The Best of The 74

The 74 online just released their top 2023 articles. Over the next two weeks, eight of those articles will be presented here, with commentary added.

Back in April, Margaret Raymond, the founder and director of the Center for Research on Education Outcomes (CREDO) at Stanford University, warned us of a terrible truth – that what traditional schools thought to be cures to learning loss were doomed to fail. Raymond writes,

“Most of the program school districts have implemented to address COVID learning loss are doomed to fail. Despite well-intended and rapid responses, solutions such as tutoring or summer school will miss their goals. Existing policies have failed to consider the unique needs of the students these services seek to help, and thus are destined to waste vast sums of relief funding in pursuit of an impossible goal.”

“How do we know this? Recent research form our team at the Center for Research on Education Outcomes (CREDO) at Stanford University looked at learning patterns in 16 states to see how recovery efforts will affect students’ academic careers.”

“Our partnerships with state education departments provide the means to examine the experience of anonymous individual students as they move through public schools. Their scores on standardized state tests reveal what they know at the end of each school year and how that knowledge changes over time. This level of insight is both wide (covering all tested students in each state) and deep (the data illuminate students’ learning histories).”

“The COVID-19 pandemic has only magnified existing learning disparities. If an average student typically gains a year’s worth of knowledge in a year’s time, then those with greater-than-average learning progress more quickly. Conversely, those who do not learn as much as the average student gain less than what’s expected. Reviewing this data over multiple years yields a picture of the Pace of Learning (POL) for individual students.”

“The differences in POL are the missing factor in policy decisions about post-COVID efforts.”

“Our research assumes that the pre-pandemic pace of learning for individual students is the best that can be expected in the post-COVID years. Using longitudinal student data, we calculated each student’s historical POL and, based on those measures, projected outcomes under different learning loss scenarios. Here, we assume students have lost an average of 90 days of learning due to COVID-19, which other research has corroborated. We then considered the effects of additional time, measured in extra years of schooling.”

[With no additional years added to their learning, 63.6% of those students who have lost an average of 90 days of school time will meet 12^th grade reading benchmarks, with 62.5% meeting math benchmarks. For those students adding up to 3 additional years to their learning, 71.1% of students losing 90 days of school time will meet 12^th grade reading benchmarks, while 70.2% will meet math expectations. Adding 5 years to their learning, 74.6% of students will meet 12^th grade reading expectations while 73.9% will meet math benchmarks.]

“These findings reveal a lot about the future students face. Those who will reach the 12^th grade benchmark on time have POLs that are strong enough to keep them on track. They are not the ones to worry about. It is the students with smaller POLs who require the most attention and support. Currently, for every day of instruction, they gain less than a full day of learning. Even a full year of additional schooling may have little impact for them. Programs of shorter duration are even less likely to produce their desire aims.”

“Current remedies are insufficient to solve the learning gaps for low-POL students. High-dosage tutoring, for example, consists of four to six hours a week of extra learning time. For average learners, that leads to an increase of about eight percentile points on state achievement tests. But because students with low POLs receive less benefit from every hour or day of instruction offered, they will not progress to the same degree as the average student. At the end of the school year, the total number of hours cannot produce the sustained impacts needed for the low-POL population. Moreover, a large number of studies have found that the benefits from tutoring do not survive into the future for any students. Summer camps offer even less cause for optimism: They provide lower dosages, and for a shorter time.”

“Ultimately, the accounting does not add up.”

“Still, against these discouraging findings, there are promising options for addressing learning recovery. One is to allow students to progress at their own pace toward established benchmarks rather than holding everyone to a fixed timeline of learning. Shifting to a master-based approach, rather than maintaining the current system of organizing students by grade level, could achieve this. As long as students continue to progress and demonstrate growth, their schooling could continue. High achievers could reach the benchmarks faster than is usually allowed and move on to more advanced goals. Releasing students from the traditional school year would free up resources that could be devoted to helping lower-POL students.”

“Another option would be to change the pace of learning only for students with slower rates of progress. Children need higher-quality instruction to realize greater learning gains, and the evidence is clear that the best teachers get better results than average educators. Making sure each classroom has excellent instruction should be the ultimate goal.”

…

Raymond presents two excellent ideas on how to effectively catch young learners up from their deficits. The problem is a large percentage of traditional school districts can’t do either.

Most schools are married to the idea of an 8-hour day and a 9-month school year. Even if they wanted to deviate from these time schedules, and backlash from their community would probably be too much for them to take. So, asking schools to find flexibility inside their instructional day and year is like whistling Dixie.

Pairing great teachers with lower-POL learners has proven an impossible task for most traditional school districts. First, most districts don’t have enough great teachers to go around. Second, getting great teachers to commit to working with lower-POL learners has proven difficult. Finally, this type of pairing takes coordination that, frankly, most of our public school districts don’t possess.

In order to do what Raymond suggests here, it’s going to take getting lower-POL learners the hell out of our traditional school system. The only chance lower-POL learners have is to leave the traditional school system and link into a high-performing learning pod or microschool, led by a well-trained and well-compensated learning coach. That opportunity would give the low-POL learner a solid opportunity to catch up, and maybe even surpass reading, writing, problem-solving, and character development expectations.

Til tomorrow. SVB