BATTLES ON THE FRONT LINES
9 months in, virus’s impact on education starts to show
Colleen Brasacchio said she already sees the ripple effects of remote instruction in her kids’ education.
As the mother of a third grader, a first grader and a preschooler in the Mt. Lebanon School District, she said she can tell the impact it has had on their reading, their writing and even in their will to learn.
“They don’t want to go to school right now,” Ms. Brasacchio said last week in a phone interview. “They don’t feel like they’re learning, they don’t want to participate. They want to be in school with their friends, with their teachers, where professionals are engaging them.”
During the past nine months, the COVID-19 pandemic has forced K-12 schools nationwide to dramatically shift how they deliver education to students. While some have returned to full-time inperson instruction, many more have instituted hybrid or remote learning models, where students are in their classrooms for part of theweek or not at all.
Experts believe the rapid changes in instruction will be felt well into the future; just how much of an effect the pandemic will have on education may not be known for years. But researchers have started looking into how COVID-19 has disrupted student learning so far.
The Northwest Evaluation Association, a Portland, Ore.-based nonprofit organization that conducts education assessments nationwide, released a report this month that showed the pandemic’s impact on learning has beenmixed.
The research analyzed data from nearly 4.4 million U.S. childrenin third through eighth grade who took reading and math assessment tests in the fall to determine how they were faring in
three categories: student performance this fall relative to a regular school year; academic growth since schools physically closed in March; and fall test scores compared to the projections made in April by the association.
The research showed that compared to the fall of 2019, student achievement this fall was about the same in reading, on average, but 5% to 10% lower in math. Most students grew in reading and math since the start of the pandemic, but growth in math was lower than what would be anticipated in a typical year.
“Reading doesn’t seem to be as badly impacted as we expected, and students are performing on par with a more typical year,” Karyn Lewis, a senior research scientist with NWEA who coauthored the report, said last week in a video interview. “Math is not so rosy. Here, we’re seeing students entering fall with lower achievement than their peers in a prior year and are making less gains than their peers.”
The difference in results, she said, could be because math is a more sequential subject than reading.
“If you’ve missed steps A and B, then it can be harder once you’re thrown into steps C, D and E,” Ms. Lewis said. “Reading, on the other hand, is a little bit more of a natural progression. It might be something that — if you consider the role of families supporting students during the pandemic — the grownups at home feel maybe a little bit more confident in directing and supporting reading than they do math.”
Students scored better in reading on average than NWEA research in the spring projected they would. In math, though, student achievement in fall 2020 was in line with projections for fourth though sixth grades and slightly above in grades sevenand eight.
The researchers give credit to teachers for the more positive outcomes.
“We wholeheartedly attribute this to the really heroic efforts of teachers and schools who had to undertake the Herculean effort of pivoting to remote instruction and figuring out new and innovate ways to teach students and continue instruction even when they don’t have the students in the classroom like they’re used to,” Ms.L ewis said.
Though it does show some differences by racial and ethnic groups, the report said it is too early to draw definitive conclusions. While the research pool is vast, the report cautions that certain demographics may be under represented in the data.
Student groups hit hardest by the pandemic — students of color, special needs students and English language learners — were more likely to be missing from the data, according to NWEA. That could be because students in those groups are harder to reach and may not have
participated in the assessments.
The report also does not break down the results between instruction models, so differences in how students are faring when they are in school versus when they are remoteremains unknown.
But the remote instruction model in particular has a growing number of parents and educators worried because the classroom experience cannot be replicated at home. And the longer students are removed from schools, the more concern there is about learning loss and social and emotional health.
Many of the largest school districts in the country have been fully remote for much of theyear.
The Pittsburgh Public Schools, Western Pennsylvania’s largest district, will be remote at least into January. The district attempted to bring select students back to class starting in the first week of November, but the surging number of COVID-19 cases in the region quickly stopped those efforts.
Though the board voted unanimously over the summer to start the school year fully remote, the will of some board members has since changed. Board member Veronica Edwards has said that the district needs to find a way to get students who are underachieving back into the classroom.
A coalition of more than 70 groupsand individuals called the Pittsburgh Learning Collaborative last week offered the district assistance in getting into a position to restart in-person instruction. The group said it could rally the region toward lowering COVID-19 transmission rates, push for the community to take the virus vaccine and help with other issues such as ensuring that schools have the necessary bandwidth for all students to use devices in class.
Like the Pittsburgh Public Schools, the Mt. Lebanon School District has been fully remote for much of the year. Last week, however, the district’s board approved a plan for hybrid instruction to start for elementary students on Jan. 11 and secondary student son Jan. 21.
The district had previously been following guidelines from the state departments of health and education that recommended schools in counties with a COVID-19 incidence rate of more than 100 cases per 100,000 residents or a positivity rate of greater than 10% go fully remote.
Susan Uffelman, one of the leaders of a Mt. Lebanon parents group that had been lobbying the school board and district administration to reopen for at least some face-toface instruction, said the education
that students were receiving was inadequate.
She said her son, Andrew, a senior at Mt. Lebanon High School, is not as interested in his classes as he was when he was physically in the building.
“Everyone is trying the best that they can with this situation, but it’s just not an environment that’s conducive long term,” Ms. Uffelman said. “The kids just aren’t engaging. The kids are not turning on their cameras, so the teachers are looking at a Zoom class of basically empty screens.”
Ms. Brasacchio, who is part of the parents group, said her children frequently ask for snacks throughout the day and stare out the window when they are in class.
She said her third grader, Brayden, has adapted better to online school than her first grader, Tyler, and Mia, her preschooler. But even for Brayden the year has been a struggle.
Ms. Brasacchio said she has watched as her son — who was once enthusiastic about going to school — grow wary of sitting in front of a computer for hours at a time.
And she worries about his education, too. She said she has seen him with other tabs open on his computer when he should be paying attention to class. He recently asked his mother why he had to study for a spelling test because he could have the list next to him and his teacher would never know.
“He used to love school. He usedto be up before his alarm ready to go to school,” Ms. Brasacchio said. “Now, he’s counting down the hours until Christmas break.”
Ms. Brasacchio said she believes in-person instruction can be done safely even amid rising COVID-19 case numbers and points to research that shows schools have not led to significant COVID-19 outbreaks in the United States.
“I love my children more than anything in the whole wide world,” she said. “If I felt like they were any way at risk with this, I would never support them going back to school. I truly feel it’s safer thangetting in a car.”