How did the pandemic affect K-12 student achievement?  This question should be consistently on the lips of school leaders.  The answer to the question, however, may be a long time coming?  Consider – is your local school district publishing current academic proficiency achievement data and talking about pandemic effect?  If not, they need to start now.  The pandemic’s impacts on student learning will challenge educators for years to come.

What Do We Know?

Data informs and drives educational decisions.  Teaching and learning without valid data points is groping for handholds on a hillside wearing a blindfold.  Because of the pandemic, we don’t have valid, recent, or relevant educational data today.

Fact – Available student academic data from the 2019-20 and 2020-21 school years and first semester of 2021-22 display trends of achievement that differ significantly from pre-pandemic data.  To put it bluntly, current pandemic data trends are significantly below pre-pandemic trends. 

A tertiary problem with our educational data is curricular fidelity and continuity.  Some schools provided remote instruction of curriculum provided by virtual vendors not the district’s curriculum.  In-person and remote children in the same grade level and subject classes received instruction in varied and different curricula.  We cannot assume that each curriculum was equivalent in content, skills, and dispositions to another.  Curricular alignment with assessment is essential.  If there is no known alignment, the resulting data are not relevant.

Many data points for individual children and disaggregated groups of children are absent for multiple assessments as children were not available for testing in the pandemic semesters.  Parents withdrew children in favor of home schooling.  No data.  Children in homes without any or consistent Internet connection were unable to participate in daily instruction.  No data or no valid data.  Some children just hit the off button for remote education.  No data.  Some children completed the assessments as unsupervised take-home tests or on-line tests.  Data is suspect.  When school campuses re-opened for in-person attendance in 2020-21, some parents and children preferred to remain in remote mode.  No data.  For too many children we cannot credibly draw any conclusions regarding their educational status or progress because their data is not recent, valid, or relevant.

That said, we do have data for some children.  We have annual assessment data and continuous teacher-based assessment data for children who were in-person school attenders and received the district’s approved curricula during the pandemic.  In the fall of 2020-21 schools were either open for in-person teaching and learning or closed and in remote education mode.  Children whose parents chose the in-person option or returned to in-person as campuses re-opened in 2020-21 remained, for the most part, within the school’s traditional curriculum.  Excepting school days when children may have been quarantined or the school was temporarily closed, in-person children received a continuous provision of the school’s instruction of approved curricula.  In-person children completed supervised assessments and these children are the most likely to give educators a sense of the pandemic’s impact upon children whose education approximated normal teaching and learning.  Their data is recent, valid, and relevant.

We also have data for children who received daily remote instruction from their regular classroom teachers using their school’s adopted curricula albeit virtually.  Some schools were able to provide their children with digital devices and hotspots, as needed, and using classroom cameras and screens sustained a viable teacher/student and student/student instructional interaction remotely.  Teachers taught their regular curricula to children at home.  Barring days of Internet or viral interruption, these children also received an instruction that approximated normal teaching and learning.  Assessments for these children are informative.  Their data is recent, valid, and relevant.

What Do We See?

Local data from pre-pandemic years placed most of our children above the 50^th percentile on annual academic assessments with a growing distribution above the 85^th percentile and diminishing distribution below the 25^th percentile.  Pandemic academic achievement data displays significant achievement slippage.   The pandemic data shows majorities of children by grade level and by subject now below the 50^th percentile.

The decline in local data trends is reflected in statewide trends.  In Illinois, “Preliminary spring testing data from most schools statewide shows steep declines in students attaining proficiency in math and English language arts across grade levels – 17.8% and 16.6% respectively.”

https://www.dailyherald.com/news/20211029/lower-scores-high-absenteeism-more-teachers-a-first-look-at-how-pandemic-affected-states-students

Locally, most high achieving pre-pandemic children remained high achieving in their pandemic assessments.  The numbers of pandemic children above the 85^th percentile resembles the numbers from pre-pandemic assessments.  Children who scored in the 50^th to 85^th percentiles slumped to lower scores on pandemic assessments and large numbers of children in the 50^th to 60^th percentile ranges slipped just below the 50^th percentile.

