A big week for education insights

It’s been a big week for new insights about education in the state’s largest school district, Jefferson County Public Schools (JCPS).

First, the Courier-Journal started to publicly release today a series of articles about the impacts of the Jefferson County Public Schools’ (JCPS) controversial busing for diversity program. We anticipate a fair amount of discussion will follow now that everyone can access the material (there was a pre-release to subscribers only on Wednesday).

Ahead of the public release of the Courier’s articles, on February 5, 2021, WFPL released reporter Jess Clark’s article about “Away From The Classroom, Disadvantaged JCPS Students Fail At Higher Rates.” This WFPL article provides some interesting data regarding the impacts on learning JCPS students have faced as a result of Non-Traditional Instruction (NTI) brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic.

Clark’s article compares results for students who got failing grades during the first six-week grading period in JCPS in the fall of 2019 and in the fall of 2020. Her analysis provides some data-based support for what many people have suspected all along – COVID-19 is causing serious learning issues for some key student groups in our schools.

Some of Clark’s key observations:

• “Most groups of students, including white and middle- and upper-income students, saw a sharp increase in failing grades during the first six weeks, or first grading term, of the 2020-2021 school year;”

• “For low-income students and many students of color, the spike in failing grades was even greater.”

Actually, the impacts shown in Clark’s graphs vary quite a bit by grade level and include some surprises, so let’s take a look.

IMPACTS by POVERTY

Clark’s first graph shows that the failure rates in elementary schools stayed essentially equal from the fall 2019 to the fall 2020 for both low and middle to upper income students.

But, the picture for middle and high school students is different. I re-charted Clark’s middle and high school data in a way that makes the changes easier to see.

As you can see in the top graph, middle school students showed uniform rises in failure rates regardless of income level.

However, the picture concerning poverty and COVID is mixed for high school students.

Low-income high school students saw failure rates rise very slightly from 39.7% to 40.4% between 2019 and 2020.

In notable contrast, in 2019 upper/middle income high school students had a 22.4% failure rate which actually dropped under NTI to 16.8%.

Clearly, if we are talking about the adverse impacts of COVID on students in poverty, the big problem is with middle school students. Surprisingly, the impact on elementary and high school students in poverty does not seem to be that great – at least for those students who showed up for NTI in 2020.

However, do keep in mind that there’s another 10% of all JCPS students we know nothing about because they have not been participating in NTI. There simply is no data to examine regarding those students who are totally missing. If, as seems likely, those students have essentially not been getting any education, the failure rates in 2020 could be as much as 10 percentage points higher.

IMPACTS by RACE

Things look more concerning when Clark examines scores by race.

Once again, in a surprise, there wasn’t much change in failure rates for white, Black or Latinx students in elementary schools due to COVID.

However, there were big problems in both middle and high schools as this next graph set shows.

Across the board, regardless of which of the three major racial groups we are talking about, the failure rates strongly climbed in middle and high schools under COVID.

Clark says English Language Learners (ELL) and non-ELL also saw large increases in middle and high school failure rates between 2019 and 2020. Check her story for more.

SOME THOUGHTS

Before digging too deeply into Clark’s findings, it needs to be mentioned again that a number of students, supposedly about 10% of the entire enrollment, have not shown up at all during the NTI period at JCPS. Most of those missing students are probably poor and lack the technology needed to participate in NTI, as well. Quite possibly, these students made no educational progress in the past year and might even show regression if they could be located and evaluated.

Also, I have not seen any discussion about whether the missing students are or are not evenly distributed across grade levels.

It’s possible the no-shows could impact Clark’s findings, especially in cases where Clark says impacts were low such as in the elementary schools.

Clark does make some comments about the participation rates in NTI, pointing to the fact that gathering of statistics on student participation in NTI is actually “very loose,” as JCPS Chief Academic Officer Carmen Coleman describes it. Students might be shown as participating when in fact they really are hardly present. Clark does not separately examine possible impacts of largely absent students on the grading statistics

Another complication is the fact that grading isn’t necessarily very uniform. Maybe grading was just generally easier for elementary school students. Without separate assessment data, there is no way to examine this issue.

It is also important to consider that the grades Clark uses are just from the first six weeks of the fall semesters. Grades can, and do, change as the school year progresses. Teachers hopefully are improving their NTI delivery skills as the year progresses, as well. Perhaps the failure rate picture improved after Clark’s six-week snapshot was taken.

