Gov. Glenn Youngkin, before having fun with the hammer attack on the husband of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, tried to make the news of declining test scores for Virginia fourth- and eighth-graders part of his crusade to whitewash K-12 education in the Commonwealth.
A review by researchers at Harvard and Stanford tells the more complete story, analogizing lower test scores nationwide – yes, it wasn’t just a Virginia thing – as being “like a band of tornadoes that swept across the country.”
“Some communities were left relatively untouched, while neighboring schools were devastated,” said Thomas J. Kane, the faculty director of the Center for Education Policy Research at Harvard.
The average U.S. public school student in grades 3-8 lost the equivalent of a half-year of learning in math and a quarter of a year in reading.
But rather than rely on the aggregate numbers, the Harvard and Stanford researchers advise parents and local officials to focus on how their local schools were affected.
According to the findings of the Education Recovery Scorecard, online at educationrecoveryscorecard.org, 6 percent of students were in districts that lost more than a year of learning in math, while 3 percent were in districts where math achievement actually rose.
“One of the things we found is that even within a district, there is variability,” said Sean Reardon, a professor of poverty and inequality in Education at Stanford University. “School districts are the first line of action to help children catch up. The better they know about the patterns of learning loss, the more they’re going to be able to target their resources effectively to reduce educational inequality of opportunity and help children and communities thrive.”
The pandemic widened disparities in achievement between high and low poverty schools, the researchers said. The quarter of schools with highest shares of students receiving federal lunch subsides missed two-thirds of a year of math learning, while the quarter of schools with the fewest low-income students lost two-fifths of a year.
While many states and districts are using their portion of the $190B in federal aid to add tutoring and summer school and extended days, many of those efforts are not yet large enough to fully address the learning loss that has occurred.
Using these estimates of achievement losses along with expected effect sizes for catch-up efforts and the share of students being served by each, districts now have an opportunity to make sure their plans are commensurate with their students’ losses.
“We now see how much ground districts have to make up to get their students back on track. More than ever, we need district leaders to communicate with their communities on how they are using recovery funds to address those gaps,” said Marguerite Roza, a research professor at Georgetown University’s McCourt School of Public Policy and director of the Edunomics Lab.
The effort to address the learning loss from the pandemic needs to be multi-level.
“The whole village needs to hear the bell ringing, not just schools,” Kane said. “Mayors should organize tutoring efforts at local libraries. Community organizations should plan school vacation academies and summer learning opportunities. Governors should be funding and evaluating innovative pilots to provide models that everyone could use. We cannot wait for the spring 2023 state test results next fall to tell us that we underinvested in recovery efforts. Many are happy just to get back to normal, but normal won’t help kids catch up.”
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Chris Graham
