Reading the Nation's Report Card, from the Dispatch

 

 I have cut and paste this here; I am not making money here, but this is vital, and scary.  We are already seeing these results with Fall 2022's freshmen class.  What will happen moving forward? How can we maintain college-level learning?

Teaching from home during the COVID-19 pandemic. (Photo by Olivier Douliery / AFP via Getty Images.)

There are plenty of time-honored ways to deal with a bad report card. “Forget” it in your locker, bury it deep in your book bag—tear it up and eat it if you’re really desperate. But no amount of deception would be enough to hide the lousy grades America’s schools got this week from the National Assessment of Education Progress (NAEP).

The NAEP tests a representative sample of 4th and 8th-grade students on reading and math skills to determine how their learning compares to past students at that age. Scores were already slipping before the pandemic, but in the latest round—administered this spring—about a third of students didn’t meet the lowest reading benchmark, and math performance saw its steepest decline since the NAEP’s first tests were administered in 1990. The details of the drops vary by age, ethnicity, and other categories, but virtually every measure shows losses.

“I want to be very clear: The results in today’s nation’s report card are appalling and unacceptable,” Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona said Monday. “This is a moment of truth for education. How we respond to this will determine not only our recovery but our nation’s standing in the world.”

Researchers consider 10 points on the NAEP to represent about a school year of learning.  “In NAEP, when we experience a 1- or 2-point decline, we’re talking about it as a significant impact on a student’s achievement,” NAEP commissioner Peggy Carr told the Associated Press. “In math, we experienced an 8-point decline.”

To be clear, that doesn’t mean the students tested forgot math they’d already learned—it’s a measure of how far behind they are compared to previous students at their age.

The scores show the havoc wreaked on kids’ learning by abrupt transitions to online learning—and the several semesters of disruption that followed. But although research has established that the students who stayed in remote school the longest typically saw the biggest losses, the NAEP results don’t fit that pattern—California, where schools tended to stay shut longer, didn’t score much differently than eager-to-open Florida.

Even setting the remote vs. in-person debate aside, these NAEP results underline what we already knew—a lot of America’s kids aren’t where they should be academically, and it’s going to take concerted intervention to help them close the gap. The stakes are high: Students could be dealing with the consequences of these learning losses for years to come if schools don’t succeed, since children who read poorly in elementary school are more likely to drop out of high school, for example, while the eighth graders who took the assessment last spring are now in a critical time to prepare for college.

“I don’t want to sugarcoat it,” Michael Petrilli, president of the education reform-focused Thomas B. Fordham Institute, told The Dispatch. “There is a very high risk that—probably especially for the older kids that have gone through this—that there are going to be gaps in their education that just never get filled.”

We haven’t seen districts holding kids back or requiring them to retake classes en masse, which Petrilli argues might be necessary to truly fill in the gaps. But public and private schools have launched programs aimed at making up for lost time, largely funded by the $190 billion in federal COVID relief. A review published yesterday by The 74 Million, a digital media outlet covering education, found that one in three large, urban public school districts in the U.S. plan to use all four of the most evidence-supported catch-up strategies: tutoring, extra learning time, small group instruction, and using data to target interventions. Exact statistics are hard to come by, but according to the data collection firm Burbio, 93 percent of the nation’s school districts offered summer programs this year, and Georgetown University’s FutureEd think tank estimated in May that schools had spent a collective $3.1 billion on after-school and summer programs.

But these programs aren’t magic bullets. Districts have struggled to hire enough tutors or convince teachers to work through their summer break on expanded summer school programs. Officials in Madison, Wisconsin, for example, had to disenroll about 700 students who signed up for summer programs due to “unanticipated staffing challenges.” The pandemic widened learning gaps between low and high-income students—wealthier families were more likely to have equipment suitable for online learning and have better access to private tutoring and other aids. But even attempts to target remediation to higher-need students have hit roadblocks: New Hampshire created a tutoring fund specifically for low-income students, but expanded it to all students after receiving limited signups.

Low remediation uptake may be partly due to parents not realizing that their kids—still passing classes, advancing to the next grade—have these learning gaps. In a poll by Education Next, 43 percent of parents said their children had experienced no learning loss, and only 9 percent were “very” or “somewhat” concerned their child wouldn’t ever catch up.

“The worry is that there’s going to be a whole cohort of kids who are going to move through the system and never be caught up … if we go back to just doing the same thing that we’ve always done,” Petrilli said. “And unfortunately, with our education system, that is usually a good bet.”