Measuring (learning) loss and what happens next
By Cricket
I’ve spent the last few weeks reading everything I could find about the recently released NAEP (National Assessment of Educational Progress) scores to try to assess the larger impact. The results, not entirely surprisingly, were unequivocally bad: scores for 9 year olds in reading and math fell by the largest margin in more than 20 years with declines spanning almost all races and income levels with the lowest-performing students’ scores dropping the most.
The immediate headlines in publications ranging from the New York Times, “The Pandemic Erased Two Decades of Progress in Reading and Math” to more niche ones like Chalkbeat, “Math and Reading Scores Plummet on National Test” were ominous. In the weeks that followed, education experts and economists continued to slice and dice the data with most concluding that it is as bad as it appears and a very few saying it’s not quite as bad.
The data indicate that on the whole kids are back to progressing at normal rates but it’s hard to know what the impact of this level of unfinished learning will be on this generation’s future. So many of the losses that children experienced, including academic losses, are incalculable, from tragic deaths of family and community members to an ensuing mental health epidemic to painful breaches of trust in our institutions to countless milestones and memories missed.
While I believe that these kinds of standardized assessments are invaluable in holding our leaders and ourselves accountable for where our children are and how they are progressing, what matters most is what happens next. So, where do we go from here? Some thoughts about what we can do now:
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We can view the losses that children suffered as our collective responsibility. As the adults in the room, we are responsible for the wellbeing of our nation’s children and accountable for what happened and what happens next. We need to feel a hopeful sense of urgency that this crisis is something we can and must address successfully.
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We can press our local school districts about their plans for addressing unfinished learning and our children’s and teachers’ mental health and wellbeing. Certain districts and states have acted quickly to implement research-based interventions like high-dosage tutoring and mental health and socio-emotional programs, while too many others have lagged behind with no real plan to do anything differently. There are interventions that are proven to work and there is funding to implement them.
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We can address the situation for the short and long-term. For the short-term, we can create space for our educators to spend time with students to figure out where they are, continually track their progress using baseline and formative assessments, and engage in thoughtful conversations with colleagues about where they need to be. For the long-term, as our Opportunity Labs founder Andrew Buher has written, we need to invest in creating a social safety net for our children woven together with quality healthcare, housing, food, employment and education. The burden cannot fall solely on our schools.