The tumult of the pandemic and the ensuing years of virtual instruction hit students hard. Across the country, learning loss was widespread and even when kids returned to in-person instruction, things didn’t just snap back to the way they were.
There are few places where learning loss is more evident than in test scores. At San Diego Unified, for example, that drop in test scores erased half a decade of steady gains in student performance. Even after years of halting progress, the district’s schools haven’t regained that lost ground.
They’re far from the only ones – only about 13 percent of San Diego County schools are outperforming where they were in the 2018-19 school year. While students at many schools are doing better in either math or English than they were in 2018, of 740 San Diego County schools, only 96 were doing better in both, according to an analysis by Voice of San Diego.
That eye-popping stat underscores just how sluggish of a recovery many students have experienced. And while some experts say the prospect of a swift recovery from the pandemic upheaval was always a long shot, others wonder whether educators should ditch the concept that they’re working toward a recovery at all.
‘This Is the New Baseline’
“Given what we know from other data sources, I wouldn’t expect there to be lots of schools where kids were doing better than pre-Covid levels,” said Morgan Polikoff, a professor of education at USC. Polikoff said the pandemic had big negative impacts on all sorts of educational outcomes, from achievement to attendance to a widening of the achievement gap.
“If you’re comparing to pre-Covid, there are still declines in terms of student achievement and attendance and other outcomes, even though there has been some recovery,” Polikoff said.
To Polikoff, the sluggishness of the recovery casts doubts on whether educators and administrators should even think of themselves as being engaged in post-Covid recovery anymore. After all, schools have had more than three years of in-person learning and billions of state and federal recovery dollars.
“In some sense, thinking about it as recovering from Covid doesn’t really make sense anymore. It’s sort of like we need to think about this as ‘this is the new baseline,’” Polikoff said. “I don’t think we want to forget about the impact of Covid, but it just doesn’t seem like that framing is really useful at this point.”
Looking forward, students may be better served by educators and policymakers working to build from this new baseline and implement strategies that will help schools improve, Polikoff said. So, understanding what’s gone right at schools that have improved is important.
‘The Educational Debt’
Ayesha Hashim, a senior research scientist at NWEA, a nonprofit that creates, administers and analyzes results from student assessments, cautioned against viewing recovery attempts through a deficit-based standpoint. Understanding where schools stand strictly through the lens of loss may do more harm than good by hurting educator and student morale, Hashim said.
“But we should still continue to be very concerned about the missed opportunities that kids have had to learn, and we should be trying to recover them as much as possible, because we know that they can be consequential for the future of these of kids,” she said. “We know that test scores can predict lifelong earnings, economic mobility, you know, and ability to complete school.”
Given how traumatic a time the pandemic was, Hashim thinks it was probably unrealistic to assume that when schools reopened the wide gaps that developed would just disappear. Instead, we should expect a much longer and more gradual process.
“But measuring these things is important because it knows it kind of then shows us the educational debt that’s owed to children and what we need to continue to focus on,” Hashim said.
Despite the piles of money schools received, the volatility of the environment made implementing and measuring the success of even proven interventions difficult. While pre-Covid research showed tutoring had big impacts on student success, implementing it at scale post-Covid led to more modest benefits. Summer school also yielded modest improvements. Meanwhile improving core curriculum and instruction practices and providing access to highly-qualified and talented teachers has also led to growth for students.
But Hashim said none of these strategies need to be looked at as a panacea.
“If we look at recovery as kind of a long-term process, these small effects can be cumulative. Especially as districts and schools are given the chance to build their capacity to really implement these programs well, over time we can expect to see better results,” Hashim said.
Digging Deeper
When it comes to which schools made the list, there weren’t clear patterns. Most of the schools had higher poverty levels than the countywide average, and the percentage of charter schools was slightly higher than but neither trend was overwhelming enough to seem statistically significant.
There were also wide differences between the schools. For example, the percentage of students who qualified for free and reduced-priced meals at schools that made the list ranged from three percent at Encinitas Union Elementary’s El Camino Creek to 97 percent at the charter school King-Chavez Community High.
And just because schools were doing better now than they were in the 2018-19 school year didn’t necessarily mean they were doing all that great.
At Escondido Union High School District’s Valley High – one of four alternative or continuation schools on the list – 10 percent of students met state English standards last year, up from 5.38 percent in the 2018-19 school year. When it came to math, .83 percent of students met state standards, up from zero. Meanwhile, at Del Mar Union Elementary’s Sage Canyon, 88 percent of students met state English standards, while 89 percent met math standards. Both figures had increased from 86 percent in the 2018-19 school year.
And while some schools just barely made the list – between English and math scores, La Mesa-Spring Valley’s Spring Valley Academy outperformed it’s 2018-19 numbers by .27 percent – other schools made great strides in the intervening years. East Village Middle College High, an atypical San Diego Unified high school where students take classes partly at San Diego City College, for example, saw a combined 40-point leap in English and math test scores.
The fundamental factor preventing schools from improving student outcomes is that there is no meaningful effort to use data to determine best practices for instruction because this might indirectly reflect on educator effectiveness (which is considered a “third rail”).