A longer road ahead: what’s next for learning recovery?

By Cricket

Earlier this summer NWEA shared testing data for over 8.3 million 3rd-8th grade students in the U.S. further revealing the extent of unfinished learning due to disruptions in schooling caused by the pandemic. The results were expected: on the whole, students made gains last year, but unfinished learning due to extended amounts of time in remote learning was significant. As such, researchers predict that learning recovery for the average elementary student will take a minimum of three years and longer for middle school students, with the greatest impact on students in high-poverty schools and historically marginalized populations.

So far, learning recovery efforts, which began two years ago when districts and schools received an unprecedented amount of federal funding from the Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief Fund - 20% of which must go to addressing learning loss using evidence-based interventions - have varied in their effectiveness. States like Tennessee, where high-dosage tutoring was propped up statewide, have experienced impressive results in raising reading proficiency, while other states and districts have encountered difficult implementation challenges around staffing tutoring and extended day learning programs.

With researchers forecasting recovery outlasting the two remaining years of funding, Opportunity Labs, which has been researching unfinished learning since the spring of 2020, asked what can be done now to bolster learning recovery efforts. Here are some ideas:

1. Tools to understand and access high-quality evidence-based interventions:  Research has shown that evidence-based interventions like high-dosage tutoring are highly effective for accelerating learning, but the quality of these interventions varies dramatically. In Washington DC, a coalition of schools and community organizations created CityTutor DC to support 10,000 K-12th grade students by acting as a resource hub to identify high-quality high-impact tutoring providers and offer helpful research and tools. A clearinghouse at the national level — perhaps within What Works Clearing House - could do the same by vetting evidence-based interventions by geographic availability and curating resources at scale, saving districts and schools valuable time that might have been spent searching for quality providers and best practices.

2. Ensure districts and schools have the funding they need based on unfinished learning loss:  As more data emerges about the unique impact the pandemic had on districts across the country, additional funding should be allocated according to need. A paper published this summer by the National Bureau of Economic Research found that the longer schools were closed, the greater the impact on learning loss. To account for this finding, the Edunomics Lab created a calculator to determine the real cost of unfinished in 8,000 districts across the country. According to their calculations, many of those districts require additional funding to pay for evidence-based interventions to help students return to pre-pandemic levels. 

3. Keep the focus on the whole child, not testing: Even with high-quality, evidence-based interventions and sufficient funding, learning recovery is complicated. Researcher Yong Zhao warned about the “learning loss trap”-  the danger of focusing on standardized testing to determine need over addressing children’s actual needs, especially around their mental and socio-emotional health, and creating meaningful learning opportunities. In a recent Khan Academy survey, 57% of teachers said that students’ mental health was the biggest barrier to learning, and 78% said that “working individually with students during class” was the best way for them to identify learning gaps.