The Best of The 74

Last week The 74 online published an article focusing on 14 ideas that changed the way we looked at our schools this year. Let’s take a look at some of these ideas through the writing of The 74’s Kevin Mahnken:

“Student absenteeism is out of control – You could spend a lot of time simply tallying the aspects of student life that COVID made worse significantly diminished achievement, lower odds of graduating on time, escalating behavioral challenges, and fewer applications to college. But the most dangerous consequence might be its effects on how often children came to school.”

“According to data collected by Stanford University Professor Thomas Dee, the proportion of K-12 students who were chronically absent – i.e., who missed 10 percent or more of the school year – nearly doubled during the pandemic, vaulting from 14.8 percent in 2019 to 28.3 percent in 2022. Extrapolated across all schools, that means an additional 6.5 million kids became chronically absent following COVID. Every state Dee studies saw an increase of at least 4 percentage points, but those with higher pre-pandemic rates of absence experienced the largest jumps.”

…

“Catch-up learning hit a wall last year – But are kids (at least, the ones actually showing up) regaining the ground they lost since 2020? According to much of the testing data that emerged this year, the answer is no – or at least, nowhere near quickly enough.”

“In a July report, researchers from the nonprofit testing organization NWEA combed through nearly seven million children’s scores on the Measures of Academic Progress (MAP) assessment, which is administered both in the fall and the spring to measure how much students learn during the year. But test takers in the 2022-23 academic year made markedly less progress in key subjects than comparable elementary and middle schoolers who sat for the exam before the pandemic, with growth in reading and math falling by as much as 19 percent and 15 percent, respectively. Only third-graders exceeded the pre-COVID learning averages.”

…

“Virtual tutoring can work – Thankfully, states and districts aren’t sitting on their hands in the face of learning loss. Supported by billions of dollars of federal funds, many have invested heavily in tutoring programs that promise to help struggling children overcome the challenges imposed by past school closures and virtual instruction. The question is whether those efforts work for enough students to justify their cost – and according to data generated by the National Student Support Accelerator, a Stanford initiative devoted to studying the effects of tutoring, there is reason for hope.”

“In October, the Accelerator circulated a paper showing impressive results from OnYourMark, a fully virtual program provided to developing readers. The study found that among 1,000 students enrolled in Texas charter schools, participating in OnYourMark resulted in kindergartners gaining the equivalent of 26 extra days of learning in letter sounds the first graders receiving 55 additional days of sound decoding. The news is particularly encouraging in that it shows a path to success for virtual tutoring, which has often been shown to be far less effective than in-person instruction.”

…

“Grade inflation got worse during the pandemic – As the chaotic transition to online learning got underway in 2020, schools had to decide how they would judge the work of students cut off from their teachers and classmates. Many opted for more lenient policies, including eliminating F grades and granting credit for late or incomplete work, out of a desire to avoid more punitive measures during a crisis.”

“It’s difficult to chart the average impact of the shift across thousands of school districts, but the Center for Analysis of Longitudinal Data in Education Research (CALDER) recently released a brief focusing on a decade of students records in Washington State. The picture was stark: While the average middle and high school GPA for math rose by 0.11 points between 2011 and 2019, it got a boost three times that size – one-third of a GPA point, or about the difference between a C+ and a B- – between 2019 and 2021.”

…

“Choice might be good for public schools – The explosive growth of school vouchers and education savings accounts, which allow families to spend public funds on private education, has dominated the school choice debate this year. Public school choice (i.e., charters and open enrollment policies), while also controversial, has receded somewhat from conversation.”

“But a working paper released this summer indicated that, in addition to providing more instructional options to families that want them, intra-choice can improve learning throughout wider communities. University of Chicago economist Christopher Campos and data scientist Caitlin Kearns scrutinized Los Angeles’s Zones of Choice initiative, which allows families within designated neighborhoods to select among multiple high schools rather than send their children to the one nearest their home. Participation in the program, they learned, significantly increase students’ English exam scores and boosts their enrollment rate at four-year colleges by 25 percent. Those gains were concentrated among schools exposed to the most competition and those that previously performed the worst, strongly hinting that inclusion in the Zones pushed them to hold onto students by improving their offerings.”

…

“Charters aren’t underperforming anymore – Charter schools have been around for over 30 years. For most of that time, their advocates and detractors have argued passionately over just how effective they really are at improving academic achievement. The primary arbiter of those disputes, most often, has been Stanford’s Center for Research on Education Outcomes (CREDO), which has released a series of studies over more than a decade comparing the performance of charter students with those enrolled at district public schools.”

“In the first few editions, those reported showed the newer schools lagging behind their traditional counterparts – evidence that the sector’s opponents’ cited frequently throughout the fierce school reform battles of the Obama era. But the latest iteration – CREDO’s first national evaluation in a decade, including data on 1.8 million students across 31 states and cities – calculated that charter students receive the equivalent of 16 extra days of learning in literacy, and six extra days of math, than students at the local public schools they would have otherwise attended. The edge, while decidedly slight, masks larger variation among subgroups: Black students gained an average of 35 extra days of reading growth and 29 extra days of math, equal to more than a month of supplemental instruction.”

So, kids aren’t coming to school, young learners are still struggling to “catch up,” virtual tutoring can help kids learn, we’re still giving out better grades than kids deserve, traditional schools need to cozy up to “choices” when it comes to the individual learner, and charters are evening their performance compared to their traditional competition.

All of this is good news I guess, but there are still millions of kids that need a different learning system in this country.

Maybe that happens, or continues to happen, in 2024?

I’ll be gone until January 3^rd. Here’s wishing all readers of ABPTL happy holidays! SVB