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"content": "\u003cp>Last Wednesday was a big day for the Sussman and Frankel family. It was the first day of school at California Creative Academy, a charter school in Los Angeles where 5-year-old Eli is newly enrolled in kindergarten.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“We were super freaked out,” Mollie Sussman told NPR, referring to herself and her husband, Brad Frankel. “We were really scared and [Eli] was pretty scared” leading up to the milestone, she said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Among her fears was that Eli, an only child, might feel overwhelmed by the transition from a small preschool to a new elementary school with kids up to the eighth grade. She worried that he might cry, that he might have a meltdown, or that he wouldn’t handle the structure of a kindergarten day with no naps.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But after participating in a class activity, where they traced outlines of one another’s hands, Sussman and her husband eased out of the classroom with no issues. “He was ready when we left. He did really well and he was super brave.” In fact, she said laughing, the only one in their three-member family who shed a tear that day was her husband.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Sussman and Frankel are not alone in their anxiety. Eli is one of more than \u003ca href=\"https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/nvsr/nvsr70/nvsr70-17.pdf\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">3.6 million children born in 2020\u003c/a> amid the COVID-19 pandemic who are walking into elementary schools across the country this fall. They’re children who came into a world full of masked adults dousing themselves in hand sanitizer. Many spent the first year of their lives either in isolation in lockdowns or with only a handful of trusted people in their bubbles. And the long-term impact on these “COVID kindergartners” remains unclear.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure class=\"wp-block-image size-large\">\u003cimg decoding=\"async\" src=\"https://npr.brightspotcdn.com/dims3/default/strip/false/crop/4800x2860+0+0/resize/1200/quality/75/format/jpeg/?url=http%3A%2F%2Fnpr-brightspot.s3.amazonaws.com%2F4c%2F9c%2Fc7bce52b46e880ddd95664a108f4%2Fgettyimages-1211233711.jpg\" alt=\"A woman stops to view a public art installation aimed at turning boarded-up shopfronts into works of art in Los Angeles on April 28, 2020.\">\u003cfigcaption>A woman stops to view a public art installation aimed at turning boarded-up shopfronts into works of art in Los Angeles on April 28, 2020. \u003ccite> (Frederic J. Brown | AFP via Getty Images)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>Research shows that \u003ca href=\"https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamapediatrics/fullarticle/2812812\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">early childhood experiences can have lasting effects\u003c/a> on development and growth, according to a 2023 study published in the \u003cem>Journal of the American Medical Association Pediatrics (JAMA Pediatrics)\u003c/em>. While nurturing experiences can increase cognitive capabilities and academic achievement, early life disadvantages can lead to a persistent deficit in skills to manage adversity, stress and self-esteem. It follows then, that parents, experts and educators are hypervigilant, tracking how the hardships of the pandemic may manifest in this generation.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Just being in utero during a highly stressful time had some developmental effects on infants,” Dani Dumitriu, a pediatrician and neuroscientist at Columbia University and chair of an ongoing study on pandemic newborns, told NPR. “They weren’t large effects but that was a very worrisome sign given that so many women gave birth during that period.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Dumitriu’s research, \u003ca href=\"https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamapediatrics/fullarticle/2787479\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">published in 2022\u003c/a>, found that 6-month-old infants born during the early months of the pandemic had slightly lower scores on a screening of their gross motor, fine motor and personal social skills, compared with a historical cohort of infants born before the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“We’re talking about things like baby being able to sit up, baby being able to reach for things, maybe engaging in a face-to-face interaction, very basic things,” she said, explaining that mothers filled out a standard developmental \u003ca href=\"https://agesandstages.com/products-pricing/asq3/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">questionnaire\u003c/a> providing the data for the study.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But, Dumitriu said, as they’ve continued to track these children and expanded the study to include more kids born pre-pandemic, they have found that the COVID babies quickly caught up. “The good news is that it looks like that trend really is restricted to the early pandemic phase of 2020 and did not continue past that year.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“A child’s brain is extraordinarily plastic or malleable,” she said. “One of the important things about child development is that what happens at 6 months is not predictive of what happens at 24 months and it’s not predictive of what happens at 5 years.”\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>Eli’s journey\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>Sussman said these findings parallel her family’s experience. As working parents, Sussman and her husband enrolled Eli in day care at 11 months. He’s since been enrolled in nursery school and pre-K. He seemed to be meeting all of the established metrics, but at about 2 years old, Sussman realized Eli wasn’t speaking at the level that her mommy apps told her he should be. “There were for sure a number of words you should know by a certain time and he didn’t know them,” she said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>A \u003ca href=\"https://www.epicresearch.org/articles/childhood-speech-development-delays-increasing-since-the-start-of-the-pandemic\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">2023 study\u003c/a> published in \u003cem>Epic Research\u003c/em> found that children who turned 2 between October and December 2021 were about 32% more likely to have a speech delay diagnosis than those who turned 2 in 2018. That rate increased dramatically, up to nearly 88%, for children who turned 2 between January and March 2023. Overall, the speech delay diagnoses increased from an average of 9% of children in 2018 to nearly 17% in the first quarter of 2023.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure class=\"wp-block-image size-large\">\u003cimg decoding=\"async\" src=\"https://npr.brightspotcdn.com/dims3/default/strip/false/crop/4873x3299+0+0/resize/1200/quality/75/format/jpeg/?url=http%3A%2F%2Fnpr-brightspot.s3.amazonaws.com%2F2c%2Fa0%2F719c556945c486c1f0234ec68556%2Fgettyimages-1275890753.jpg\" alt=\"Masked schoolchildren wait to have their portraits taken for picture day in September 2020 at Rogers International School in Stamford, Conn.\">\u003cfigcaption>Masked schoolchildren wait to have their portraits taken for picture day in September 2020 at Rogers International School in Stamford, Conn. \u003ccite> (John Moore | Getty Images North America)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>Sussman immediately sought help and enrolled Eli in speech therapy, where she was relieved to hear that this was a common issue. “The speech therapist said that they had seen an increase in the number of kids coming to speech therapy. Likely because of the lack of exposure to mouths and facial expressions, because it’s a big part of how you learn to talk.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>By the time Eli turned 3 “he was so much more verbal and really in a great place,” Sussman said.\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>Pandemic behaviors and habits that can spell trouble for kindergartners\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>Other effects of the pandemic and subsequent social-distancing practices have led to lingering, potentially detrimental behaviors in children, which can show up in kindergarten or much later, according to Dumitriu.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Among the most important is parental stress, Dumitriu said. “Many studies around the world show there’s a very well-described intergenerational effect of maternal stress during pregnancy on the developing child,” she said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Children also \u003ca href=\"https://scholar.google.com/scholar_lookup?title=Young%20children%E2%80%99s%20screen%20time%20during%20the%20first%20COVID-19%20lockdown%20in%2012%20countries.&author=C%20Bergmann&author=N%20Dimitrova&author=K%20Alaslani&publication_year=2022&journal=Sci%20Rep&volume=12&pages=2015\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">spent more time on screens\u003c/a> during lockdown than they did in a pre-pandemic world and that can make them less ready for school, according to a study published in the journal \u003cem>Nature\u003c/em>. Michelle Yang, a resident physician with Children’s Hospital of Orange County who studied screen time use in kids, said there are many dangers associated with television electronic devices for children ages 2 to 5 years. “Exposing children at this age to two to three hours of screen time showed increased likelihood of behavioral problems, poor vocabulary, and delayed milestones. This is especially true for children with special needs,” she wrote in an \u003ca href=\"https://health.choc.org/the-effects-of-screen-time-on-children-the-latest-research-parents-should-know/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">article\u003c/a> providing guidelines for parents.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>School attendance and preschool enrollment levels have also suffered since the pandemic. The U.S. Department of Education’s \u003ca href=\"https://www.ed.gov/teaching-and-administration/supporting-students/chronic-absenteeism#:~:text=The%20Department%20is%20using%20every%20tool%20in,suggests%20that%20children%20who%20are%20chronically%20absent\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">most recent study\u003c/a> on attendance found that the rate of chronic absenteeism — which is when students miss 10% or more of school — averaged 28% across the country during the 2022-2023 school year.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The results of the changes in behavior and habits are reflected in test scores, Kristen Huff, head of measurement at Curriculum Associates, a company that provides national grade level testing, told NPR.