Focus on educational foundations post pandemic
Students have lost a lot of ground, so let’s not experiment before they regain it
Reopening schools and resuming regular K-12 in-school education in September 2020 will compel us to confront the reality that students, out of school for nearly half a year, will be significantly behind in their expected intellectual growth and social development.
That is why it is surprising to hear that influential Ontario educators see the massive school disruption as an opportunity to reimagine education. “Never let a crisis go to waste” is a popular adage that seems to apply to the recent cloud burst of rosy visions for a post-COVID-19 education.
Moving ahead in the COVID-19 era, Pamela Osmond-Johnson, Carol Campbell, and Katrina Pollock recently claimed, will involve building upon its lessons and tapping into a global vision for a better education world. Coming out of a maelstrom of “illness, grief and trauma,” they believe that “Mazlow before Bloom“must be “the guid- ing principle moving forward.”
Instead of focusing on rectifying student learning loss, educators are being counselled to pursue a “better normal’ — to seize upon the flashes of creativity, champion well-being, expand project-based learning experimentation and seek a permanent cessation of standardized student assessment.
In this new path forward, there is no mention whatsoever of the costs of the great disruption in terms of student learning and achievement. Nor is there much of an acknowledgment that students living in poverty as well as those with severe learning challenges and complex needs will likely bear the brunt of the fallout from the suspension of regular, in-person, K-12 education
Some 60 million students in Canada and the United States have been out-of-school during the COVID-19 pandemic, including 2 million in Ontario. It’s now becoming clear that a sizable proportion of those students missed out on, or were minimally engaged in, the alternative Learn at Home programs.
While student attendance and participation rates are not readily accessible in Canada, the evidence surfacing in dozens of American states is that student attendance has been highly irregular, and as many as 25 per cent of all students rarely or never checked-in with their teachers. Leading researcher Andrew Rotherham of Bellwether Education reports that anywhere from 7 million to 12 million students have received “no formal schooling” because of the uneven implementation of “in-between” programs, as well as inequities in device and internet access.
The Portland, Oregon-based, North West Education Association has already produced some sobering forecasts, based upon statistical analysis, demonstrating the potential “learning loss” during the shutdown. Their COVID-19 slide estimates suggest students will return in fall 2020 with 63 to 68 per cent of the learning gains in reading and less than 50 per cent of the learning gains in mathematics — and nearly a year behind in some grades — compared to a regular school year. One caveat is that, unlike the summer holidays, there was some distance learning provided, likely offsetting some of the projected losses.
That study builds upon earlier Brookings Institute studies examining the impact of “summer learning loss’ on student achievement.
Education ministers and superintendents will soon be wrestling with the fallout affecting students and families, including how to approach instruction in the fall of 2020 when most students will be farther behind than in a typical year.
That learning slide will also aggravate educational inequalities, compounding the problem facing classroom educators
Without reliable Canadian research to guide us, developing a student learning recovery plan may end up being largely a matter of guesswork and fall, by default, to regular classroom teachers to figure it out on their own
Here, too, education policy-makers will have to look to the United States for evidence-based recovery plans. The NWEA research team recommends four remedial strategies:
Conduct initial diagnostic student assessments to ascertain where to start your instruction;
Address the greater variability in academic skills with strategies providing differentiated instruction to meet the learning needs of all students;
Develop student “catch-up” learning growth plans to get backon-track with goals that are more ambitious than usual and yet obtainable.
Engaging everyone in “operation catch-up” is emerging as the new priority. Instead of rhapsodizing about a post-coronavirus burst of creativity, let’s focus on shoring up the educational foundations with sound educational recovery plans. Paul W. Bennett is research director, at the Schoolhouse Institute, Halifax, N.S., and national co-ordinator of ResearchEd Canada. His next book, “The State of the System: A Reality Check on Canada’s Schools” will appear in September 2020.