Life has recently given educators many things to worry over. Pandemic! School shootings! Teacher shortages! Low pay! Chaotic school board meetings! Book banning! NAEP score decline!
I take the last one back. As we indeed should worry about disease, bullets, teacherless classrooms, and surging radicalism, we should not sweat the reported decline in the National Assessment of Educational Performance scores. The reason we should not sweat this is – what did we expect assessment scores to be after three semesters of emergency teaching and learning? Improved?
The National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) reported scores for 4th grade students declined 5 points in reading and 7 points in mathematics. In terms of trend lines, NCES says these were the largest score declines since 1990 and the first ever score decline in mathematics.
I return to the question – what did we expect? Actually, the scores represent what we expected, and these are not a calamity.
The decline in reading scores was expressed broadly across all demographics or within a point or two for differentiated groups. Pick your target population – urban, suburban, rural; ethnicity; gender; wealthy or impoverished; English or non-English speaking – reading and math scores declined. When schools went into emergency mode due to the pandemic, reading and math achievement amongst all children suffered. What did we expect?
Interestingly, among higher performing students, those with constant access to computer or tablet, reliable Internet, consistent access to a quiet place to do school work, and consistency of an on-line teacher available top help them with assignments demonstrated less decline in reading and math. Exactly what we would expect.
Correspondingly and without great surprise, students with low performance in reading and math prior to emergency education, especially children of color, demonstrated greater decline in reading and math. Many of these children were at the opposite end of educational supports during the pandemic. They had little to access to computers or tablets, unreliable or no Internet access, no quiet places, and were not connected with on-line teachers. Exactly what we would expect.
NAEP measures only reading and math. What of student learning in science and social studies? What of achievements in art, music, and second language? As a result of the pandemic, all areas of student learning suffered and expected overall achievement diminished. Another expectation. It sounds like educational disaster, but it is not.
What do we know? First, these diminished student achievements are associated with emergency education and not with usual education. I recall smashing my leg and spending 16 weeks in a cast and walking with crutches when I was fourteen. Life, for a while, changed due to that emergency. Once the cast came off, it took months before I regained strength and flexibility in my right leg. I had to unlearn living with the emergency as well as living anew without it. In emergencies, we compensate by doing things differently when we cannot do what we usually do. Compensatory life is not the same. When the emergency is over, we typically stop compensating and life returns to normal, although I am more duck-footed.
2019-20 through 2021-22 data were emergency-based data. The casts we wore during that emergency are off. We need to look at that data for what it is – emergency data – and not consider it as normal data.
Second, over time, all data resettles around its historic mean. It will take renewed implicit teaching to cause children who limped through pandemic education to have the knowledge, skills, and dispositions they need; this learning will not happen without focused education. But it will happen. Students who in 21-22 were not solid in their reading and math will achieve improvements in 22-23 and 23-24 and their data will move back toward usual norms. School bands that suffered developing instrumentation will find new players and students not ready for Spanish 3 will find growth in blended Spanish 2-3. We know how to teach these children.
Third, our world is too attuned to reports of calamity, and what may not be calamitous gets reported as “disaster”. Across the 14 years of 4K-12 public education, emergencies will rise, be faced, and we will trend toward normalcy. The real calamity and disaster of the pandemic was the number of lives lost to death. Those we cannot recover. Everything else can be recouped.
Lessons learned. Don’t sweat what you cannot affect. The NAEP data is already in the books, and it reported the kind of data we were expecting. We were in an emergency and now we are not. Today, we pull up our socks and get at the 22-23 data.