This will be my last column for 2022, so I thought it would be a good idea to review the year utilizing charts and studies most significant when it comes to telling this year’s public education story.
Yesterday, The 74 published an article that shared 14 charts designed to help us better understand COVID’s impact on 2022’s students, teachers, and schools.
The first chart demonstrates the scope of learning loss within our public schools. Even though NAEP (National Assessment of Educational Progress) math scores for 8th graders plummeted 8 points, from 282 to 274, what was interesting to me was the small incremental progress we made as a country in 8th grade math, as measured by NAEP, during this century. 8th grade math scores increased 8 points from 2000 to 2019!
The second chart shows the geography of remote learning.
“Multiple studies have identified a strong association between academic backsliding and time spent in remote learning. And while different states and districts switched back to in-person instruction at different speeds, a disturbing commonality emerged: The least-advantaged kids were usually the slowest to return to the classroom.”
Shame on us as public school educators that we weren’t able to take care of all kids, but especially those who came from least-advantaged backgrounds, when it came to teaching them reading, writing, problem-solving, and character development skills virtually.
This was a big failure – one of the biggest in 2022.
The third chart shows that poorer districts lost the most when it came to student achievement.
“In districts where 70 percent or more of students qualified for free or reduced-price lunch, average math performance fell by 0.66 grade levels. By contrast, in districts where fewer that 39 percent of students qualified for free lunch, only 0.45 grade levels of math achievement were lost.”
The fourth chart shows that enrollment fell as many families fled their public school system. Whether districts were mostly remote or mostly in person, overall enrollment declined.
The fifth chart tells us that even our youngest learners weren’t spared when it came to damage caused by COVID. It seems that “the cognitive development of young learners was slowed by the extraordinary social isolation imposed by daycare closures and lockdowns of public spaces, producing unavoidable consequences related to reading and math skills for schools in the next decade.”
The sixth chart focuses on our older kids. According to The 74 article, “Even as social and intellectual growth was apparently slowed for some infants and babies, psychologists warn that the compounded stress of the last few years may have harmfully accelerated the maturation process for older kids.”
The seventh chart addresses stressed-out teachers. “Adults in schools have shown their own signs of exhaustion. In a survey of nearly 4,000 K-12 teachers and principals conducted by the RAND Corporation, about one-third said they intended to quit their jobs, a significantly higher proportion than it found during the chaotic pandemic months of early 2021.”
The eighth chart addresses the social shuffle experienced by K-12 students. “It shouldn’t come as any surprise that young adults’ personal relationships, no less than their academic prospects, were fundamentally changed by months spent away from their peers.”
“In some ways, those changes were positive: According to a June poll released by Pew, 45 percent of American kids between the ages of 13 and 17 said they felt closer to their parents after two years of disrupted schooling. But sizable minorities also reported feeling less close to friends, classmates, teachers, and extended family, a web of social connections that might have proven vital during a lengthy period of difficulty.”
Two charts address future earning loss and the overall costs of recovery. “Based on the historical correlation between math gains on NAEP and professional earnings growth, potential income lost could reach an astounding $900 billion of future earnings.” Likewise, the costs of recovering from at least two years of COVID interruptions range between $325 billion and $930 billion, according to researchers Kenneth Shores and Matthew Steinberg.
One chart shows us that Latino students took a learning hit over the past two-plus years.
Another chart shows an explosion of absenteeism when K-12 attendance was measured.
The 13th chart demonstrates that most teachers stay with their jobs, at least up to now.
And the final chart shows that K-12 students still in our public school system are making progress, albeit small, but probably not enough to produce a epidemic of breakthrough learning.
The question on my mind, heading into 2023, is this: Can the current public school system recover from what COVID has dealt it? If so, what type of future do black, brown, and poor kids have in a system that under-performed for them prior to the pandemic? If not, what can we create to replace the traditional school system so that all young learners can define, plan, execute, and evaluate their own learning?
I’ll be away until January 2nd. Happy Holidays to all my readers, and we will talk again in 2023.
Til next year. SVB
A Better Path to Learning 
Leave a comment