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Since school returned after the pandemic, even students who were not in school because they were too young to be in kindergarten during the [lockdowns] are coming into kindergarten behind or less prepared rather than their pre-pandemic peers,” Huff said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>According to the company’s \u003ca href=\"https://cdn.bfldr.com/LS6J0F7/at/j37vw8rh26mgjtr6sk47pq3r/ca-sosl-executive-summary-2025.pdf\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">2025 State of Student Learning report\u003c/a>, the percentage of 5-year-olds who are arriving kindergarten-ready in reading has declined by 8 points since 2019 — from 89% to 81%. The declines are even greater in math. Only 70% of kindergarten students are testing at expected grade level, compared to the 2019 cohort, which was at 84% in 2019. The disparities are deeper still when broken out by race and income. Since 2023, majority Black and majority Hispanic schools continue to show a steady increase in test scores across most grades, but their test scores remain well below their white counterparts. The same is true for students whose families live on incomes below $50,000 per year versus those living above $75,000 annually.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The good news, Huff said, is that students are making strides. But while they’re growing at comparable rates to pre-pandemic, the improvement is not enough to make up for the academic ground that has been lost, she added.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“That is why we need to focus on that acceleration in the rate at which they’re learning,” Huff said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Like Dumitriu, Huff focuses on the malleability of children’s brains as well as the expertise of educators. They just need the right resources.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad floatright]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“We know what works,” she said. “We know what is needed in classrooms, in schools and for students and to support teachers. And when those things are in place, these schools — even when they’re in low-income communities — can buck the trend.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cdiv class=\"npr-transcript\">\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Transcript:\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>LEILA FADEL, HOST:\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Millions of children born during the COVID pandemic start kindergarten this year. NPR’s Vanessa Romo went to find out – are the nation’s 5-year-olds ready for school?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>VANESSA ROMO, BYLINE: Last Wednesday was a big day for the Sussman and Frankel family. It was 5-year-old Eli Frankel’s first day of school at California Creative Academy, a charter school in Los Angeles. Mollie Sussman, his mom, told me about the day sitting at her kitchen table while the Hot Wheels-obsessed boy played next to us.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>MOLLIE SUSSMAN: As parents, every single milestone you go through feels like the biggest deal when you’re in it. And then afterwards, you’re like, oh, like, we got through it. It’s totally fine.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>ROMO: Yeah.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Among her fears was that Eli might feel overwhelmed by the transition from a small preschool to a bigger school. She worried that he wouldn’t be able to handle the structure or just cry. But to her surprise, only her husband teared up.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>ELI FRANKEL: I was playing a monster truck race (ph).\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>UNIDENTIFIED PERSON: And who’s winning?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>ROMO: The Sussman and Frankels are not alone in their anxiety. Three-point-six million children were born in 2020 as the coronavirus ushered in one of the most extraordinary periods in modern history. And scientists are still trying to figure out how this generation may be different.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>DANI DUMITRIU: First of all, I’d say we’re way too early, right? Like, trying to say something about 5-year-olds right now is scientifically impossible because science lags by at least a couple years.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>ROMO: That’s Dani Dumitriu at Columbia University. She’s the co-chair of an ongoing study on pandemic newborns. One of their first findings, published in 2023, was that 6-month-old infants born during the early months of the pandemic showed slight developmental delays in their motor skills. That was particularly troubling, Dumitriu said, because there’s ample research showing that early childhood experiences can have lasting effects on development and growth. But the good news is that those infants quickly caught up, she said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>DUMITRIU: The early child brain is extraordinarily malleable, and any measure that we use in that very early phase is not really predictive. It’s just an indicator of that child in that moment.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>ROMO: Kristen Huff has been tracking the academic growth of K-through-12 kids since before the pandemic. Huff is head of measurement at Curriculum Associates, which provides national-grade-level testing. Their latest study, which covers the 2023-24 school year, found that…\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>KRISTEN HUFF: Even students who were not in school because they were too young to be in kindergarten during the pandemic are coming into kindergarten less prepared than their pre-pandemic peers.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>ROMO: According to the report, just 81% of 5-year-olds are arriving kindergarten-ready in reading. That’s down from 89% in 2019. And scores dropped 14 points in math. Still, Huff is optimistic about the future.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>HUFF: We know what is needed in classrooms and schools and to support teachers. And when those things are in place, these schools, they can buck the trend.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>ROMO: That’s just going to take a lot of commitment from the grown-ups, she said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Vanessa Romo, NPR News.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>(SOUNDBITE OF DJ SHADOW, ET AL.’S “SCARS”)\u003c/p>\n\u003c/div>\n\n",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>Last Wednesday was a big day for the Sussman and Frankel family. It was the first day of school at California Creative Academy, a charter school in Los Angeles where 5-year-old Eli is newly enrolled in kindergarten.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“We were super freaked out,” Mollie Sussman told NPR, referring to herself and her husband, Brad Frankel. “We were really scared and [Eli] was pretty scared” leading up to the milestone, she said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Among her fears was that Eli, an only child, might feel overwhelmed by the transition from a small preschool to a new elementary school with kids up to the eighth grade. She worried that he might cry, that he might have a meltdown, or that he wouldn’t handle the structure of a kindergarten day with no naps.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But after participating in a class activity, where they traced outlines of one another’s hands, Sussman and her husband eased out of the classroom with no issues. “He was ready when we left. He did really well and he was super brave.” In fact, she said laughing, the only one in their three-member family who shed a tear that day was her husband.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Sussman and Frankel are not alone in their anxiety. Eli is one of more than \u003ca href=\"https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/nvsr/nvsr70/nvsr70-17.pdf\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">3.6 million children born in 2020\u003c/a> amid the COVID-19 pandemic who are walking into elementary schools across the country this fall. They’re children who came into a world full of masked adults dousing themselves in hand sanitizer. Many spent the first year of their lives either in isolation in lockdowns or with only a handful of trusted people in their bubbles. And the long-term impact on these “COVID kindergartners” remains unclear.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure class=\"wp-block-image size-large\">\u003cimg decoding=\"async\" src=\"https://npr.brightspotcdn.com/dims3/default/strip/false/crop/4800x2860+0+0/resize/1200/quality/75/format/jpeg/?url=http%3A%2F%2Fnpr-brightspot.s3.amazonaws.com%2F4c%2F9c%2Fc7bce52b46e880ddd95664a108f4%2Fgettyimages-1211233711.jpg\" alt=\"A woman stops to view a public art installation aimed at turning boarded-up shopfronts into works of art in Los Angeles on April 28, 2020.\">\u003cfigcaption>A woman stops to view a public art installation aimed at turning boarded-up shopfronts into works of art in Los Angeles on April 28, 2020. \u003ccite> (Frederic J. Brown | AFP via Getty Images)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>Research shows that \u003ca href=\"https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamapediatrics/fullarticle/2812812\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">early childhood experiences can have lasting effects\u003c/a> on development and growth, according to a 2023 study published in the \u003cem>Journal of the American Medical Association Pediatrics (JAMA Pediatrics)\u003c/em>. While nurturing experiences can increase cognitive capabilities and academic achievement, early life disadvantages can lead to a persistent deficit in skills to manage adversity, stress and self-esteem. It follows then, that parents, experts and educators are hypervigilant, tracking how the hardships of the pandemic may manifest in this generation.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Just being in utero during a highly stressful time had some developmental effects on infants,” Dani Dumitriu, a pediatrician and neuroscientist at Columbia University and chair of an ongoing study on pandemic newborns, told NPR. “They weren’t large effects but that was a very worrisome sign given that so many women gave birth during that period.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Dumitriu’s research, \u003ca href=\"https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamapediatrics/fullarticle/2787479\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">published in 2022\u003c/a>, found that 6-month-old infants born during the early months of the pandemic had slightly lower scores on a screening of their gross motor, fine motor and personal social skills, compared with a historical cohort of infants born before the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“We’re talking about things like baby being able to sit up, baby being able to reach for things, maybe engaging in a face-to-face interaction, very basic things,” she said, explaining that mothers filled out a standard developmental \u003ca href=\"https://agesandstages.com/products-pricing/asq3/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">questionnaire\u003c/a> providing the data for the study.