Quote of the Day – PLUS – Did the pandemic impact Kentucky’s schools even worse than Texas’?

“Texas recently became the first state to release state test score data since the pandemic hit. Student scores dropped across the board, but the massive declines in results from remote learners drove the downward trend. Just over a year of pandemic schooling erased most of the academic gains from the past seven years. Even more concerning, Texas offered more in-person instruction than most other states, meaning that results from other states will likely be even worse (underlining added for emphasis).”

 Nat Malkus, “Plummeting test scores are a symptom; remote instruction is the disease,” The Hill, July 23, 2021.

THE PLUS

Texas isn’t the only state that has already released testing data that shows the pandemic learning lag is a major concern. On September 16, the Fordham Foundation released its report on the situation in Ohio, and it is also highly concerning. For example, Fordham says: 

“Specifically, in ELA, third-grade students learned roughly 20 percent less on average between November 2020 and April 2021 as compared to students in prior years.

We found similar overall impacts across all of the grades we examined. The total decline in student achievement in spring 2021 compared to prior years was roughly equivalent to between one-half and a whole year’s worth of learning in math and between one-third and one-half of a year’s worth of learning in ELA, depending on the grade level.”

Fordham’s report clearly blames remote learning for as a major factor in the declines and also notes the impacts fell most heavily on minority students. Fordham also surprisingly says in its study: 

“Contrary to popular belief, students in later grades experienced the greatest learning declines relative to typical achievement growth rates.”

Kentucky has not released any test score information since the fall of 2019. Once Kentuckians finally start seeing some testing data again, which is scheduled to happen on September 29, 2021, perhaps it will turn out that Kentucky fared somewhat better than Texas, but Malkus at least doesn’t seem to think that’s likely.

Certainly, other glimpses we have gotten from limited data on grading in Kentucky during the pandemic (See here and here for some examples) indicate that Kentucky’s learning lag due to pandemic-caused remote learning is probably substantial.

Just as in Texas and Ohio, it is likely the total learning a Kentucky fourth grader accomplished in the 2020-21 school term is going to lag well behind what fourth graders accomplished in the years just before COVID hit.

Certainly, the strong hints from Texas and Ohio plus limited other information that is available point to the idea that remote learning has not been as effective as in-person instruction was in the past in Kentucky’s public schools.

Kentuckians will learn more on September 29th, but the data will be challenging to analyze intelligently. For one thing, we know that a number of students were simply never tested with either the KPREP or with the state’s 11th Grade ACT college entrance test program. That will make intelligent comparisons to results from pre-pandemic years difficult to impossible.