I don’t have an opinion on this, and it obviously varies from place to place. It seems to be accepted that Covid caused many months of academic delay even if online learning eas used. Am curious to hear, especially from teachers, what they think about this, or this article. In Ontario, one candidate has proposed temporarily adding an extra year of high school - is this needed, or wise? I have no idea.
(Move to Covid forum if more apropos).
Math prof at a fairly competitive US liberal-arts college here: Subjectively, I think we did see quite a dip in academic skills and preparedness in the 2020-2021 academic year, bleeding into 2021-'22. I don’t know how much of that was just stress and burnout and how much was students really not having learned large chunks of what we usually expect them to have learned.
Maybe I’m just an optimistic fool, but it feels to me like students (well, our students) are currently recovering from whatever that was, and confidence and performance levels are up.
My kid’s elementary school released some numbers last week. These are just a few numbers for one school in a reasonably well funded district, so be cautious extrapolating to the wider population.
At the start of the school year (2021/2022) only 47% of the kids were reading at grade level, but by the end of the current school year 81% of kids were reading at grade level.
Also “median progress toward typical growth was 148%,” which means kids made on average 1.5 years of growth in one school year.
This year has also been completely in person, while the 2019/2020 school year ended remote, and 2020/2021 started remote, then was in person, then was back remote, then finally ended in person.
When I was a kid, I read a lot, including non-fiction, and sometimes even including science textbooks, while having serious problems paying attention in class. I don’t know if my grades would get me into your college, but I don’t think COVID would have much hurt my education.
However, for kids who aren’t yet at the point where they can learn by reading, or can do it but resist, it seems a big setback. If you can’t read material for your own age, I would expect a lot of giving up. That’s the real issue. Will there be a cohort with lower college completion? I’m thinking yes.
And the COVID lost year would have been a real setback for me in the one subject I recall not being able to pick up from reading the textbook, that being math.
“Behind” is a really weird word, and it doesn’t get parsed nearly enough. So let’s parse it.
What this means is that there are nationally normed multiple-choice tests that measure the ability of children to answer MC questions accurately. Children who have experienced significant trauma, or who have missed a significant number of days of school, have always performed worse on these tests.
Guess what.
Kids missed a ton of school as we desperately tried to keep grandma alive. Kids experienced horrendous levels of trauma–not just a few kids each year, but the majority of kids.
We don’t have the same population of high-attendance, low-trauma kids that we usually have.
We should not be using the same tests.
This year in education has been an abject failure, inasmuch as we decided as a society to return to business as normal instead of working with the kids we have in the ways that they need. It’s led to terrible test scores, horrifying behaviors, and massive nationwide educator burnout.
Our most intense response to the crisis has been to ban books, stigmatize LGBT kids, accuse teachers of stealth CRT in the classrooms, and freak out at school board meetings over Satanic mask mandates.
I’m not super psyched about the way the question is phrased.
Your idea of what they need may have a different emphasis from mine (become lifelong learners with skills needed to succeed in modern workplaces, and even on a board like this).
But, if there is anything to my idea of what struggling students need from school, these two stories seem positive:
In a seismic shift, NYC to mandate elementary schools use phonics-based curriculum
I am open to alternate phrases.
Standard tests purport to measure, say, math or reading comprehension. Assume they do this adequately. There may be a drop in scores for many reasons including trauma, volume of material covered, online being less effective or engaging than in-person teaching, mood changes, time without teaching, size of group taught, yada yada.
Is there not still a drop in scores? Reasonable under the circumstances. But you either read at a certain level or you don’t. Changing tests would not change this?
There have been some extreme reactions to be sure but these do not seem typical. In Canada at least.
On the contrary, we definitely should. I agree that we shouldn’t be using the results of those same tests to determine arbitrarily who are the “good” students or who is “slow” or “underperforming”, because the most vulnerable students have taken some real hits on those metrics unrelated to their abilities.
But we absolutely should be using the same tests to compare pre- and post-shutdown results so we can understand how education was impacted by the pandemic crisis and what additional support is needed now.
Which AFAICT is exactly what the OP’s linked article is describing and recommending.
I don’t think the primary purpose of public education is to create a good workforce. Rather, it’s to help folks gain the skills and affect and knowledge they need to follow the path they want, while contributing to a society that helps others follow the path they want. Slightly different emphasis: for some folks, workplace success will be what they want as adults, but not for everyone.
The Lucy Calkins story is definitely good. I’ve been a big Calkins hater for years, considering her curriculum to be an excellent curriculum for middle-aged well-educated middle-class women, and for those who aspire to become as such, but not particularly suited for anyone else. Better yet will be when Calkins’s curriculum is in the dustbin.
But a heavily phonics-based curriculum does have a problem: kids who do read fluently often can’t stand it. Having taught a phonics-heavy curriculum for years, I well know the kids who were like, “I’m already a good speller and can read well, can’t I do something else?” and I’m like, “Hush now, everybody together, A-Apple-Augh!”
As with every other damn thing in education, differentiation is key.
