Business-as-usual traditional instruction and more NTI might not cope

One of the big unknowns from the COVID-19 pandemic involves measurable impacts on K-12 education.

Due to both remote learning and students simply not showing up in any way for education during the pandemic, most testing programs – notably for Kentucky both the state’s own KPREP assessments and the National Assessment of Educational Progress in reading and math – were all cancelled this past school term.

About the only testing conducted was the ACT testing; but, it was also incomplete. A notable number of students simply never showed up to take the test.

Student absence also impacted a test program called Measures of Academic Progress (MAP), which many Kentucky school districts administer several times each school year to gauge student progress.

We're still waiting to see even the incomplete results from COVID-impacted ACT testing (probably out next month), but the NWEA (used to be the Northwest Education Agency at one time) just released its analysis of a national sample of students who took the MAP tests. The findings are disturbing even though the 5.5 million public students included in the study still left out other students who normally would have been tested if COVID wasn’t a factor.

A few key NWEA findings from across the nation include:

• In reading, students entered the 2020–21 school year at about the same level as a “typical” year. However, students experienced lower academic gains and ended the school year an average of 3–6 percentile points behind, compared to 2018–19.

• In math, students entered the 2020–21 school year (already) behind where they started in a “typical” school year and also experienced lower academic gains. Students ended the school year an average of 8–12 percentile points behind compared to the 2018–19 school year.

The reading findings are especially troubling because, as shown in Figure 1.a in the NWEA report, there normally isn’t much progress even without COVID for reading in Grades 5 through 8. With COVID, reading progress looks almost flat for the entire year for those grades in this figure.

For minority students, Figure 3.b in the report shows the learning lags for Math from the most recent pre-COVID year were notably worse. For example:

• Black student percentile scores were 15 points lower in Grade 3 Math in 2020-21 than in 2018-19.

• Latinx student percentile scores for Grade 3 Math were 17 points lower for the same time frames.

Figure 4 in the NWEA report shows that high poverty schools (more than 75% of students in poverty) also saw serious learning lags compared to the pre-COVID period.

• In Grade 3 Math, students in high poverty schools had an average score at the 39th percentile at the end of the 2018-19 school year, and this sagged badly to just an average score at the 22nd percentile at the end of the recently concluded 2020-21 school year.

• Even third-graders in low-poverty schools (less than 25% of students in poverty) lost ground in math, scoring at the 71st percentile at the end of 2018-19 but only at the 64th percentile at the end of the 2020-21 term.

• Those numbers from Figure 4 indicate the math achievement gap between low-poverty and high-poverty Grade 3 schools shot up from a 32-point difference at the end of the 2018-19 term to a 42-point gap at the end of the 2020-21 term.

What makes the information above even more concerning is that some students who were present in the 2018-19 school year were not present in the tested sample for the 2020-21 term, with students of color more likely to be missing. Due to the unknown performance of missing students, the learning lags NWEA reports are likely understated.

At the end of its report, the NWEA calls for some dramatic changes in the nation’s K-12 education system, but does so in rather general terms that might not really be that helpful to local educators trying to put in place a program to actually deal with the learning lags that all will certainly have to cope with thanks to COVID.

But, the NWEA findings do indicate that the distance learning situations virtually all students were in during the 2020-21 school year didn’t perform particularly well, and especially so for disadvantaged students. So, absent some impressive (and at present not apparent) breakthrough in distance learning programs, just going to more NTI might not be a very good way to serve our students.

Instead, offering parents more information on exactly where their children are performing (by, for example, not cancelling anymore testing) along with providing options on how that child might receive education differently could be a more intelligent way to continue to battle with a COVID pandemic that seems to keep coming up with surprises faster than our existing education system is able to cope.