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But, Dumitriu said, as they’ve continued to track these children and expanded the study to include more kids born pre-pandemic, they have found that the COVID babies quickly caught up. “The good news is that it looks like that trend really is restricted to the early pandemic phase of 2020 and did not continue past that year.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“A child’s brain is extraordinarily plastic or malleable,” she said. “One of the important things about child development is that what happens at 6 months is not predictive of what happens at 24 months and it’s not predictive of what happens at 5 years.”\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>Eli’s journey\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>Sussman said these findings parallel her family’s experience. As working parents, Sussman and her husband enrolled Eli in day care at 11 months. He’s since been enrolled in nursery school and pre-K. He seemed to be meeting all of the established metrics, but at about 2 years old, Sussman realized Eli wasn’t speaking at the level that her mommy apps told her he should be. “There were for sure a number of words you should know by a certain time and he didn’t know them,” she said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>A \u003ca href=\"https://www.epicresearch.org/articles/childhood-speech-development-delays-increasing-since-the-start-of-the-pandemic\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">2023 study\u003c/a> published in \u003cem>Epic Research\u003c/em> found that children who turned 2 between October and December 2021 were about 32% more likely to have a speech delay diagnosis than those who turned 2 in 2018. That rate increased dramatically, up to nearly 88%, for children who turned 2 between January and March 2023. Overall, the speech delay diagnoses increased from an average of 9% of children in 2018 to nearly 17% in the first quarter of 2023.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure class=\"wp-block-image size-large\">\u003cimg decoding=\"async\" src=\"https://npr.brightspotcdn.com/dims3/default/strip/false/crop/4873x3299+0+0/resize/1200/quality/75/format/jpeg/?url=http%3A%2F%2Fnpr-brightspot.s3.amazonaws.com%2F2c%2Fa0%2F719c556945c486c1f0234ec68556%2Fgettyimages-1275890753.jpg\" alt=\"Masked schoolchildren wait to have their portraits taken for picture day in September 2020 at Rogers International School in Stamford, Conn.\">\u003cfigcaption>Masked schoolchildren wait to have their portraits taken for picture day in September 2020 at Rogers International School in Stamford, Conn. \u003ccite> (John Moore | Getty Images North America)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>Sussman immediately sought help and enrolled Eli in speech therapy, where she was relieved to hear that this was a common issue. “The speech therapist said that they had seen an increase in the number of kids coming to speech therapy. Likely because of the lack of exposure to mouths and facial expressions, because it’s a big part of how you learn to talk.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>By the time Eli turned 3 “he was so much more verbal and really in a great place,” Sussman said.\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>Pandemic behaviors and habits that can spell trouble for kindergartners\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>Other effects of the pandemic and subsequent social-distancing practices have led to lingering, potentially detrimental behaviors in children, which can show up in kindergarten or much later, according to Dumitriu.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Among the most important is parental stress, Dumitriu said. “Many studies around the world show there’s a very well-described intergenerational effect of maternal stress during pregnancy on the developing child,” she said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Children also \u003ca href=\"https://scholar.google.com/scholar_lookup?title=Young%20children%E2%80%99s%20screen%20time%20during%20the%20first%20COVID-19%20lockdown%20in%2012%20countries.&author=C%20Bergmann&author=N%20Dimitrova&author=K%20Alaslani&publication_year=2022&journal=Sci%20Rep&volume=12&pages=2015\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">spent more time on screens\u003c/a> during lockdown than they did in a pre-pandemic world and that can make them less ready for school, according to a study published in the journal \u003cem>Nature\u003c/em>. Michelle Yang, a resident physician with Children’s Hospital of Orange County who studied screen time use in kids, said there are many dangers associated with television electronic devices for children ages 2 to 5 years. “Exposing children at this age to two to three hours of screen time showed increased likelihood of behavioral problems, poor vocabulary, and delayed milestones. This is especially true for children with special needs,” she wrote in an \u003ca href=\"https://health.choc.org/the-effects-of-screen-time-on-children-the-latest-research-parents-should-know/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">article\u003c/a> providing guidelines for parents.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>School attendance and preschool enrollment levels have also suffered since the pandemic. The U.S. Department of Education’s \u003ca href=\"https://www.ed.gov/teaching-and-administration/supporting-students/chronic-absenteeism#:~:text=The%20Department%20is%20using%20every%20tool%20in,suggests%20that%20children%20who%20are%20chronically%20absent\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">most recent study\u003c/a> on attendance found that the rate of chronic absenteeism — which is when students miss 10% or more of school — averaged 28% across the country during the 2022-2023 school year.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The results of the changes in behavior and habits are reflected in test scores, Kristen Huff, head of measurement at Curriculum Associates, a company that provides national grade level testing, told NPR.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Since school returned after the pandemic, even students who were not in school because they were too young to be in kindergarten during the [lockdowns] are coming into kindergarten behind or less prepared rather than their pre-pandemic peers,” Huff said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>According to the company’s \u003ca href=\"https://cdn.bfldr.com/LS6J0F7/at/j37vw8rh26mgjtr6sk47pq3r/ca-sosl-executive-summary-2025.pdf\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">2025 State of Student Learning report\u003c/a>, the percentage of 5-year-olds who are arriving kindergarten-ready in reading has declined by 8 points since 2019 — from 89% to 81%. The declines are even greater in math. Only 70% of kindergarten students are testing at expected grade level, compared to the 2019 cohort, which was at 84% in 2019. The disparities are deeper still when broken out by race and income. Since 2023, majority Black and majority Hispanic schools continue to show a steady increase in test scores across most grades, but their test scores remain well below their white counterparts. The same is true for students whose families live on incomes below $50,000 per year versus those living above $75,000 annually.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The good news, Huff said, is that students are making strides. But while they’re growing at comparable rates to pre-pandemic, the improvement is not enough to make up for the academic ground that has been lost, she added.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“That is why we need to focus on that acceleration in the rate at which they’re learning,” Huff said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Like Dumitriu, Huff focuses on the malleability of children’s brains as well as the expertise of educators. They just need the right resources.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“We know what works,” she said. “We know what is needed in classrooms, in schools and for students and to support teachers. And when those things are in place, these schools — even when they’re in low-income communities — can buck the trend.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cdiv class=\"npr-transcript\">\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Transcript:\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>LEILA FADEL, HOST:\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Millions of children born during the COVID pandemic start kindergarten this year. NPR’s Vanessa Romo went to find out – are the nation’s 5-year-olds ready for school?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>VANESSA ROMO, BYLINE: Last Wednesday was a big day for the Sussman and Frankel family. It was 5-year-old Eli Frankel’s first day of school at California Creative Academy, a charter school in Los Angeles. Mollie Sussman, his mom, told me about the day sitting at her kitchen table while the Hot Wheels-obsessed boy played next to us.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>MOLLIE SUSSMAN: As parents, every single milestone you go through feels like the biggest deal when you’re in it. And then afterwards, you’re like, oh, like, we got through it. It’s totally fine.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>ROMO: Yeah.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Among her fears was that Eli might feel overwhelmed by the transition from a small preschool to a bigger school. She worried that he wouldn’t be able to handle the structure or just cry. But to her surprise, only her husband teared up.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>ELI FRANKEL: I was playing a monster truck race (ph).\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>UNIDENTIFIED PERSON: And who’s winning?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>ROMO: The Sussman and Frankels are not alone in their anxiety. Three-point-six million children were born in 2020 as the coronavirus ushered in one of the most extraordinary periods in modern history. And scientists are still trying to figure out how this generation may be different.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>DANI DUMITRIU: First of all, I’d say we’re way too early, right? Like, trying to say something about 5-year-olds right now is scientifically impossible because science lags by at least a couple years.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>ROMO: That’s Dani Dumitriu at Columbia University. She’s the co-chair of an ongoing study on pandemic newborns. One of their first findings, published in 2023, was that 6-month-old infants born during the early months of the pandemic showed slight developmental delays in their motor skills. That was particularly troubling, Dumitriu said, because there’s ample research showing that early childhood experiences can have lasting effects on development and growth. But the good news is that those infants quickly caught up, she said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>DUMITRIU: The early child brain is extraordinarily malleable, and any measure that we use in that very early phase is not really predictive. It’s just an indicator of that child in that moment.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>ROMO: Kristen Huff has been tracking the academic growth of K-through-12 kids since before the pandemic. Huff is head of measurement at Curriculum Associates, which provides national-grade-level testing. Their latest study, which covers the 2023-24 school year, found that…\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>KRISTEN HUFF: Even students who were not in school because they were too young to be in kindergarten during the pandemic are coming into kindergarten less prepared than their pre-pandemic peers.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>ROMO: According to the report, just 81% of 5-year-olds are arriving kindergarten-ready in reading. That’s down from 89% in 2019. And scores dropped 14 points in math. Still, Huff is optimistic about the future.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>HUFF: We know what is needed in classrooms and schools and to support teachers. And when those things are in place, these schools, they can buck the trend.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>ROMO: That’s just going to take a lot of commitment from the grown-ups, she said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Vanessa Romo, NPR News.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>(SOUNDBITE OF DJ SHADOW, ET AL.’S “SCARS”)\u003c/p>\n\u003c/div>\n\n\u003c/div>\u003c/p>",
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"content": "\u003cp>Four years after the pandemic shuttered schools, we all want to be done with COVID. But the latest analyses from three assessment companies paint a grim picture of where U.S. children are academically and that merits coverage. While there are isolated bright spots, the general trend is stagnation.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>One report documented that U.S. students did not make progress in catching up in the most recent 2023-24 school year and slid even further behind in math and reading, exacerbating pandemic learning losses.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“At the end of 2021-22, we optimistically concluded that the worst was behind us and that recovery had begun,” wrote Karyn Lewis, a researcher at NWEA, one of the assessment companies. “Unfortunately, data from the past two school years no longer support this conclusion. Growth has slowed to lag pre-pandemic rates, resulting in achievement gaps that continue to widen, and in some cases, now surpass what we had previously deemed as the low point.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The starkest example is eighth grade students, who were in fourth grade when the pandemic first erupted in March of 2020. They now need nine months of additional school to catch up, according to \u003ca href=\"https://www.nwea.org/uploads/recovery-still-illlusive-2023-24-student-achievement-highlights-persistent-achievement-gaps-and-a-long-road-ahead_NWEA_researchBrief.pdf\">NWEA’s analysis, released in July 2024\u003c/a>. “This is a crisis moment with middle schoolers,” said Lewis. “Where are we going to find an additional year to make up for these kiddos before they leave the education system?”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>All three analyses were produced by for-profit companies that sell assessments to schools. Teachers or parents may be familiar with them by the names of their tests: MAP, i-Ready and Star. Unlike annual state tests, these interim assessments are administered at least twice a year to millions of students around the nation to help track progress, or learning, during the year. These companies may have a business motive in sounding an alarm to sell more of their products, but the reports are produced by well-regarded education statisticians.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Curriculum Associates did not detect as much deterioration as NWEA, but did find widespread stagnation in 2023-24, according to a \u003ca href=\"https://www.curriculumassociates.com/research-and-efficacy/annual-report-the-state-of-student-learning-in-2024?utm_source=ca-mktg_IRY-2469478&utm_medium=web&utm_campaign=701PJ00000CQkY9YAL&utm_content=SoSL-Research-Awareness_research&utm_term=&utm_creative_format=native&utm_marketing_tactic=aws-rev-nat-nat\">report released on August 19, 2024\u003c/a>. Their researcher Kristen Huff described the numerical differences as tiny ones that have to do with the fact that these are different tests, taken by different students and use different methods for crunching the numbers. The main takeaway from all the reports, she said, is the same. “As a nation, we are still seeing the lasting impact of the disruption to schooling and learning,” said Huff, vice president of assessment and research at Curriculum Associates.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In short, children remain behind and haven’t recovered. That matters for these children’s future employment prospects and standard of living. Ultimately, a less productive labor force could hamper the U.S. economy, according to projections from economists and consulting firms.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>It’s important to emphasize that individual students haven’t regressed or don’t know less now than they used to. The average sixth grader knows more today in 2024 than he or she did in first grade in 2019. But the pace of learning, or rate of academic growth, has been rocky since 2020, with some students missing many months of instruction. Sixth graders in 2024, on average, know far less than sixth graders did back in 2019.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Renaissance, a third company, found a mottled pattern of recovery, stagnation and deterioration depending upon the grade and the subject. (The company shared its preliminary mid-year results with me via email on Aug. 14, 2024.) Most concerning, it found that the math skills of older students in grades eight to 12 are progressing so slowly that they are even further behind than they were after the initial pandemic losses. These students were in grades four through eight when the pandemic first hit in March 2020.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>On the bright side, the Renaissance analysis found that first grade students in 2023-24 had completely recovered and their performance matched what first graders used to be able to do before the pandemic. Elementary school students in grades two to six were making slow progress, and remained behind.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Curriculum Associates pointed to two unexpected bright spots in its assessment results. One is phonics. At the end of the 2023-24 school year, nearly as many kindergarteners were on grade level for phonics skills as kindergarteners in 2019. That’s four out of five kindergarteners. The company also found that schools where the majority of students are Black were showing relatively better catch-up progress. “It’s small, and disparities still exist, but it’s a sign of hope,” said Curriculum Associates’s Huff.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Here are three charts and tables from the three different testing companies that provide different snapshots of where we are.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_64500\" class=\"wp-caption alignnone\" style=\"max-width: 800px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"wp-image-64500 size-medium\" src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2024/08/JB1-800x530.png\" alt=\"\" width=\"800\" height=\"530\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2024/08/JB1-800x530.png 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2024/08/JB1-160x106.png 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2024/08/JB1-768x509.png 768w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2024/08/JB1.png 977w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 800px) 100vw, 800px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">The bars show the difference between MAP test scores before the pandemic and in the spring of 2024 for each grade. The green line translates those deficits into months of additional schooling, based on how much students typically learned in a school year before COVID hit. For example, fifth graders would need an additional 3.9 months of math instruction over and above the usual school year to catch up to where fifth graders were before the virus. Source: Figure 3, “Recovery still elusive: 2023–24 student achievement highlights persistent achievement gaps and a long road ahead,” NWEA (July 2024).\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_64501\" class=\"wp-caption alignnone\" style=\"max-width: 800px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-medium wp-image-64501\" src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2024/08/JB2-800x430.png\" alt=\"\" width=\"800\" height=\"430\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2024/08/JB2-800x430.png 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2024/08/JB2-160x86.png 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2024/08/JB2-768x413.png 768w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2024/08/JB2.png 977w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 800px) 100vw, 800px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Almost one out of every five third graders is below grade level in reading, a big increase from one out of every eight students before the pandemic. Source: Figure 2, “State of Student Learning in 2024” Curriculum Associates (August 19, 2024)\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_64502\" class=\"wp-caption alignnone\" style=\"max-width: 800px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"wp-image-64502 size-medium\" src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2024/08/JB3-800x435.png\" alt=\"\" width=\"800\" height=\"435\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2024/08/JB3-800x435.png 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2024/08/JB3-160x87.png 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2024/08/JB3-768x417.png 768w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2024/08/JB3.png 977w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 800px) 100vw, 800px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">The number of students who are below grade level in math is higher than it used to be before the pandemic in grades one through eight. Source: Figure 11, “State of Student Learning in 2024” Curriculum Associates (Aug. 19, 2024)\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_64503\" class=\"wp-caption alignnone\" style=\"max-width: 800px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"wp-image-64503 size-medium\" src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2024/08/Picture1-800x407.png\" alt=\"\" width=\"800\" height=\"407\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2024/08/Picture1-800x407.png 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2024/08/Picture1-160x81.png 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2024/08/Picture1-768x391.png 768w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2024/08/Picture1.png 977w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 800px) 100vw, 800px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Renaissance analysis of Star tests taken between December 2023 and March 2024 (shared with The Hechinger Report in August 2024). Final spring scores were not yet analyzed.