In any event, though Clark’s study takes a rather interesting approach to develop a picture about the impacts of COVID on education, the data and conclusions drawn from them are not immune to validity challenges.

Better information might come from assessment data that could be related back to previous years’ performances. Sadly, that assessment data is not coming soon.

For example, the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) in both Math and Reading already has been cancelled for early 2021 and might or might not be given next year.

Kentucky’s own state assessment, the KPREP, was already cancelled last year and currently there is a concerted effort to cancel KPREP at the end of this school term, too. If KPREP is cancelled again, the information vacuum about what COVID is really doing is going to get lengthy.

Another test that might be used for COVID impact analysis is the Measures of Academic Progress (MAP). Many Kentucky school districts, JCPS included, use MAP. It is normally given several times during the school year.

In fact, there has already been a nationwide study on COVID impacts using MAP. That MAP-based research showed there wasn’t much learning loss in reading but found substantial reason for concern about math.

However, that MAP-based study immediately came into question because the student group that took MAP in 2019 was very different from the group that tested in the Fall of 2020. The study’s authors admit about one in four students who tested with MAP in 2019 simply wasn’t present in the 2020 test sample. What if those missing students would predominantly test low? It would drag the 2020 results down even more. But, there’s no way to tell.

For now, if we can get the majority of students back to in-person school by the spring, a KPREP test could offer us the first reasonably decent look at the impacts of COVID-19. Right now, however, that is a pretty big “If.”

At present, given the relative absence of data-based information about COVID’s impacts, Clark’s work seems to be some of the best so far available. Let’s look at Clark’s data some more, as it contains some surprises that could be important.

First, in a notable surprise, Clark’s research shows the COVID learning impact for elementary school students does not seem of concern, at least for those students who actually showed up to do NTI in the fall. The picture for middle and high school students is more clouded and raises more cause for anxiety.

This raises an immediate issue for school reopening, as reports indicate many think the priority needs to be placed on elementary schools. If Clark’s findings are correct, that could be poor policy.

If we look at the by race data Clark provides, there is substantial learning loss for all three major racial groups found in JCPS in both middle and high schools, while the elementary picture is far less concerning.

Clark’s poverty-related information tells a more clouded story. Again, the elementary school picture shows no cause for concern.

So, this separate analysis based on poverty also indicates that placing priority on getting elementary schools open first could be poor policy.

Failure rate increases are severe in middle schools for students of all income levels. Meanwhile, only low-income students had notable increased failure rates in high schools. Why is that? Why doesn’t the high school trend for middle/upper income students agree with the trend for all major racial groups in high schools? Could this point to a problem with Clark’s analysis or with the data she was provided?

Could it be that NTI, perhaps augmented with a lot of parent help, works fairly well for elementary school students and for higher income high school students, but not for other high schoolers and not for any middle schoolers?

Is COVID adding to the achievement gap? Clark interprets her data that way, saying “Existing Gaps Are Growing.” But, the gap doesn’t grow much in her elementary school data.

Certainly, while Clark’s data won’t provide the final word on the COVID impact on education, it doesn’t provide much comfort, either, at least not for middle and high school students.

To reemphasize, Clark’s work points to a possibility I’ve not seen discussed before. While the emphasis on getting kids back to school seems targeted on serving the lower grades first, Clark’s findings surprisingly show what might really be needed is exactly the opposite. It might be that older students, especially in middle schools, are more adversely impacted by NTI.

There’s another important message here. How come some of the best work on COVID impacts is coming from news reporters – not from school systems or education school researchers? How can schools cope with the COVID issues effectively if they are not addressing the data required to really understand those issues?

That leads to some final thoughts. The combination of uneven – sometimes never ending – NTI in our public schools is creating a host of problems and uncertainties for parents. Based on work such as Clark’s and the MAP study, the achievement gaps are almost certainly getting worse. Meanwhile, it’s been well-reported that private schools are maintaining a high degree of in-person classes during the pandemic. This all creates more pressure on parents, particularly low-income parents, to get help to move their children to private schools if the public system cannot or will not serve their children well. Maybe it is time for Kentucky to provide school choice options that make it easier for low-income households to utilize the education resources that can serve their child best.