![]() ![]() Extending the school year may be logistically easier than, say, hiring and scheduling hundreds of new tutors.īut that doesn't mean extending the school year is easy. They already have the bus routes," Kane explains. Kane says districts should also consider making up for missed learning by adding more days to the school calendar. "We don't want to remediate," Contreras says emphatically. Multiple superintendents, including Contreras, emphasized that the purpose of these tutoring efforts was not to look backward, over old material, but to support students as they move forward through new concepts. "So hiring graduate assistants was a very intentional effort to make sure our students saw themselves, but also to introduce those graduate assistants to the teaching profession." "We want to continue to grow the number of Black and brown teachers in the district," Contreras says. And it's our obligation now, whether or not we agreed with those decisions, to pay that bill. "Rather, we should think of it as a bill for a public health measure that was taken on our behalf. "That student achievement declined is not a surprise," Kane says. Kane says he hopes that, instead of relitigating districts' choices to stay remote, politicians and educators can use this data as a call to action. The report says, "as long as schools were in-person throughout 2020-21, there was no widening of math achievement gaps between high-, middle-, and low-poverty schools." On the other hand, in the quarter of states where overall use of remote instruction was the lowest, including Texas, Florida and a host of rural states, the report says, high-poverty schools were still more likely to be remote "but the differences were small: 3 weeks remote in high poverty schools versus 1 week remote in low poverty schools." Kane and his fellow researchers found that learning gaps were most pronounced in states with higher rates of remote instruction overall.įor example, in the quarter of states where students spent the most time learning remotely, including California, Illinois, Kentucky and Virginia, "high-poverty schools spent an additional nine weeks in remote instruction (more than two months) than low-poverty schools," the report says. ![]() Thomas Kane, Center for Education Policy Research We should think of it as a bill for a public health measure that was taken on our behalf. We know we have learning loss, so how are we going to address it?" "Like our board, they don't even use those words. 'You know, we have learning loss,' " says Sheila Walker, a parent in Northern California. "It would mean so much for parents if somebody would acknowledge it. Some parents who saw their kids struggle while trying to learn remotely believe "learning loss" fits - because it captures the urgency they now feel to make up for what was lost. "We try not to say 'learning loss,' because if they didn't learn it, they didn't lose it," explains Ebony Lee, an assistant superintendent in Clayton County, Ga. Kane is part of a collaborative of researchers at Harvard, the American Institutes for Research, Dartmouth College and the school-testing nonprofit NWEA, who set out to measure just how much learning students missed during the pandemic.Īnd notice we're saying "missed," not "lost," because the problem is that when schools went remote, kids simply did not learn as much or as well as they would have in person. Much of that missed learning, Kane says, was likely a hangover from spring 2020, when nearly all schools were remote and remote instruction was at its worst. We try not to say 'learning loss,' because if they didn't learn it, they didn't lose it.Įbony Lee, an assistant superintendent in Clayton County, Ga. Most schools had little to no experience with remote instruction when the pandemic began they lacked teacher training, appropriate software, laptops, universal internet access and, in many cases, students lacked stability and a supportive adult at home to help.Įven students who spent the least amount of time learning remotely during the 2020-21 school year - just a month or less - missed the equivalent of seven to 10 weeks of math learning, says Thomas Kane of the Center for Education Policy Research at Harvard University. Surprise! Students learned less when they were remote Now, as a third pandemic school year draws to a close, new research offers the clearest accounting yet of the crisis's academic toll - as well as reason to hope that schools can help. How did the pandemic disrupt learning for America's more than 50 million K-12 students?įor two years, that question has felt immeasurable, like a phantom, though few educators doubted the shadow it cast over children who spent months struggling to learn online. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |