In their New York Times op-ed piece on learning loss during the pandemic, the authors conclude their analysis of the research with a call to justice:
“If we fail to replace what our children lost, we — not the coronavirus — will be responsible for the most inequitable and longest-lasting legacy of the pandemic. But if we succeed, that broader and more responsive system of learning can be our gift to America’s schoolchildren.”
So, a year later, how are our kids doing?
A more recent article focuses on the impact of the pandemic on the youngest learners. The authors interviewed dozens of school personnel across the country who collectively saw similar concerning trends in students’ readiness to learn: the inability to sit still for long enough to hear a story, underdeveloped fine motor skills, significant gaps in fundamental background knowledge, and, most disconcertingly, emotional dysregulation. Some students were not able to negotiate basic interactions with peers without physical displays of anger.
Paul Cuffee, a Providence charter school that serves 820 children in grades K-12 on three separate campuses, reflects the demographics of the city: 96% of the student body identify as BIPOC and 82% qualify for free or reduced-price lunch. Chris Haskins, Paul Cuffee’s Head of School confirmed the basic narrative. Students who missed out on a preschool year during the lockdown and entered kindergarten in 2021 tended to demonstrate higher levels of “explosive behavior.” He speculated that their difficulty adapting to school culture was due to the loss of socialization skills acquired when twenty or more preschoolers learn how to play, communicate, and engage in early educational activities.
(Photo Courtesy of Paul Cuffee School)
Haskins went further, saying that this cohort of students, having just finished second grade, continue to demonstrate significant and seemingly intractable gaps in achievement despite three years of interventions. While growth scores are starting to show some modest improvement, their performance on testing is stubbornly lower than pre-pandemic levels.
Meanwhile, new middle schoolers struggle with the demands of reading extended passages, especially the attention and executive functions required to comprehend informational text. Freshmen are entering Algebra 1 with gaps in their skills of proportional reasoning and integer operations that are critical to their understanding.
(Photo Courtesy of Chris Haskins)
Extra help to catch up
Like most public local education agencies in Rhode Island, Cuffee received an allocation from federal COVID relief funds aimed in part at mitigating learning loss. They also leveraged Governor McKee’s 2023 Learn360 initiative to extend learning opportunities outside of the school day. offering after-school tutoring and programming at the YMCA. Haskins feels that this program was effective, though attendance was inconsistent due to familial constraints around work, transportation, and childcare needs. “The camp-like feel at the YMCA really appealed to kids and kept them engaged in the academic piece,” he said.
This summer, Cuffee is using Elementary and Secondary School Educational Relief (ESSER) funds to work with RIDE and the Annenberg Foundation to host a two-week summer school to help rising 9th graders with Algebra 1 readiness and offer credit recovery for students who have not successfully matriculated to high school.
The program seeks to address both the COVID setbacks and what is often referred to as the “summer slide,” or learning loss that occurs when students are out of school for up to twelve weeks. Data shows that students, and especially BIPOC students and lower SES students, experience at least modest loss of academic skills, like computational skills or reading fluency. Summer Reading: Closing the Rich/Poor Learning Achievement Gap, calculates that losses of three months between the beginning of Grade 1 and Grade 6 accumulate to 2-3 years as students head into middle school, irrespective of effective instruction they might receive during the school year.
And this learning loss is even more detrimental to students with learning differences like dyslexia, language-processing disorders, and attentional variation (like ADHD) and executive function, vulnerabilities in critical skills like task initiation and time management. Work out of the Center for Behavioral Research and Education at the University of Connecticut identified the widening achievement gap between struggling readers and their more proficient peers, a disparity that grows over the first three years of school and reflects a more pronounced summer drop-off for the former group.
Credit: Center for Behavioral Education & Research at UConn’s Neag School of Education
As Michael Coyne, the Center’s Director, explained in an email, the graph is a “general representation of how literacy/reading trajectories of different groups of readers differ over the first years of school. These trajectories are apparent even before the start of formal schooling, become more discrepant over time, and are generally resistant to change (i.e., kids don’t often ‘catch up’ on their own, unless they receive intensive, systematic, and evidence-based interventions). The pandemic has just amplified these trajectories– by differentially affecting those students most at risk of experiencing reading difficulties.”
Taken together, then, pandemic learning losses and the summer slide have a compounding negative impact on student learning. What can we do? Few educational advocates think that at-risk students should be punished by being forced to attend summer programs. Extending the school year is also fraught. In the ‘23-’24 academic school year, RIDE and teachers’ unions agreed to an additional thirty minutes of instructional time, but that agreement sunsets on August 1. And with austerity spending threatening funding for Providence’s schools, the bold– and expensive— initiatives that researchers have called for could turn out to be impractical.
Learning Outside of School Helps Learning In School
It seems, then, that parents, caregivers, and community organizations that support them might have to step up to play a more active and informed role as educational partners. Where higher SES families have been better able to supplement the per-pupil allocation for their own children for summer experiences like camp, cultural outings, and educational materials, for lower SES families those expenditures can fall into the category of discretionary spending.
But the pandemic has taught us that even spontaneous learning opportunities– talking to children as they accompany adults on errands, for example– can have a significant impact on the growth of vocabulary and critical thinking skills. And perhaps the biggest takeaway, the urgency of which is underscored by the Attorney General’s recent call for warning labels on social media platforms, is that adults start to control device use and encourage children to participate in embodied, imaginative play that engages their minds and their muscles. Even the youngest children, whose hard-working parents resorted to their cell phones and tablets to create moments of respite, especially during the pandemic, are showing the ill effects of too much screen time. But, through physical, pro-social interactions, the earliest learners heading to elementary school later in August may just have better-developed gross and fine motor skills to avoid the frustration and outbursts that made learning– and teaching– so challenging these past few years.
As the researcher Tom Kane said in an interview with Harvard Graduate School of Education, “Schools were not the sole cause of achievement losses. Nor will they be the sole solution. As enticing as it might be to get back to normal, doing so will just leave the devastating increase in inequality caused by the pandemic in place. We must create learning opportunities for students outside of the normal school calendar, by adding academic content to summer camps and after-school programs and adding an optional 13th year of schooling.”
David Ahlborn has been a Providence resident for 25 years. He is the Director of Curriculum and Instruction for Polaris, an academic support program for upper school students with learning differences at the Wheeler School.
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Here are some free and low-cost public resources for our readers:
- The Meadows Center, The Imagination Library, ¡Colorin Colorado!, and RIDE’s Games to Support Early Literacy Skills.
- For the earliest learners, Kari Kurto of the Reading League suggests tapping into resources available at Language ENvironment Analysis (LENA) .
- Also, the Community Libraries of Providence are promoting efforts to engage youngsters in summertime reading activities. The Providence Film Festival is hosting screenings, and Trinity Repertory and Rhode Island Latino Arts are again sponsoring Teatro en El Verano at outdoor sites across the city.
- The Providence Parks Department also offers spaces and programs, including academic enrichment, that families can still take advantage of.
