A “teaching recovery” must take place before students can bounce back from one of the most disruptive periods in the history of U.S. education, a new study asserts.
A “crisis in the quality of classroom teaching” is the biggest barrier to providing students with the targeted support they need, according to district leaders who were guaranteed anonymity to discuss the unfinished learning with researchers from the Center on Reinventing Public Education at Arizona State University.
“The unguarded feedback is an important peek into systemic challenges that force us to evaluate our shared expectations for what kind of student recovery may—or may not—be possible,” CRPE explains in Wednesday’s “Teaching Recovery?” report. “It provides an important piece of the puzzle for why we continue to see lackluster student test scores and why school systems struggle to implement and scale targeted student supports.”
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The leaders—who represent five different school systems—also told researchers that, though “day-to-day chaos” is now ebbing, staffing shortages and teacher development snags have knocked district COVID recovery plans off-track. Administrators warned that the disruptions of the last three years have driven some teachers to fall back on “outdated and ineffective instructional practices” or to reduce the rigor of instruction below grade level. Also, teachers are continuing to exit classrooms for higher-paying jobs outside K12.
“School systems that had planned on supporting students to recover lost learning time through learning acceleration found that this approach required significantly more teacher training than systems were able to provide or teachers were willing to adopt,” the researchers wrote.
Academic recovery plans saddled educators with the difficult task of accelerating learning to get students to grade level while backfilling learning gaps caused by school closures and other disruptions. The resulting need to build—or rebuild—teachers’ core skills have scuttled tutoring programs and other academic assistance. It has also forced administrators to centralize instructional support, a process that has left leaders with less time to deliver personalized support to students who have fallen furthest behind, the report says.
A look at the routes to ‘teaching recovery’
The top piece of advice that “Teaching Recovery?” has for administrators is to seek greater support from state and federal policymakers, higher education, community advocates, service providers and other key stakeholders. The goals of this collaboration would be to build teachers’ instructional capacity and put the needed instructional materials into classrooms.
The report urges K12 leaders to lobby state policymakers to subsidize high-dosage tutoring, as many educators still believe that the approach is the best way to reverse learning loss. Superintendents and their teams should also advocate for “maximum flexibility” to increase student learning time as necessary. Finally, they can ask states to track the performance of any outside tutoring services retained by districts.
At the federal level, K12 leaders should press Congress to provide greater Title I flexibility to pay for out-of-school private tutoring or extra coursework.
“Administrators made frank assessments about the uneven day-to-day workings of their classrooms,” the report concludes. “These rare observations should spark urgent conversations in schools, communities, and policy spaces about how to provide additional help to struggling students and reverse pandemic-related learning loss.”
