Four years after COVID-19 first hit American schools, we are—thankfully—well past the depths of the crisis. But for education, true recovery from the pandemic has been slow to come. A variety of data points—including NWEA’s MAP Growth and state, national, and international tests—show students today are still behind. With student needs still so high, schools can’t just go back to how they operated pre-pandemic.
But staying in recovery mode may also not be what our students need. It’s time to make some shifts that emphasize growth, equity, and continuous improvement. I recommend three structural changes for the new normal our students deserve:
1. Target high-dosage tutoring to academically at-risk students
High-quality, grade-level instruction will always be the best bet for most students. But even pre-pandemic, a typical 5th-grade teacher was tasked with a classroom of students who were up to seven grade levels apart from each other. COVID only expanded the amount of academic variation within schools and classrooms. Personalization has never been more important, or harder.
Fortunately, the COVID era has also seen the rise of high-dosage tutoring programs, and we’ve learned a lot about how tutoring programs can be implemented well. The research on tutoring suggests many benefits.
It’s a high-impact, cost-effective academic investment. High-dosage tutoring programs can also create a positive mentoring relationship for students, improving student confidence and engagement in learning.
2. Find other ways to add additional learning time
The shift to virtual instruction in 2020 and 2021 deprived students of in-person time with teachers, staff, and other student peers. That lost time had severe academic and socio-emotional consequences. But that lesson can also be applied the other way: Districts can help students flourish by providing them with more opportunities for face-to-face interactions.
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For example, schools and districts have helped students make big gains, especially in math, by offering intensive, short-term interventions during summer vacations and other school breaks. Programs with the strongest gains are ones that feature longer stretches of at least 20 days and where districts are able to match struggling students with the most effective teachers.
3. Address school absenteeism
Most importantly, getting students back in school must be a priority for district leaders. A plethora of research has found that attendance is a strong precursor to achievement in the short-run and of longer-term outcomes like high school graduation and college attendance.
Recent research from NWEA’s Megan Kuhfeld and colleagues at the University of Maryland and Stanford has important lessons for district leaders. They found that even partial-day attendance was strongly predictive of long-run student outcomes. Measuring behaviors like tardiness, office discipline referrals, and participation in extracurricular activities could also be relatively easy to track and potentially offer timely, actionable information about which students need additional support.
They also found that “academic behaviors” such as regular attendance were strong proxies for social-emotional skills such as self- management, self-efficacy, growth mindset, and social awareness. In other words, everything flows from having students present and ready to learn.
With the federal ESSER funding cliff approaching later this year, local education leaders must work with their state officials and policymakers to sustain the interventions that are delivering the biggest gains for students. That starts by identifying what programs or interventions are working, for which students, and at what cost. These questions have always been relevant, but they are even more urgent as schools move beyond the COVID recovery era into a new normal.
