Education Week - October 2, 2024 - 5

WHAT THE
RESEARCH SAYS
Students Fell Behind During the Pandemic. Who Stayed Behind?
By Brooke Schultz
Although schools have made up some pandemic-related
learning loss, not enough students are receiving the
support they need-and the federal dollars helping fund
that support may dissipate before the most vulnerable are
caught up.
That's according to a report released Tuesday from
the Center on Reinventing Public Education, a research
organization at Arizona State University's Mary Lou Fulton
Teachers College.
" The bottom line for us was: This is not over, " said Robin
Lake, the director of the Center on Reinventing Public
Education, during a press call. " It's not a thing of the past
and it's probably not going to be for some time. "
The center has followed recovery efforts for three years,
taking stock on how American students are faring following
the height of the pandemic. This year, researchers dug into
special populations-students with special needs, English
learners, and homeless students-to see how the most
vulnerable students are recovering.
When the researchers looked at different data points
from across the country of the various hurdles facing
K-12 education-like chronic absenteeism and staffing
challenges-there was a disproportionate impact on those
students " across the board, " said Lake.
The pandemic " just showed that those students were
already in academic settings that weren't necessarily
maximizing their talents and providing the opportunities
that those students need, " said Eric Duncan, the director of
P-12 policy for EdTrust. The equitable education advocacy
organization was not involved in the center's report.
" It makes sense that you would see, unfortunately, larger
gaps in terms of academic progress and recovery overall for
populations that have been vulnerable and underserved for
many decades in our education system, " he said.
And there's a litany of " gale-force headwinds " that are
prohibiting the system from making forward progress, the
report says: Teacher morale is low, there are significant
mental health concerns for students, federal funds will
soon no longer support recovery efforts, and there's a lack
of transparency from both districts and states about how
students are doing academically.
" When we started doing this report, we thought it would
be five years of reporting. We're starting to believe that
recovery is going to take a lot longer than that, that COVID
may have left an indelible mark to some degree, especially
if we don't shift course, " Lake said.
Here are some key takeaways from the report.
Academic recovery is slowly happening, but students
who were already behind are now further behind
There are glimmers of good news in an admittedly
" depressing " report, Lake said. Proven recovery efforts are
at work, like tutoring and extended learning time.
The average student has recovered roughly a third of
their learning losses in math and a quarter in reading, the
report finds.
But recovery is happening slowly, which means older
students with less time to go in the K-12 system will
graduate at a disadvantage, and there are widening gaps for
younger students.
The students who were already behind, however, are
falling even further behind, with the chasms between the
lowest- and highest-achieving students only widening,
according to the report. Students from low-income districts
are making noticeably slower recovery.
In districts with low poverty rates, students have made
a full recovery in reading and gained further ground, but
districts with higher rates of poverty have " languished, " the
report indicates.
English learners continued to score lower than prepandemic
averages on English-proficiency assessments.
For students in every grade level that took the WIDA Access
test, which is used in 41 states and the District of Columbia,
last year's scores were the lowest since 2018.
The achievement gaps for students based on race,
income, disability status, and English-language proficiency
took additional academic hits since the pandemic, Lake
said.
" It's shocking they could go lower than they already were
and alarming when we don't see them popping back up to
where they already were, " she said.
There has been a surge in special education referrals
In the 2022-23 academic year, 7.5 million students
received services under the Individuals with Disabilities
Education Act. There's been a marked increase in the last
two years in students being identified as needing special
education services, with more referrals for students
entering kindergarten with academic and social struggles,
according to the report.
The number of special education students dipped slightly
during the pandemic-which researchers say was likely
a result of underidentification. With rates increasing,
it's a question of: Are educators just catching up, or is
overidentification now happening, particularly for the
" COVID babies " -students who didn't have access to
preschool and normal socialization, Lake said.
" Are they being funneled into special education as a
solution, or do they really have a disability that needs to
be addressed in special ed.? Is special ed. equipped to deal
with this influx? What are the funding implications and the
staffing implications here? " she said. " What we know is
that educators on the ground are saying in the early grades,
there's more going on than just low test scores. There's a
lot of behavior stuff happening and a lot of kids who are
getting flagged when they wouldn't necessarily have been
[before]. "
Older students are catching up, but younger students
are falling behind or holding steady with below historical
trends in reading or math, the report states. The widening
disparities for younger students become more nuanced
when layering race and income status.
There's a lack of transparent student-performance data
The first step is for policymakers to admit there's a
problem, Lake said.
" We don't seem to be there yet, " she said.
Few states are transparently sharing data about
academic recovery, according to the report. Just seven
states make it easy to see longitudinal performance data.
Sixteen states made it " all but impossible " to find and
track longitudinal performance trends. Even further,
many state websites were " borderline unusable-even
for education policy experts and researchers, " the report
says.
One of the most significant hurdles for addressing
academic recovery-students' presence in schools-also
hasn't seen much discussion from politicians. According to
the report, in 38 gubernatorial state of the state speeches in
2024, there wasn't much focus on chronic absenteeism.
But even on a local level, there's a lack of communication
about how students are faring, the report finds. Parents are
" getting a misleadingly rosy picture from report cards, "
it says, and don't know when their children have fallen
behind.
An elementary teacher delivers a lesson in Spanish
in a dual-language immersion class. A report found
that vulnerable students bear the brunt of slow
academic-recovery gains.
" We heard story after story about parents feeling like
they weren't getting the communication that they wanted
to have from schools, " Lake said.
One parent told researchers that at the end of the school
year, the school said their child wasn't ready to graduate
" 'cause apparently he had two Fs, and I didn't know until
we were in the process of graduation. "
There are ways to address the issues
Federal funding dollars-about $200 billion-did
help, Lake said, but not enough. Two studies found
that ESSER funding did " move the needle of student
achievement. "
But " if money is not geared toward the things that we
know work, it won't make a difference, " Lake said.
" It's going to be a tricky time, in the course of the next
few years-the needs are not going away, but many of the
dollars are, especially at the federal level, " she said.
Districts have until the end of this month to commit
all their funds from the latest round of federal aid. They
have another several months to spend that money-
transferring it from a district account to a vendor or
employee by Jan. 31, 2025, for work completed before
October 2024.
At the local level, though, the report urges schools to
prioritize relationships between families and educators.
It also urges schools to " tear down the walls " -examine
how they identify students with disabilities and abandon
" flawed and outdated approaches " in their processes. It
encourages schools to avoid pitting tutoring against special
education services and pullout services against academic
instruction.
Ensuring tutoring and small-group sessions are a regular
part of education is also essential, the report says. Schools
should also help students plan for after graduation, through
exposure to career options via credits and credentials they
can gain before graduating from high school.
The EdTrust's Duncan said promising movement
has been seen from strategic investments born from
the pandemic-recovery efforts- " things that vulnerable
student populations haven't historically had equitable
access to, " he said. That includes high-dosage tutoring and
academic enrichment, plus other social-emotional and
developmental programming.
" That's what we're hoping to build off of in the next few
years, " he said.
From academic recovery to student mental health, teachers and education leaders are grappling with big questions and challenges. This research column aims to help readers understand what the research
says-and doesn't say-about the current context for learning and learning in general.
EDUCATION WEEK | October 2, 2024 | www.edweek.org | 5
Allison Shelley for All4Ed

http://www.edweek.org

Education Week - October 2, 2024

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