\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>Understanding why recovery is stagnating and sometimes worsening over the past year is difficult. These test score analyses don’t offer explanations, but researchers shared a range of theories.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>One is that once students have a lot of holes in their foundational skills, it’s really hard for them to learn new grade-level topics each year.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“I think this is a problem that’s growing and building on itself,” said NWEA’s Lewis. She cited the example of a sixth grader who is still struggling to read. “Does a sixth-grade teacher have the same skills and tools to teach reading that a second or third grade teacher does? I doubt that’s the case.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Curriculum Associates’s Huff speculated that the whole classroom changes when a high percentage of students are behind. A teacher may have been able to give more individual attention to a small group of students who are struggling, but it’s harder to attend to individual gaps when so many students have them. It’s also harder to keep up with the traditional pace of instruction when so many students are behind.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>One high school math teacher told me that she thinks learning failed to recover and continued to deteriorate because schools didn’t rush to fill the gaps right away. This teacher said that when in-person school resumed in her city in 2021, administrators discouraged her from reviewing old topics that students had missed and told her to move forward with grade-level material.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“The word that was going around was ‘acceleration not remediation’,” the teacher said. “These kids just missed 18 months of school. Maybe you can do that in social studies. But math builds upon itself. If I miss sixth, seventh and eighth grade, how am I going to do quadratic equations? How am I going to factor? The worst thing they ever did was not provide that remediation as soon as they walked back in the door.” This educator quit her public school teaching job in 2022 and has since been tutoring students to help them catch up from pandemic learning losses.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Chronic absenteeism is another big factor. If you don’t show up to school, you’re not likely to catch up. \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/mindshift/63191/how-can-high-rates-of-absenteeism-coexist-with-high-daily-attendance\">More than one in four students in the 2022-23 school year were chronically absent\u003c/a>, missing at least 10% of the school year.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Deteriorating mental health is also a leading theory for school struggles. A \u003ca href=\"https://cesr.usc.edu/documents/A_Nations_Children_at%20Risk_Insights_on_Childrens_Mental_Health_from_The_Understanding_America_Study.pdf\">study by researchers at the University of Southern California\u003c/a>, released Aug. 15, 2024, documented widespread psychological distress among teenage girls and preteen boys since the pandemic. Preteen boys were likely to struggle with hyperactivity, inattentiveness and conduct, such as losing their temper and fighting. These mental health struggles correlated with absenteeism and low grades.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>It’s easy to jump to the conclusion that the $190 billion that the federal government gave to schools for pandemic recovery didn’t work. (The deadline for signing contracts to spend whatever is left of that money is September 2024.) But that doesn’t tell the whole story. Most of the spending was targeted at reopening schools and upgrading heating, cooling and air ventilation systems. A much smaller amount went to academic recovery, such as \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/mindshift/tag/tutoring\">tutoring\u003c/a> or summer school. Earlier this summer two separate groups of academic researchers concluded that this money \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/mindshift/64123/pandemic-aid-to-schools-paid-off-but-we-dont-know-how\">led to modest academic gains for students\u003c/a>. The problem is that so much more is still needed.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad floatright]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>This story about \u003c/em>\u003ca href=\"https://hechingerreport.org/proof-points-kids-struggling-four-years-after-the-pandemic/\">\u003cem>academic recovery\u003c/em>\u003c/a>\u003cem> was written by Jill Barshay and produced by \u003c/em>\u003ca href=\"https://hechingerreport.org/special-reports/higher-education/\">\u003cem>The Hechinger Report\u003c/em>\u003c/a>\u003cem>, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for \u003c/em>\u003ca href=\"https://hechingerreport.org/proofpoints/\">\u003cem>Proof Points\u003c/em>\u003c/a>\u003cem> and other \u003c/em>\u003ca href=\"https://hechingerreport.org/newsletters/\">\u003cem>Hechinger newsletters\u003c/em>\u003c/a>\u003cem>.\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\n",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>Four years after the pandemic shuttered schools, we all want to be done with COVID. But the latest analyses from three assessment companies paint a grim picture of where U.S. children are academically and that merits coverage. While there are isolated bright spots, the general trend is stagnation.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>One report documented that U.S. students did not make progress in catching up in the most recent 2023-24 school year and slid even further behind in math and reading, exacerbating pandemic learning losses.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“At the end of 2021-22, we optimistically concluded that the worst was behind us and that recovery had begun,” wrote Karyn Lewis, a researcher at NWEA, one of the assessment companies. “Unfortunately, data from the past two school years no longer support this conclusion. Growth has slowed to lag pre-pandemic rates, resulting in achievement gaps that continue to widen, and in some cases, now surpass what we had previously deemed as the low point.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The starkest example is eighth grade students, who were in fourth grade when the pandemic first erupted in March of 2020. They now need nine months of additional school to catch up, according to \u003ca href=\"https://www.nwea.org/uploads/recovery-still-illlusive-2023-24-student-achievement-highlights-persistent-achievement-gaps-and-a-long-road-ahead_NWEA_researchBrief.pdf\">NWEA’s analysis, released in July 2024\u003c/a>. “This is a crisis moment with middle schoolers,” said Lewis. “Where are we going to find an additional year to make up for these kiddos before they leave the education system?”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>All three analyses were produced by for-profit companies that sell assessments to schools. Teachers or parents may be familiar with them by the names of their tests: MAP, i-Ready and Star. Unlike annual state tests, these interim assessments are administered at least twice a year to millions of students around the nation to help track progress, or learning, during the year. These companies may have a business motive in sounding an alarm to sell more of their products, but the reports are produced by well-regarded education statisticians.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Curriculum Associates did not detect as much deterioration as NWEA, but did find widespread stagnation in 2023-24, according to a \u003ca href=\"https://www.curriculumassociates.com/research-and-efficacy/annual-report-the-state-of-student-learning-in-2024?utm_source=ca-mktg_IRY-2469478&utm_medium=web&utm_campaign=701PJ00000CQkY9YAL&utm_content=SoSL-Research-Awareness_research&utm_term=&utm_creative_format=native&utm_marketing_tactic=aws-rev-nat-nat\">report released on August 19, 2024\u003c/a>. Their researcher Kristen Huff described the numerical differences as tiny ones that have to do with the fact that these are different tests, taken by different students and use different methods for crunching the numbers. The main takeaway from all the reports, she said, is the same. “As a nation, we are still seeing the lasting impact of the disruption to schooling and learning,” said Huff, vice president of assessment and research at Curriculum Associates.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In short, children remain behind and haven’t recovered. That matters for these children’s future employment prospects and standard of living. Ultimately, a less productive labor force could hamper the U.S. economy, according to projections from economists and consulting firms.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>It’s important to emphasize that individual students haven’t regressed or don’t know less now than they used to. The average sixth grader knows more today in 2024 than he or she did in first grade in 2019. But the pace of learning, or rate of academic growth, has been rocky since 2020, with some students missing many months of instruction. Sixth graders in 2024, on average, know far less than sixth graders did back in 2019.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Renaissance, a third company, found a mottled pattern of recovery, stagnation and deterioration depending upon the grade and the subject. (The company shared its preliminary mid-year results with me via email on Aug. 14, 2024.) Most concerning, it found that the math skills of older students in grades eight to 12 are progressing so slowly that they are even further behind than they were after the initial pandemic losses. These students were in grades four through eight when the pandemic first hit in March 2020.