial and economic gaps during the pandemic. Very poor schools tended to spend more time learning remotely, as did black and Hispanic students.
“There would be profound consequences if we allowed these success losses to become permanent,” said Thomas Kane, a Harvard economist who has sounded the alarm about the scale of the intervention needed.
By his calculation, students in very poor schools who stayed away for more than half of the 2020-21 school year lost the equivalent of 22 weeks of education.
Yet many common interventions lack the firepower to close a gap of this size.
For example, summer school usually brings around five weeks of gain, he estimated. Another popular option, doubling math instruction over an entire school year, can yield a bit more: up to 10 weeks of instructional time.
Even frequent one-to-one tutoring in small groups – considered one of the best options, albeit the most expensive – cannot on its own offset the worst of the impact of the pandemic. Dr. Kane estimated that when done well over the course of a school year, tutoring can yield the equivalent of around 19 weeks saved.
It is unlikely that every student who needs help will receive all of these interventions. Even with an influx of federal funds, there is often not enough money to give all students the comprehensive support they need.
Many places had to be strategic.
Tennessee has gone all out on tutoring, using federal funds to launch an extensive statewide program that is used by more than half of the state’s school districts. About 150,000 elementary and middle school students receive tutoring through the program, about 15 percent of all students in the state.
At North Clinton Elementary School in Clinton, Tennessee, where more than 90 percent of students are considered low-income, that means targeting students who are close to grade-level reading.
For 45 minutes each school day, these “bubble” students head to a staff room or the school library office and work closely with a teacher or assistant. At ratios of no more than three students per tutor, they practice more difficult aspects of reading comprehension, such as how to summarize a reading passage or infer what a character may have been thinking.
The results were promising: By the end of the school year, about 50 percent of North Clinton students participating in the state’s program became “on track” for their grades, state officials said. school.
“It’s going to change the trajectory for students,” said school district assistant principal Jamie Jordan.
Yet other students are even further behind. They meet in their own tutoring groups, which are not supported by the state program.
For many of the most vulnerable students, the stakes of this moment are enormous.
Low-income students and Black, Hispanic, and Indigenous students have entered the pandemic behind their more advantaged peers and Asian and white students, in part because of disparities that begin early in childhood. With fewer resources and a lack of access to early education, many children are already behind by the time they start kindergarten, a gap that can persist throughout their school years.
The pandemic has only exacerbated these gaps.
For example, fifth-grade white students have historically performed above the national average on math assessments; like other students, they have seen a decline during the pandemic, according to the report. But the drop – seven percentile points, from the 64th to the 57th percentile – still leaves them above the national average.
Hispanic students, on the other hand, saw a larger drop in recent assessments — a drop of 10 percentile points from the 44th to 34th percentile — and were left out further.
“To assume that all students in all schools are equal once everything is over would be wrong,” said Cassandra R. Davis, assistant professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, who has studied the impact of disasters. like hurricanes and floods in marginalized schools.
After other disasters, she has seen wealthier communities recover, but low-income communities often receive less support. “Their recovery time is much longer,” she said.
There are also indications that middle school students struggle more than elementary school students.
For example, from last spring to this spring, seventh graders showed only modest improvements in reading and no change in math, according to the report. Eighth graders continued to lose ground in math, the only age group in the report to do so.
Kym LeBlanc-Esparza, assistant superintendent of Jefferson County, Colorado, said she’s seen a similar trend among middle schoolers in her school district, which serves about 78,000 Denver-area students. The gap has been particularly persistent in mathematics.
Dr. LeBlanc-Esparza believes the difference is due, in part, to changes in the program as students age. Although parents may have been able to help students in their elementary years, students often need more direct instruction as they begin advanced concepts, such as fractions, decimals, and percents.
“Most parents don’t feel as comfortable delving into this the same way they do around the alphabet and phonics and teaching kids colors,” said said Dr. LeBlanc-Esparza.
About 34% of students in her school district are considered low-income, and over the past three years, she said, the educational gap between low-income students and students who don’t live in the poverty has increased from year to year.
In the race to catch up, his district is training teachers — and even community volunteers — to serve as tutors.
“It creates an incredible sense of urgency,” Dr. LeBlanc-Esparza said. “It tells us as educators that we have a moral imperative to look at this data and do something differently.”