COVID learning loss is becoming clearer: Students in one state, North Dakota, slipped notably in English and math proficiency compared to scores recorded pre-pandemic.
The number of students scoring “proficient” or “advanced” in ELA in spring 2021 was 42%, a 5-point drop from state assessments given before the COVID outbreak in grades three through eight, and in 10th grade.
In math, proficiency scores fell seven points to 38% on tests that were canceled in 2020 due to the pandemic.
“This decline is significant, and it presents a challenge to all of us as educators in North Dakota,” State School Superintendent Kirsten Baesler said in releasing the results. “Fortunately, our schools have been provided unprecedented resources to use in reversing these trends. We have experienced significant loss, and we now are presented with an opportunity to make a significant comeback.”
But in-person instruction has been holding steady in most districts in most parts of the country. This has allowed administrators and their teams of educators to become laser-focused on helping students recover from 18 months of stress and unfinished learning.
‘Emphasis on acceleration’
While the initial rounds of COVID relief were spent on technology and COVID prevention, the bulk of ESSER III funds are being devoted to student success—academic and social-emotional—and advancing teachers’ skills, says administrators in several states.
“All of the ESSER III funding has been put toward student learning, with an emphasis on acceleration as opposed to unfinished learning,” says Timothy M. McInnis, assistant superintendent of the Hancock Place School District in St. Louis. “Instead of focusing on everything they’ve missed—instead of a drill-and-skill approach—it’s about moving students forward so they pick things up along the way.”
One of the district’s first moves was to hire 12 new certified teachers and two more guidance counselors. The latter decision was made as administrators realized students basic social-emotional needs had to be addressed before diving into academic recovery and higher-order thinking skills, McInnis says.
Some of the district’s students have struggled this fall to reacclimate to the regular routines and procedures of school. During the first few weeks of school, teachers were encouraged to focus initially on developing relationships with their students to assess how the children are faring emotionally.
After some professional development over the summer, teachers have also been fully integrating social-emotional concepts into the core curriculum. “That’s everything from student choice when it comes to the projects they’re working on to relevance in that students are seeing themselves in the lessons and understanding how the learning applies to them in fun and powerful ways,” McInnis says.
New staff will allow for “smaller-than-ever” class sizes so teachers can work one-on-one with students to provide high-dosage, personalized instruction and tutoring, he adds. Administrators and teachers have also been focused on zeroing in on the most essential “power standards” that students need to successfully progress through school.
At the elementary level, that means reading, writing and phonemic awareness and comprehension. In the upper grades, the focus turns to math skills, problem-solving, and mastery. “We know students from low-income backgrounds and students of color were more likely to experience remediation as their primary education modality during COVID,” he says. “That, coupled with no social-emotional learning, would be a recipe for disaster.”
Teaching the ‘priorities of the priorities’
Learning loss is crossing socioeconomic lines in Idaho’s largest system, the West Ada School District, Superintendent Derek Bub says.
“It really depends on the home environment,” Bub says. “If a student’s mom and dad are medical providers and weren’t home, the student had to manage their own learning for the last year and a half, and that’s really difficult.”
Before this school year, Bub and his team developed 10-week instructional plans, with cycles of assessment, to better monitor progress and respond to achievement gaps with a highly personalized approach for each student.
Part of that plan is focusing on ensuring students master the most essential standards—or the “priorities of the priorities”—needed for progressing to the next course and grade level, Chief Academic Officer Marcus Meyers adds.
This requires high-leverage teaching practices like small group instruction. “When closing big gaps, students should learn everything the first time in effective core instruction,” Myers says. “The numbers are showing that we can’t always intervene. We have to shore up core instruction and then look at intervention and enrichment.”
Teachers are conducting a series of short assessments to get instant feedback on students’ acquisition of the priority standards. “It’s a matter of not wanting to wait until the end-of-year standard assessment to be able to change instruction based on what students need, and with that comes a level of urgency.”
The data generated by frequent assessments also better allows educators to be transparent about the interventions needed for each student. This, in turn, keeps students informed about how they are progressing. The district is shifting students’ mindset from assessment for grading to assessment for learning.
“This is an assessment that helps us coach your learning better so students know where they’re at, so they know how to articulate what they need, so they know how to seek help,” Myers says. “Testing is not meant to be punitive, it’s not meant to be a hammer—it’s meant to be a coaching tool.”
But the challenges of COVID have not been without some victories—in fact, Bub says, the last 18 months have also been a period of substantial growth and schools will look different because of it. “We weren’t 1-to1-1, and we quickly pivoted. We were struggling with the implementation of technology, and now it’s second nature,” he says. “We’re going to be better educationally. We’re going to produce better kids.”
