Toll on students from ‘COVID slide’ revealed
In the shift to online, districts see losses, especially in math
Ava Martinez used to enjoy going to school. She was excited to dissect frogs and was an avid reader, a straight-a student enrolled in her school’s gifted and talented program and several PRE-AP classes.
Before the pandemic, Ava had a vibrant social life but never let it interfere with grades. Now, the 13-year-old stays home and takes classes virtually. Her workload at Rudder Middle School in the Northside Independent School District seems heavier, but classes seem shorter. She can’t simply raise her hand to ask a question or turn to the student next to her.
“Before, I didn’t think of school as work, but now it’s like a hassle,” Ava said.
Some of her high grades have slipped to B’s and C’s, and she withdrew from PRE-AP classes and the gifted and talented program, said her mother, Alejandra Crawford.
Education leaders across the country predicted massive learning loss would result when schools were shuttered last March by the coronavirus pandemic. Studies are beginning to show just how severe the “COVID slide” has been. And parents are crying out for help.
One of the reasons state education officials decided not to cancel the State of Texas Assessments of Academic Readiness, or STAAR, in the spring is to gauge the dimensions of the learning loss, though the test’s value there will be limited because it won’t be mandatory.
But locally, some school districts have already given other tests to students. Northside ISD leaders will present results to their board of trustees, likely in February, Superintendent Brian Woods said.
“There’s clearly learning loss, and learning loss in mathematics is more dramatic than it seems to be in reading,” Woods said.
That aligns with state and national trends.
The Northwest Evaluation Association, a research organi
zation that creates assessments for grades prekindergarten through 12, has found test scores for math were between 5 and 10 percentage points lower for students nationally last year when compared with same-grade students in 2019. The study’s authors caution that many children were missing from last year’s data, but some of Texas’ largest districts have found the same picture in their assessments.
San Antonio ISD gave two types of tests, the Measure of Academic Progress and Circle Progress Monitoring, and found its students were, for the most part, maintaining their reading skills. But students were falling behind in math, district leaders told trustees during a November board meeting.
For example, data showed students had similar gains in reading from third grade to fourth. But in the same cohort, the district saw a 13-point decline in math test scores.
“We have more students scoring low and average (in math) compared to reading, where we have less students scoring low and low average,” Theresa Urrabazo, the district’s senior executive director of accountability, research, evaluation and testing, told trustees.
“What you’re going to notice throughout the presentation is that math took a much bigger hit than reading. And this is also consistent with what we’re seeing across the state and with other districts.”
Parents who saw their kids struggling went into search mode to get help, according to the nonprofit organization Families Empowered, which helps families navigate school choice. The organization said it surveyed 208 San Antonio parents and that 70 percent said their kids needed help catching up when they went back to school after the shutdown in March.
The immediate switch to distance learning was really hard on five of Sheila and Paul Ryan’s six school-age children. They were in elementary and high school grades at Great Hearts Monte Vista.
Only 14-year-old Emma was thriving, her mother said.
The family’s two other daughters and their three sons showed behavioral changes and complained that being on camera all day was anxiety-inducing.
One of the Ryan girls has autism, and a son has attention deficit disorder. Virtual learning was not a good fit for either.
The challenges were compounded by the family’s internet bottleneck. The parents work from home and have three older children — for a grand total of nine kids — who are in college. At one point, the household juggled 29 Zoom sessions in one day, Sheila Ryan said. They called Spectrum to increase their bandwidth and were told they were already getting the maximum.
Grades started slipping for most of the Ryan children. The parents began to worry less about their report cards and more about their social and emotional well-being. Still, they didn’t want the children to fall so far behind that they would be unprepared for the world after school.
“We’ve kind of shifted our whole perspective of what ‘making it’ looks like,” Sheila Ryan said.
During the fall semester, the family started exploring other options. They briefly considered home schooling full time but abandoned the idea. Their oldest daughter, Abigail, 16, agreed to wear her mask all day and maintain social distancing so she could go back to her Great Hearts campus in person.
The parents changed schools for their other two daughters, who are also back in classrooms: Emma, 14, at Roosevelt High School, and Molly, 13, at Ed White Middle School, both in North East ISD.
The boys — Judah, 11, Benjamin, 9, and Simon, 7 — are still at home attending the Great Hearts Online virtual academy.
Most of the kids had to take tests at the start of the spring semester this month. That encouraged Ryan, who wants to know how far behind they are and in which subjects.
“I’m really excited about that. I think it’s really thoughtful,” Ryan said.
One of the keys to tackling learning loss is collecting data, and that has to be done through testing, said Colleen Dippel, founder and CEO of Families Empowered.
“I really don’t see any way out of this for families without having more data, not less,” Dippel said. “We really have to understand the magnitude of the problem if we’re going to provide interventions for kids.”
The state’s STAAR results, which come later in the year, will be too late, Dippel said. Districts that are testing students now will be ahead in the effort to make up for lost learning.
“If we are learning that some kids are a year behind or 18 months behind, that’s a really difficult dilemma that should not be put off to next August,” Dippel said. “It’s not a summer slide, it’s not even a COVID slide. It’s a COVID avalanche.”
Schools and learning centers provided by organizations such as the YMCA and the Boys and Girls Club should offer one-onone tutoring, Dippel said. School districts should plan to have either more teachers available over the summer or utilize student teachers and tutors for both inperson and online assistance.
A glimmer of hope for Alejandra Crawford is that daughter Ava wants to return to school. She frequently asks her mom when she can go back, and Crawford asks for a little more time. That tells Crawford that Ava hasn’t lost her love of learning.
“I always tell her, ‘This is not going to be forever, and I guarantee all the things you want to do, I will repay it,’” Crawford said.