Children who were in the pre-pandemic 25^th to 50^th percentile range slipped below the 25^th percentile.

Children whose pre-pandemic data was below the 25^th remained below the 25^th and their numbers increased, especially in math.

Local data does not disaggregate the pandemic results as the numbers of children in each disaggregation are so low as to identify children by name.

What Should We Think About This?

We have work to do. 

Children are provided one school year per grade level, meaning that a child in kindergarten has one school year to successfully learn kindergarten’s annual curriculum.  Few schools are talking about suspending grade level promotions due to the pandemic.  Hence, a child in kindergarten in 2021-22 will have only this year for a kindergarten education.  While usual practice in the fall of the subsequent school year includes some review of the prior year’s learning, the pace and intensity of schooling picks up in September and this year’s kindergarten child needs to be prepared for 1^st grade next September.  We have work to do.

Additionally, the graduating Class of 2022 will not have a sticker on their diplomas indicating “Pandemic Education”.  They will not enter post-high school education or their employment with a “High School Education Incomplete” notation.  For high schoolers whose remote education was less than usual in 2020-21, we have six school months remaining in this school year to bring them up to graduation speed.  “Up to speed” will not include coverage of all topics that would normally taught in a school year.  There is not sufficient time for coverage.  “Up to speed” means the provision of essential senior year learning.  We have work to do.

We do have the option of spreading curriculum over time for K-11 students.  Unlike seniors who will graduate, K-11 children have access to the 2022-23 school year. 

At the same time, each cohort of children in our school will be promoted in June 2022 to the next grade K-12 grade level.  A child in the 6^th grade this year will be expected to be prepared for 7^th grade next fall. 

There is no reason a school cannot do these things.  Our children are relying on us to fulfill their educational needs.  It is our work to do.

To Do.

We need to personalize the pre-pandemic and pandemic academic achievement data into a profile for each child.  The goal is two-fold:  to cause children to regain pre-pandemic achievement status and to cause each child to meet the school’s continuing academic proficiency goals.  The latter goal may take more time and effort than the first goal.

A personalized plan provides initial instruction of missed curricula and corrective intervention of poorly learned or mislearned curricula.  This is important – we need to discern between missed learning and poorly learned or mislearned content and skills, because there is a real instructional difference.  We teach differently if content and/or skills were missed, that is not taught and learned, or if content/skills were poorly learned or contain errors in content and skills.  Missed learning will be taught as initial instruction.  Poorly learned content/skills need to be corrected or unlearned and then taught and learned correctly – this takes more teacher time and attention.

A personalized plan rebuilds the school/home relationship.  For the past three semesters, schooling for many children has been at home under parent supervision and decision making.  Decisions at home relative to place and time for learning were often more important and difficult than the lessons to be learned.  Parents provided initial instruction when children did not have daily or consistent connection with their teachers.  The presentation of a personalized post-pandemic learning plan reconnects the classroom teacher as the person providing instruction.

The aggregate of personalized plans creates the school’s focus for an academic year.  At the end of the 2021-22 school year, school success will be determined by the successful completion of personalized plans instead of the completion of annual curricula or the school calendar.  The school at large, as well as individual classroom teachers, use the plans to drive school calendar decisions prioritizing uninterrupted instructional time for teachers and students.  Children will participate in school activities, arts, and athletics, but these may be rethought in the face of needed personalized learning.

Finally, how we repair from the pandemic will define the community’s future trust in our schools.  Personalizing each child’s education is the high ground of this trust.  Fulfilling each child’s personalized plan is delivering on the trust we enjoy as the community’s educators.

The Big Duh!

Public education survived the Spanish Flu pandemic, two world wars, depressions and recessions, and political turmoils.  The historic measure of survival was the capacity of a school to adapt to new conditions and requirements for the education of children.  In each measure, schools were required to understand the stresses of the times, modify the how, where and when of teaching and learning, and fulfill the mission of child education.   Our schools, our teachers, and our children and their families will survive COVID by always focusing on the essential outcomes of a public education.