Over the past year, Deprece Bonilla, a mother of five in
Oakland, California, has gotten creative about helping her children thrive in a
world largely mediated by screens.
اضافة اعلان
She signed them up for online phonics tutoring and virtual
martial arts lessons. If they are distracted inside the family’s duplex, she
grabs snacks and goes with the children into the car, saying they cannot come
out until their homework is done. She has sometimes spent three hours per day
assisting with school assignments, even as she works from home for a local
nonprofit organization.
It all sometimes feels like too much to bear. Still, when
her fifth-grade son’s public school teacher told her he was years behind in
reading, she was in disbelief.
“That was very offensive to me,” she said. “I’m not putting
in myself, my hard work, his hard work, for you to tell me that he’s at
second-grade reading.”
Bonilla’s experience illustrates a roiling debate in education,
about how and even whether to measure the academic impact of the coronavirus
pandemic on the nation’s children — and how to describe learning gaps without
stigmatizing or discouraging students and families.
Studies continue to show that amid the school closures and
economic and health hardships of the past year, many young children have missed
out on mastering fundamental reading and math skills. The Biden administration
has told most states that unlike in 2020, they should plan on testing students
this year, in part to measure the “educational inequities that have been
exacerbated by the pandemic.”
But others are pushing back, especially on behalf of the
Black, Hispanic and low-income children who, research shows, have fallen
further behind over the past year. They fear that a focus on “learning loss”
could incite a moral panic that paints an entire generation as broken and say
that relatively simple, common-sense solutions can help students get back up to
speed.
“This isn’t a lost generation,” said Kayla Patrick, a policy
analyst at the Education Trust, a national advocacy group focused on low-income
students and students of color. “They just need extra support — in many cases,
the support they probably needed before the pandemic, like tutoring.”
Others go further, arguing that regardless of what
terminology is used, standardized testing to measure the impact of the pandemic
is unnecessary or even actively harmful. Voices as prominent as the former New
York City schools chancellor, Richard Carranza, and the Massachusetts Teachers
Association, the state’s largest educators union, have encouraged parents to
opt their children out of state tests during the pandemic. “We do not want to
impose additional trauma on students that have already been traumatized,”
Carranza said.
Jesse Hagopian, a Seattle high school teacher and writer,
said testing to measure the impact of the pandemic misses what students have
learned outside of physical classrooms during a year of overlapping crises in
health, politics and police violence.
“They are learning about how our society works, how racism
is used to divide,” he said. “They are learning about the failure of government
to respond to the pandemic.”
Hagopian said he believed that “learning loss” research was
being used to “prop up the multibillion-dollar industry of standardized
testing” and “rush educators back into classrooms before it’s safe to do so.”
Some of the recent research has been conducted by outfits
that create and license academic assessments, but other research has been led
by independent scholars. Both types of studies show some students are
struggling.
A preliminary national study of 98,000 students from Policy
Analysis for California Education, an independent group with ties to several
large universities, found that as of late fall, second graders were 26 percent
behind where they would have been, absent the pandemic, in their ability to
read aloud accurately and quickly. Third graders were 33 percent behind.
Those differences were equivalent to being able to read
seven to eight fewer words per minute accurately.
Heather Hough, an author of the working paper, said schools
might need to provide extra instructional time to help students catch up. But
she warned against an approach that focused only on academics, saying that
young children needed recess, playtime and social time — some of which have
been in short supply during the pandemic — to be able to absorb new information
effectively.
“That is as critical to early reading development as the
technical skills,” she said.
Another national study of more than 1 million students from
Curriculum Associates, an assessment company, found that this winter, there
were reductions of up to 16 percent in the number of elementary school students
performing at grade level in math and up to 10 percent in the number of
students performing at grade level in reading.
While there are deficits across demographic groups, the gaps
were larger in schools that serve predominantly Black, Hispanic or low-income
students.
At least one large study found no decline in fall reading
performance and only modest losses in math. But testing experts caution that
the true impact of the pandemic on learning could be greater than is currently
visible. Many of the students most at risk academically are missing from
research because they are participating irregularly in online learning, have
not been tested or have dropped off public school enrollment rolls altogether.
In addition, some students have been tested at home, where they could have had
assistance from adults.
Debates about the extent of missed learning are more than
academic. If remote school is actively harming children’s skill development, it
becomes harder for teachers unions, school boards or administrators to argue
that schools should remain shuttered as vaccines roll out across the nation or
should operate only on limited schedules.
Nationwide, about half of students attend schools that are
currently offering daily, in-person learning. Federal data shows stark
disparities. As of January, the majority of Black, Hispanic and Asian American
fourth graders were learning fully remotely, compared with one-quarter of white
fourth graders. And West Coast schools are lagging significantly behind in
reopening.
It is not yet clear from research to what extent school
closures have driven learning deficits during the pandemic as opposed to the
other upheavals families have endured, from job loss and housing instability to
illness and lack of reliable child care. Many families continue to choose
remote learning even where schools are open.
But some experts, like Patrick of the Education Trust, warn
against continued online instruction, despite its popularity with a subset of
parents and students. Research suggests that in-school tutoring from a highly
trained teacher or aide, ideally one on one or in a small group, can help
students who are behind catch up academically — services that could be paid for
with the billions of stimulus dollars that districts are set to receive from
Washington.