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>On the bright side, the Renaissance analysis found that first grade students in 2023-24 had completely recovered and their performance matched what first graders used to be able to do before the pandemic. Elementary school students in grades two to six were making slow progress, and remained behind.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Curriculum Associates pointed to two unexpected bright spots in its assessment results. One is phonics. At the end of the 2023-24 school year, nearly as many kindergarteners were on grade level for phonics skills as kindergarteners in 2019. That’s four out of five kindergarteners. The company also found that schools where the majority of students are Black were showing relatively better catch-up progress. “It’s small, and disparities still exist, but it’s a sign of hope,” said Curriculum Associates’s Huff.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Here are three charts and tables from the three different testing companies that provide different snapshots of where we are.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_64500\" class=\"wp-caption alignnone\" style=\"max-width: 800px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"wp-image-64500 size-medium\" src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2024/08/JB1-800x530.png\" alt=\"\" width=\"800\" height=\"530\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2024/08/JB1-800x530.png 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2024/08/JB1-160x106.png 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2024/08/JB1-768x509.png 768w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2024/08/JB1.png 977w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 800px) 100vw, 800px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">The bars show the difference between MAP test scores before the pandemic and in the spring of 2024 for each grade. The green line translates those deficits into months of additional schooling, based on how much students typically learned in a school year before COVID hit. For example, fifth graders would need an additional 3.9 months of math instruction over and above the usual school year to catch up to where fifth graders were before the virus. Source: Figure 3, “Recovery still elusive: 2023–24 student achievement highlights persistent achievement gaps and a long road ahead,” NWEA (July 2024).\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_64501\" class=\"wp-caption alignnone\" style=\"max-width: 800px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-medium wp-image-64501\" src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2024/08/JB2-800x430.png\" alt=\"\" width=\"800\" height=\"430\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2024/08/JB2-800x430.png 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2024/08/JB2-160x86.png 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2024/08/JB2-768x413.png 768w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2024/08/JB2.png 977w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 800px) 100vw, 800px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Almost one out of every five third graders is below grade level in reading, a big increase from one out of every eight students before the pandemic. Source: Figure 2, “State of Student Learning in 2024” Curriculum Associates (August 19, 2024)\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_64502\" class=\"wp-caption alignnone\" style=\"max-width: 800px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"wp-image-64502 size-medium\" src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2024/08/JB3-800x435.png\" alt=\"\" width=\"800\" height=\"435\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2024/08/JB3-800x435.png 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2024/08/JB3-160x87.png 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2024/08/JB3-768x417.png 768w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2024/08/JB3.png 977w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 800px) 100vw, 800px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">The number of students who are below grade level in math is higher than it used to be before the pandemic in grades one through eight. Source: Figure 11, “State of Student Learning in 2024” Curriculum Associates (Aug. 19, 2024)\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_64503\" class=\"wp-caption alignnone\" style=\"max-width: 800px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"wp-image-64503 size-medium\" src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2024/08/Picture1-800x407.png\" alt=\"\" width=\"800\" height=\"407\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2024/08/Picture1-800x407.png 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2024/08/Picture1-160x81.png 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2024/08/Picture1-768x391.png 768w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2024/08/Picture1.png 977w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 800px) 100vw, 800px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Renaissance analysis of Star tests taken between December 2023 and March 2024 (shared with The Hechinger Report in August 2024). Final spring scores were not yet analyzed.\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>Understanding why recovery is stagnating and sometimes worsening over the past year is difficult. These test score analyses don’t offer explanations, but researchers shared a range of theories.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>One is that once students have a lot of holes in their foundational skills, it’s really hard for them to learn new grade-level topics each year.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“I think this is a problem that’s growing and building on itself,” said NWEA’s Lewis. She cited the example of a sixth grader who is still struggling to read. “Does a sixth-grade teacher have the same skills and tools to teach reading that a second or third grade teacher does? I doubt that’s the case.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Curriculum Associates’s Huff speculated that the whole classroom changes when a high percentage of students are behind. A teacher may have been able to give more individual attention to a small group of students who are struggling, but it’s harder to attend to individual gaps when so many students have them. It’s also harder to keep up with the traditional pace of instruction when so many students are behind.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>One high school math teacher told me that she thinks learning failed to recover and continued to deteriorate because schools didn’t rush to fill the gaps right away. This teacher said that when in-person school resumed in her city in 2021, administrators discouraged her from reviewing old topics that students had missed and told her to move forward with grade-level material.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“The word that was going around was ‘acceleration not remediation’,” the teacher said. “These kids just missed 18 months of school. Maybe you can do that in social studies. But math builds upon itself. If I miss sixth, seventh and eighth grade, how am I going to do quadratic equations? How am I going to factor? The worst thing they ever did was not provide that remediation as soon as they walked back in the door.” This educator quit her public school teaching job in 2022 and has since been tutoring students to help them catch up from pandemic learning losses.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Chronic absenteeism is another big factor. If you don’t show up to school, you’re not likely to catch up. \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/mindshift/63191/how-can-high-rates-of-absenteeism-coexist-with-high-daily-attendance\">More than one in four students in the 2022-23 school year were chronically absent\u003c/a>, missing at least 10% of the school year.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Deteriorating mental health is also a leading theory for school struggles. A \u003ca href=\"https://cesr.usc.edu/documents/A_Nations_Children_at%20Risk_Insights_on_Childrens_Mental_Health_from_The_Understanding_America_Study.pdf\">study by researchers at the University of Southern California\u003c/a>, released Aug. 15, 2024, documented widespread psychological distress among teenage girls and preteen boys since the pandemic. Preteen boys were likely to struggle with hyperactivity, inattentiveness and conduct, such as losing their temper and fighting. These mental health struggles correlated with absenteeism and low grades.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>It’s easy to jump to the conclusion that the $190 billion that the federal government gave to schools for pandemic recovery didn’t work. (The deadline for signing contracts to spend whatever is left of that money is September 2024.) But that doesn’t tell the whole story. Most of the spending was targeted at reopening schools and upgrading heating, cooling and air ventilation systems. A much smaller amount went to academic recovery, such as \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/mindshift/tag/tutoring\">tutoring\u003c/a> or summer school. Earlier this summer two separate groups of academic researchers concluded that this money \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/mindshift/64123/pandemic-aid-to-schools-paid-off-but-we-dont-know-how\">led to modest academic gains for students\u003c/a>. The problem is that so much more is still needed.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>This story about \u003c/em>\u003ca href=\"https://hechingerreport.org/proof-points-kids-struggling-four-years-after-the-pandemic/\">\u003cem>academic recovery\u003c/em>\u003c/a>\u003cem> was written by Jill Barshay and produced by \u003c/em>\u003ca href=\"https://hechingerreport.org/special-reports/higher-education/\">\u003cem>The Hechinger Report\u003c/em>\u003c/a>\u003cem>, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for \u003c/em>\u003ca href=\"https://hechingerreport.org/proofpoints/\">\u003cem>Proof Points\u003c/em>\u003c/a>\u003cem> and other \u003c/em>\u003ca href=\"https://hechingerreport.org/newsletters/\">\u003cem>Hechinger newsletters\u003c/em>\u003c/a>\u003cem>.\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\n\u003c/div>\u003c/p>",
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"slug": "how-postcards-to-parents-can-help-schools-get-kids-back-to-class",
"title": "How Postcards to Parents Can Help Schools Get Kids Back to Class",
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"headTitle": "How Postcards to Parents Can Help Schools Get Kids Back to Class | KQED",
