Pandemic Learning Losses (Part 1)

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Thank you for joining us this week for Family Policy Matters. It's the end of another school year and a good time to analyze student performance from last year. After much speculation about the possibility of student learning losses through the pandemic, we're finally starting to have hard data so we can analyze where North Carolina students stand academically in light of the dramatic school changes they experienced since the spring of 2020. Well, to talk with us about that today, we are welcoming Dr. Terry Stoops, director of the Center for Effective Education at the John Locke Foundation here in North Carolina. He is also co-founder of Carolina Charter Academy in Anjure, North Carolina, and serves on the North Carolina Charter School Advisory Board. Dr. Terry Stoops, welcome back to Family Policy Matters.

Thank you so much for having me. Well, so far, North Carolina's Department of Public Instruction has released two reports that look at student learning and achievement through the pandemic. So what exactly did they measure?

Sure. And we'll start with the first report that took student test scores and compared them based on the growth that students were projected to have versus what they actually did have on state tests. It's important to know that North Carolina uses growth as one of the measures of student performance. And that's how we can determine students are behind by comparing where they should be based on their past performance on state tests and where they are.

And what we found was not surprising, but still really, really shocking. And I'll talk about the first report first, because this was a report that looked at statewide performance on state standardized tests. And these mainly focused on the math, reading and science tests that were required by the federal government to administer each year. And this first study found that students had fallen behind in every subject, in every grade, with the exception of English II. This is the high school English course. And you might think, well, what happened in English II that students are actually where they should be academically? Researchers have no idea. We might hear the Office of Learning, Recovery and Acceleration, the main entity that's conducting these studies, an explanation about why English II was spared. But we at this point have no idea why English II students are performing where they should be despite the closure of schools. And that really was the overriding factor of why students are not performing where they should be, is that when you close schools and you went to online learning, that learning was not the quality that it needed to be in order to make sure that students were where they should be in their academic achievement. It's also worth noting that this first study found that across every student subgroup, there were learning losses. And this is important to note because there was an expectation among some people that our advanced students, the academically and intellectually gifted students, were not going to have any learning loss. These were students that typically have a lot of support from home, that have a lot of natural talent, and many believe that because of that, then they would be shielded from the learning loss that we encountered with all of these other students.

But that wasn't the case. Even our gifted and talented students experienced learning loss, albeit at rates that were lower than some other groups like our low-income, our special needs, and our low-performing students. Those groups struggled as we predicted they would, but the students that were academically and intellectually gifted struggled just as much as the typical North Carolina student.

A few other takeaways that I think are worth noting. The first is between male and female students. There was an expectation that male students were going to be hit harder, that male students really needed that social interaction, as all students do, to be successful in class. But the test scores didn't bear that out. In fact, we found that female students had a greater amount of learning loss than male students did. Of course, we are still trying to understand why that is, but I think it's very concerning that female students who have traditionally outperformed male students had fallen behind at greater rates than their male counterparts during the pandemic. Now, we may wonder just how big were these learning losses.

The initial report, the first report that was published, put it in effect sizes, and that's something that us social scientists really like to do is to use effect sizes because they allow us to use the same metric across different groups. But the second report, published by the Department of Public Instruction and their Office of Learning, Recovery, and Acceleration, is the real startling report because it translated these effect sizes into months of learning. So now we actually know how many months of learning students are behind in English and math. And I'll start with the good news first, is that in English, there are some grades, third grade, fifth grade students, where the learning loss only amounts to a couple months.

And I think the thinking is that we will be able to catch up those few months of learning loss throughout the subsequent school years without having to provide any additional or special services to students. In other grades in English language arts, such as fourth grade and seventh grade, it's closer to seven months learning. So this is really where we start to see some serious learning losses when students are seven months behind in a ten month school year. That is almost three quarters of a school year.

So we have to really keep our eye on our English language arts instruction, especially in elementary and middle school. But math is devastating when you look at how many months behind students are. In fifth grade, seven months. In sixth grade, ten months. In seventh grade, eleven and a half months.

