Catching Up Our Kids

A group of American Enterprise Institutute’s researchers recently released the Return to Learn Tracker, a way for traditional districts to estimate the level of student learning loss in their schools.

According to The 74, “Back when districts wrote their ESSER plans (the federal government’s COVID relief initiative,) most didn’t have the information we have today. Many didn’t know yet how different types of students fared with remote or hybrid learning and thus crafting plans to remedy those losses was a struggle.”

“But new studies are filling in the holes. We now know that closing schools in response to the COVID-19 pandemic harmed students academically. A recent paper for the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) demonstrates that the longer the schools stayed closed or operated in a hybrid model the bigger the losses, especially for Black and Hispanic students, those in poverty, or those who were behind grade level to start with.”

“It may be obvious, but disadvantaged students who learned less will need more help going forward.”

The four AEI researchers, Marguerite Roza, Katherine Silberstein, Aashish Dhammani, and Chad Aldeman go on to write, “For example, Seattle Public Schools was fully remote for three-quarters of the 2020-21 school year. Given the makeup of its student body, the available research would estimate that the average district student lost an average of 17 weeks of learning in math and 10 weeks in reading. Some lost more; some lost less.”

“Our calculator also compares the estimated learning losses with how much money a district would need to spend to remedy them. We used available research on the effect sizes of tutoring (a high-impact investment) to estimate those costs. Based on our calculations, Seattle leaders would need to invest approximately $105 million to address the learning losses in their community.”

“Fortunately, Congress has provided school districts with three round of federal relief funds totaling $190 million. In the last round, Congress directed districts to spend at least 20 percent of their funds to address student learning loss. In Seattle, the third round of relief funds totaled $93 million; that’s money the district can use to help get students back on track – if spent effectively.”

I’ll admit I was one of those skeptics during 2020 when it came to learning loss. I thought it was a ploy by traditional districts to get their students back in school. I thought districts wanted kids back in schools for two reasons – their current teachers were more comfortable with classroom teaching and learning and district leadership feared the backlash from parents when they started to see what was coming home in terms of “out of school” learning. Although I’m still suspicious because of the reasons I shared above, I now believe kids lost learning because they lost learning time.

And that is what bothers me about this new Return to Learn Tracker – all of this “tracking” is based on an old Madeline Hunter phrase – “time on task.” All these money and tutoring approximations are built on what schools currently depend on, something called “incremental learning.” The entire system is built on “incremental learning” these days – curriculum guides, scopes and sequences, pacing guides, testing calendars. All of it.

But that’s not how I, or I’m guessing you, experienced learning. Learning doesn’t happen by “increment,” measured by 45-minute teaching periods, 6-week evaluation periods, 9-month academic years. Instead, learning happens by “breakthroughs.” If you’ve ever taught, you know what I mean by “breakthrough” learning. Kids will struggle, struggle, and continue to struggle. They will fail a six-weeks test, and then the next week demonstrate knowledge and skills on the same objectives they struggled with the week before. Young learners don’t learn through “increments.” Instead, they learn by demonstrating “breakthrough” learning, and that is something the traditional system is not set up to support.

It will be interesting to see how districts use this new “tracking’ tool. I’m guessing districts won’t be able to set up programming to help those kids behind catch up. Tutoring is a favored strategy when it is individual and specific. School districts don’t do “individual and specific” well. I hate to be a cynic, but I’ve seen this movie before. The feds offer up a large pot of money to states and districts to “fix” a problem, and those states and districts use some of the money to attempt success, but the final answer is unspent funds and disappointing academic results.

The numbers are all wrong. Districts are built to serve large numbers, when everyone knows that small groups are required to catch kids up when they have fallen behind. But districts don’t know how to do “small,” so the real solution – an individualized learning plan for all kids behind – will continue to be an elusive goal for the traditionalists.

We will see. Til tomorrow. SVB