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"content": "\u003cp>\u003ca href=\"#episode-transcript\">\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003ci>View the full episode transcript.\u003c/i>\u003c/span>\u003c/a>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">When students didn’t come back to Maple Elementary after COVID-19 restrictions were lifted, Niki Espinoza, the school’s community school coordinator, noticed right away. “I live in the Shafter community, the community that I serve. I see these children out with their parents in the market, at recreational sports, games, at high school sports games and out at restaurants,” she said, emphasizing that the school community is small and close-knit. Situated in a rural district in California with nearly 300 students, Maple Elementary faced the concerning reality that nearly a third of their students were becoming chronically absent.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Chronic absenteeism, \u003c/span>\u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/mindshift/63984/as-chronic-absenteeism-soars-in-schools-most-parents-arent-sure-what-it-is\">\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">defined as students missing 10% or more of the school year\u003c/span>\u003c/a>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">, has long been a concern for educators, but the \u003c/span>\u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/mindshift/59968/a-third-of-public-school-children-were-chronically-absent-after-classrooms-re-opened-advocacy-group-says\">\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">challenges worsened during the pandemic\u003c/span>\u003c/a>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">. Stanford economist Tom Dee’s research revealed that chronic absenteeism rates across the country nearly \u003c/span>\u003ca href=\"https://www.pnas.org/doi/full/10.1073/pnas.2312249121\">\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">doubled on average\u003c/span>\u003c/a>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">. “People just fell out of the habit of going to school, and the experience of remote instruction may have diminished the perceived value of in-person learning,” he said. “This underscores a widespread failure of students to \u003c/span>\u003ca href=\"https://kqed.org/mindshift/61166/3-years-since-the-pandemic-wrecked-attendance-kids-still-arent-showing-up-to-school\">\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">reintegrate into their academic routines\u003c/span>\u003c/a>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> as they return to schools.” Other research on chronically absent students has shown that they are \u003c/span>\u003ca href=\"https://nces.ed.gov/pubs2009/attendancedata/chapter1a.asp\">\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">less likely to graduate\u003c/span>\u003c/a>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> and \u003c/span>\u003ca href=\"https://www.attendanceworks.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/06/Expanded-Learning-May-2022_final.pdf\">\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">more likely to struggle academically\u003c/span>\u003c/a>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Determined not to let students slip through the cracks, Espinoza began to seek solutions. She found a \u003c/span>\u003ca href=\"https://scholar.harvard.edu/files/todd_rogers/files/reducing_student_absenteeism.pdf\">\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">study by Stanford education researcher Carly Robinson\u003c/span>\u003c/a>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> that showed that sending mailers to parents about their child’s attendance could reduce absenteeism. Robinson acknowledged that it may seem like too simple of a solution to an issue that is affecting schools across the nation. “In many cases, schools are already communicating to parents in a variety of different ways,” she said, adding that the mailers helped parents better track missed days and understand the importance of regular attendance.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Seeing that it was a low-cost solution, Espinoza decided to try it out. “I jumped into Canva, and I created two postcards,” she said. One postcard said “We Miss You. We Want You to Come Back to School,” while the other one plainly stated how many days of school the child has missed. Espinoza’s experimentation revealed three insights that are pivotal in addressing absenteeism: Parents aren’t informed about the effect absences have on their child’s education, parents often don’t know how many days of school their child has missed, and schools must be prepared to address the root causes of absences.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_64113\" class=\"wp-caption alignnone\" style=\"max-width: 800px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-medium wp-image-64113\" src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2024/06/240216-ChronicAbsenteeism-116-BL-800x533.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"800\" height=\"533\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2024/06/240216-ChronicAbsenteeism-116-BL-800x533.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2024/06/240216-ChronicAbsenteeism-116-BL-1020x680.jpg 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2024/06/240216-ChronicAbsenteeism-116-BL-160x107.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2024/06/240216-ChronicAbsenteeism-116-BL-768x512.jpg 768w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2024/06/240216-ChronicAbsenteeism-116-BL-1536x1024.jpg 1536w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2024/06/240216-ChronicAbsenteeism-116-BL-2048x1365.jpg 2048w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2024/06/240216-ChronicAbsenteeism-116-BL-1920x1280.jpg 1920w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 800px) 100vw, 800px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">School office secretary Patricia De Julian (left) and Elvia Morales work at the front desk at Maple Elementary School in Shafter, Calif., on Feb. 16, 2024. \u003ccite>(Beth LaBerge/KQED)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003ch2>\u003cb>Attendance in early grades matters\u003c/b>\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Parents may underestimate the impact of missing a day of school here or there. However, even sporadic absences can hurt learning. Contrary to common belief, chronic absenteeism is not exclusive to middle or high school students; it begins \u003c/span>\u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/mindshift/63995/kindergartners-are-missing-a-lot-of-school-this-district-has-a-fix\">\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">as early as kindergarten\u003c/span>\u003c/a>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">. “The biggest predictor of whether a student is going to be chronically absent is their absences from the prior school year,” Robinson said. Absences during the early grades can create a pattern that continues throughout a student’s educational journey, with consequences such as \u003c/span>\u003ca href=\"http://www.floridarti.usf.edu/resources/format/pdf/Chronic%20Absenteeism%20Lit%20Review%202018.pdf\">\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">failing to reach crucial third-grade reading benchmarks\u003c/span>\u003c/a>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">, which is closely linked to future dropout rates.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Espinoza said students who missed school were missing out on other benefits, too. “When a child is on campus, they’re learning to engage with peers, they’re learning to engage with adults,” she said. “The socialization part of school is very rewarding in a young person’s life.”\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">To address parental misconceptions about attendance, Espinoza shared facts about attendance on Maple Elementary’s social media feeds in addition to sending out mailers. “I put the facts in black and white, and I started to educate my parents on why it matters,” she said. By sharing research on the importance of regular attendance, schools can help parents make sure their children consistently attend class.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>\u003cb>Keeping track of absences is hard\u003c/b>\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">In Robinson’s study, researchers used the mailers to provide \u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">parents\u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> with accurate information on their child’s attendance record because parents typically \u003c/span>\u003ca href=\"https://www.attendanceworks.org/parents-really-feel-attendance/#:~:text=Parents%20often%20don't%20know%20how%20many%20days%20their%20children%20miss.&text=only%2030%20percent%20said%20their,what%20we%20consider%20chronic%20absence\">\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">struggle to keep track of their child’s school absences\u003c/span>\u003c/a>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">. “Parents often underestimate their own child’s absences by about 50%. Let’s say my child has missed 20 days of school. If you ask me how many days I think my child has missed, I’m saying about ten days of school,” Robinson said.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">In Espinoza’s district, many parents were unaware of their child’s absenteeism or what constituted chronic absenteeism. “If I call a parent and say your child is chronically absent, they’re going to say, ‘I don’t know what that even means’,” she said. She realized that it was unfair to hold parents accountable for \u003c/span>\u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/mindshift/63984/as-chronic-absenteeism-soars-in-schools-most-parents-arent-sure-what-it-is\">\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">what they did not know\u003c/span>\u003c/a>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">. Espinoza used the mailers as a proactive means to kindly inform parents, often sending them in the family’s home language. Upon receiving the postcards, some parents reached out to her with surprise and embarrassment. “The postcards are not punitive. They’re not meant to shame. They’re there to say, ‘Hey, we love your kid. Attendance matters. We miss them’,” Espinoza said.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>\u003cb>Students may need additional support\u003c/b>\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">In response to the mailers, Espinoza saw the number of chronically absent students decrease significantly. She sent 70 postcards in her first batch – covering almost a third of students. The following term, she only needed to send out 20.