Its been a really rough year. For me, its been difficult to parse what is skill loss and what is more the dramatic shift in attitudes. I teach at a highly intense academic magnet. More than anything, the kids came back with a profound lack of focus and stamina. Among other things, online education intensified an already terrible tendency to approach education as a strictly transactional process: I turn in the papers, you give me the grades. Online education turned learning into a series of impersonal assignments to be burned through as quickly as possible, or opted out of.
In 20 years, this was the first year I had significant numbers of kids who didn’t complete classwork. They would just sit there. They min-maxxed everything. They studied less, because it wasn’t a direct grade. They seemed less stressed out than previous years . . . But also less ambitious. They didn’t interact in class discussions, and it was a struggle to get them to work in groups. Often, I felt I was still teaching to a screen.
Writint skills didn’t seem to take a hit–they wrote a lot from home–but stamina really did. They struggled to sit and write for 45 minutes at a stretch, and would only prodice half of what I would normally expect. But what they wrote was “normal”.
Behavior was also bad. I had seniors, and they were mostly fine, but my friends with freshmen and sophomores found them to be positively feral. The freshmen acted like literal 7th graders. So there was more time spent on classroom management than typical.
And, to be fair, teachers also really struggled with stamina and focus. We had to remember how to teach, too.
It did get much, much better over the course of the year. I have high hopes for next year. But yes, at the end of the day, it was hard to tell how much was being “behind” and how much was that they had fogotten how to be students.
If the tests were good in the first place, maybe we should be using the same ones. But the tests have always been terrible, under the best of circumstances; and in this year of recovery from the pandemic, they’ve completely messed up our priorities and blinded us to what we should be doing. Doubtless the dire results from this year’s test will lead to a lot of hand-wringing over exactly the wrong things.
My teacher friends have been reassuring parents since the start that schools are prepared, with plans in place to catch up, everyone up over a 1 yr period. The year they move up into is being reshaped slightly to catch and fill the gaps in what they learned.
I would assume all schools are attempting to do something similar.
Thank you for addressing this. I’ve asked this question from the beginning: “Behind what?”. This will certainly lead to ‘solutions’ worse then the problem. And yeah, the time with students out of school could have been used for improvements in curricula instead of spreading fear and loathing of knowledge.
This whole idea is bananas. What are we doing now, to pack 18 months of learning into 10 months, that we haven’t been doing all along? Are we going to continue doing it in the future, so that all time in school is magically almost doubled in efficacy? How are we going to somehow get kids emerging from (or in the midst of) deep global trauma to learn better than past kids who didn’t experience that trauma?
There’s overwhelming pressure on schools to claim they can do this, but it ain’t possible.
If you’re in the Indy 500 and your car experiences a wipeout, and your pit crew promises you that after half an hour of work they’re gonna soup your car up so you’ll not only get back in the race but you’ll catch up to your previous position, aren’t you gonna ask them why they didn’t soup your car up like that in the first place?
Your pit crew is fooling you.
In a weird twist, the low-attendance, high-trauma kids adjusted to the pandemic year pretty well. Of course, this is because they’d already fallen through the cracks in the system and so were largely unaffected when those same cracks just grew much, much bigger.
So you get (broad-brushing it) three groups of kids:
It’s that third group which got royally fucked by the pandemic year. Maybe their single-income family become a zero-income family. Maybe virtual education meant not getting the tutoring they needed to keep their head above water in a particular course. Maybe a year in isolation exacerbated social interaction issues or mental health problems.
A lot of those kids, especially the younger ones, are never going to get their footing again without serious intervention services. The slope here is heartrendingly slippery.
The best move would’ve been to call the 2020-21 year a complete wash and start fresh in the 2021-22 year with an emphasis on the types of social-emotional witchcraft that Florida is now banning altogether.
Sheesh, they won’t be reteaching everything! They will work to identify where individual students have gaps and work to fill them. Not something a homeschooler might be capable of perhaps, but teachers can and do this very thing, on a much smaller scale routinely.
Children are very resilient, they’ll be fine. Yknow, if their parents stop freaking out and let the teachers do what they do best.
Pretty sure we are the teachers, here.
Its not that simple. Its not like once they got back in school, the pandemic was over and we could go back to how things were. The range of abilities is far wider than usual, and the causes far more complex. And there are on-going issues with instruction.
You are wildly underestimating the issues caused by the pandemic, the timeframes needed to address those issues, and the resources that teachers possess to address them.
“Resilience” is word that encompasses a variety of learned skills, strategies, and traits. What do you think happened to the resilience of at-risk or potentially at-risk children during a year of virtual education and social isolation?
I saw something once from a woman that grew up during the Balkan wars. Years of her school age life were spent in the middle of war time. She said that her and her peers ended up just fine as adults, education wise at least. The last couple of years have been very challenging and we need to be as supportive as possible to our kids and give them every chance to succeed, but this is hardly the only time, or the worst time, that education was affected by real world problems.
ETA: I work in education and come from a family of teachers. Not stating this to imply my opinion means anything because of that, but I’m not exactly out of touch either.
Yes, again, the OP’s linked article does address this issue in some detail, although with some skepticism.