Our youngest students need their classrooms

Do what it takes — shut the churches, shut the bars. Don't shut the elementary schools.

Starting next week, all junior high and high school classes will abruptly pivot again to online school in response to surging COVID-19 case counts.

Elementary schools are open, for now.

That's a very good thing, because after months of worry and guesses, officials finally have the first hard data on just how badly emergency online school went last spring.

Some kids did great.

Many did not, and the youngest ones really struggled.

In one University of Alberta study, still under academic review, students in grades 2 and 3 were on average six to eight months behind in reading by the time they got back in September.

In a newly published Swiss study, primary school students learned German and math on average half as fast online compared to before.

In that study, many young students actually learned nothing or went backward, while others — likely those with skilled parent tutors — surged ahead.

It's what officials expected, and what Alberta teachers have been warning about.

Emergency online school is different than choice — when those parents who have time, computers and internet get to decide to keep their children home. When there is no choice, those students who most need the desks, physical presence of a teacher and structure of school will suffer.

George Georgiou, professor of educational psychology at the University of Alberta, was fortunate to have access to a perfect sample group when the lockdown hit. For four years, he's been working with 25 schools in Leduc, Elk Island, Edmonton and Fort Vermilion to measure and support student literacy through standardized tests three times a year.

Before the March 2020 lockdown, he had tests from 4,000 students in each grade from Grade 2 to Grade 9, covering the full range of student ability.

When students took the same tests in September 2020, students from Grade 4 and older had generally improved their reading ability. But students Grade 3 and younger suffered. They were the ones reading roughly six to eight months behind.

Separate from that, Georgiou was running an Alberta Education-funded research project with 1,560 Grade 1 students from 84 classes.

They were tested in September 2019 and January 2020, when 540 of them were flagged as struggling readers. They were supposed to get in-person help learning letters and sounding out words like c-a-t and h-a-t. Then schools went online and that program ended.

When researchers finally got access to schools again in September, they tracked down 409 of those struggling students, now in Grade 2. Eighty per cent of them still didn't know the sounds of the letters and more than half scored worse than they did in January. That compares to 20 per cent who would still struggle in a normal year with reading intervention.

“If they don't get immediate support to bypass their reading difficulties, they will experience reading difficulties later in their life,” said Georgiou in an interview. “And reading is the basis for every academic domain. You can't do well in mathematics if you can't read the problems. You can't do well in writing if you don't know how to read.”

Georgiou submitted a research paper to the Reading League Journal. It is under review.

The findings match what educators expected — that elementary students who can't yet read or follow online independently are particularly hard hit by emergency shutdowns. Other researchers are starting to see that, too.

In Switzerland, Martin Tomasik, science director at the University of Zurich's Institute for Education Evaluation, had computer-based testing data for 28,685 public school students. He was able to compare the eight weeks schools were abruptly online to the eight weeks previous for learning in math and German.

Like Georgiou, he found that for students under 12 years old, the pace of learning dropped by half and the gap between advanced and lagging students widened considerably. Online learning did not affect tests for the older grades, where a large achievement gap was already present. His paper is posted on the professional network Research Gate.

“If you just look at education, our study clearly says you should avoid school closures,” he said in an interview.

“If you have to do this, it is only justified to close schools for the older children who have sufficient self-regulated learning capacity, who are independent from their parents and can regulate their education on their own.

“Younger children cannot. They are the most at risk to suffer from school closures.”

Daily new COVID-19 case rates make it clear why junior high and high school classes are moving online. The rate among that population is the same for adults, double that of the younger children, although those rates have increased rapidly, too.

Let's hope this new emergency pivot goes better for the older students. It won't be easy, and it's one of a string of new restrictions many physicians and infectious disease specialists don't believe will be enough — not with bars, restaurants, casinos, churches, mosques and other social gathering places still open.

That would mean weeks and weeks of virtual class as Alberta baby steps into a progressively stricter lockdown.

If they don't get immediate support to bypass their reading difficulties, they will experience reading difficulties later in ... life.