In eighth grade, almost fifteen months. And math one, which is usually ninth grade students, it's fifteen and a quarter months behind in learning. Now, here's what's really scary about that math one figure, is that math one forms the basis for all high school math that a student will have to take in later years. Meaning that those high school teachers will have to go back and reteach a lot of the things students should have learned in math one. The other problem is that when we're talking about high school math, this is the math that students need to really master for them to be successful in math and the sciences and in business and all of those math intensive subjects in college.

So I think that in a few years, we're going to have a brand new crisis. We know that learning loss occurred at great extent in grades K-12. But we are going to have students entering our colleges and universities that are way far behind in math and perhaps less so in English that will require remedial work to the extent that we've never had to provide students remedial work in our community colleges and our universities. And this is going to be something that I don't think is a state we've really thought much about because right now, most of our focuses on dealing with learning loss are on the K-12 education system and rightfully so. But we're going to have to think seriously about what we do about students being grossly underprepared for college level instruction in English and in math. So you jumped right to the colleges are going to have to provide remedial. Has there been any discussion about we're going to extend the number of years that students are in high school or anything like that?

That is really the question we need to be asking. And we need to be thinking about creative approaches to dealing with the learning loss. There's a great deal of empirical research that tells us the one thing, the one tried and tested way to address learning loss is something called high dosage or intensive tutoring.

It's a very simple concept. Small groups of students receiving tutoring services in small groups from a very experienced, very capable teacher either after class or after school or during the summer. It has to be intensive and sustained and it has to be delivered by a high quality instructor. We know that this is the way to address learning loss, but unfortunately, we are not seeing a whole lot of movement in the public education system to implementing this high dosage or intensive tutoring, despite the fact that our public schools are sitting on billions with a B in federal coronavirus relief funding that they could use to contract with retired teachers, the nonprofit or private sector, or perhaps teachers that would be willing to take on additional duties to be able to provide the intensive tutoring, especially in math, that our students are going to need in order to be successful after they graduate. Instead, a lot of this federal money has been used for teacher bonuses and teacher raises for those that are already in the classroom. These are usually across the board raises and across the board bonuses, rather than the kind of targeted interventions that are required to make sure our students are caught up. Okay, so this billions of dollars in federal COVID funding, you said we're sitting on it. Who's we?

Who's sitting on it? The school boards and the General Assembly, but mostly it's the school boards because one of the philosophies and this actually wasn't an objectionable philosophy from the Biden administration is that school districts understand best how the money should be spent. And so school boards have a tremendous amount of money at their disposal. Some larger school boards like Wake County, it's hundreds of millions of dollars, and some smaller school districts, mostly in rural communities. It's in the $10 million, $20 million range that is unspent, and they don't have to spend the money immediately. They can spend the money anytime between now and 2024 and perhaps even further out if that money isn't spent by the deadline that's been set by the federal government. And there's almost no restrictions on how school boards can use the money. So if they found that they needed to replace a ventilation system, they can use the money for that.

There's almost no restriction. Now I'm all for local control. I believe that the closer you get to the child, the better able you are to make decisions on what that child needs. But a school district understands that or should understand that we are not going to get learning loss addressed in any other way than their ability to use the money that they have right now to address student learning loss through intensive or high dosage tutoring.

And the science on this is settled. I think that it's an approach that any school board that is thinking seriously about learning loss as a problem should be considering, and yet I find startlingly few districts even talking about learning loss, let alone starting to implement tutoring programs to address it. You've been listening to Family Policy Matters. This has been part one of a two part show with Dr. Terry Stoops, director of the Center for Effective Education at the John Locke Foundation. We hope you enjoyed this program and plan to tune in again next week for part two. To listen to the show online and for more information about NC Family, visit our website at ncfamily.org. That's ncfamily.org. Thanks so much for listening and may God bless you and your family.