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">While mailers can alert parents to their child’s absences, it’s important to recognize the root causes of absenteeism, too. \u003c/span>\u003ca href=\"https://www.attendanceworks.org/chronic-absence/addressing-chronic-absence/3-tiers-of-intervention/root-causes/\">\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Homelessness, health problems and family responsibilities\u003c/span>\u003c/a>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> are among the most common reasons for student absenteeism. In many cases, it’s not enough to just tell parents how many days of school their child has missed. When absences continued after parents received mailers, Espinoza followed up with phone calls to parents and conversations with students to learn what was going on. “There were conversations of fear. There were conversations of ‘My child feels like they’re so behind, they don’t want to go back.’ And I had to address those,” she said.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_64114\" class=\"wp-caption alignnone\" style=\"max-width: 800px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-medium wp-image-64114\" src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2024/06/240216-ChronicAbsenteeism-55-BL-800x533.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"800\" height=\"533\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2024/06/240216-ChronicAbsenteeism-55-BL-800x533.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2024/06/240216-ChronicAbsenteeism-55-BL-1020x680.jpg 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2024/06/240216-ChronicAbsenteeism-55-BL-160x107.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2024/06/240216-ChronicAbsenteeism-55-BL-768x512.jpg 768w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2024/06/240216-ChronicAbsenteeism-55-BL-1536x1024.jpg 1536w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2024/06/240216-ChronicAbsenteeism-55-BL-2048x1365.jpg 2048w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2024/06/240216-ChronicAbsenteeism-55-BL-1920x1280.jpg 1920w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 800px) 100vw, 800px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Teacher Sarah Poettgen leads a reading session for two students at Maple Elementary School in Shafter, Calif., on Feb. 16, 2024. \u003ccite>(Beth LaBerge/KQED)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Maple Elementary’s community school model, which prioritizes social services in addition to academics, proved to be instrumental in addressing the factors contributing to student absenteeism. Once Espinoza identified the reasons for a student’s irregular attendance, she could collaborate with school staff to implement targeted interventions and support services. For example, when Ayden, an eighth grader, missed school after his grandfather died, the school provided referrals to mental health services to help him cope with his grief.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">In many cases students feel as if they have fallen behind and \u003c/span>\u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/mindshift/62271/most-students-are-learning-at-typical-pace-again-but-those-who-lost-ground-during-covid-19-arent-catching-up\">\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">won’t be able to catch up again\u003c/span>\u003c/a>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">. That was the case for Noel, a third grader who felt behind in his studies after missing several days of school when pandemic restrictions were lifted. Literacy and math coaches provided additional academic support during and after school to help him catch up.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Prioritizing collaboration with parents, proactive intervention and holistic support were essential in reducing absenteeism at Maple Elementary. Throughout her attendance campaign, Espinoza recognized a child’s reluctance to attend school \u003c/span>\u003ca href=\"https://childmind.org/article/when-kids-refuse-to-go-to-school/#:~:text=School%20refusal%20usually%20goes%20along,used%20to%20treat%20school%20refusal.\">\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">could signal deeper issues\u003c/span>\u003c/a>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">, such as anxiety, bullying or academic struggles. “Attendance, if monitored and watched, can help us help children in all other areas of their lives,” she said.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c!-- iframe plugin v.4.3 wordpress.org/plugins/iframe/ -->\u003cbr>\n\u003ciframe loading=\"lazy\" frameborder=\"0\" height=\"200\" scrolling=\"no\" src=\"https://playlist.megaphone.fm/?e=KQINC4691385622&light=true\" width=\"100%\" class=\"iframe-class\">\u003c/iframe>\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2 id=\"episode-transcript\">Episode Transcript\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Nimah Gobir:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> Welcome to MindShift, the podcast about the future of learning and how we raise our kids. I’m Nimah Gobir.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Nimah Gobir:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> Do you remember perfect attendance awards? They’re used to encourage students to come to school regularly, but there is a growing debate about whether they are outdated. Word on the street is that they basically award students for having good immune systems – or even worse – for coming to school sick! Also one study found that these kinds of incentives \u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">don’t actually work.\u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> In the study, students who received perfect attendance awards essentially realized they were attending more school than their peers and then they felt like they could miss school going forward.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Nimah Gobir:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> But the importance of attendance – whether it’s perfect or not – is crucial. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Nimah Gobir: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Today’s episode is all about chronic absenteeism. That’s when a child misses 10% or more of the school year. Typically that ends up being around 18 days.\u003c/span>\u003cb> \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Chronic absenteeism has become a major concern across the country, especially after the pandemic when 93% of households had kids doing distance learning. \u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">The experience of being remote may have led kids to see less value in in-person schooling. There are several kids who miss so many days of school that they just stop attending.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Nimah Gobir:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> Niki Espinoza, was determined to not let any of her students slip through the cracks. As Maple School District’s community school coordinator, it’s her job to communicate with parents and students and make sure the school district is meeting their needs.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Niki Espinoza:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> The school community community coordinator is so important because we are bridging that gap. We are standing in the middle of the gap and saying, no, we’re on your side. I’m not your child’s teacher. I’m your child’s advocate on this campus, and I’m your advocate. And I want them to love coming to school.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Nimah Gobir: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Maple is located in the Central Valley, an agricultural region in California. Many of the families who live there work on farms or in packing sheds. Niki lives there too.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Niki Espinoza:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> I see these children out with their parents in the market, at recreational sports, games, at high school sports games, um, out at restaurants. \u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">We’re not urban. We’re in the middle of an orchard. We only have one teacher per grade.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Nimah Gobir:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> It’s a TK-8th grade with about 300 students so pretty small.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Nimah Gobir: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">So just a note here: It’s common for the word “district” to be used to describe a group of schools. But in Maple’s case things are far apart and it’s a rural area. So when we talk about Maple you might hear the word “district” or “school” and we’re talking about the same thing.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Niki Espinoza:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> Covid drove a wedge on a lot of school campuses across the nation, the parents versus the school.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Niki Espinoza:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> It was easy for students to stay home when we started to roll back in, because there was a fear attached to COVID.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Nimah Gobir: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Many students at Maple found returning to school challenging.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Dallas:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> It was kind of tricky coming back to school.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cb>Nimah Gobir: \u003c/b>Students like Dallas, an eighth grader.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Dallas: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">And then you have to interact with people and, and then also you’re like, learning online isn’t like learning in school. So whenever you went back to school, it was a way different, like, environment and everything.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Nimah Gobir:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> Noel, a third grader, faced a similar situation. His parents were hesitant to send him back to school immediately after it reopened.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Noel:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> I was one of the kids, like, took forever to get from, like, virtually to class to, like, here.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Nimah Gobir: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">When Niki noticed students’ attendance starting to lag, she started gathering all the information she could on chronic absenteeism. She did not like what she found.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Niki Espinoza:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> The absenteeism was hurting our children.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Nimah Gobir:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> Niki was not the only educator seeing attendance at her school plummet. Stanford economist Tom Dee has been doing research on the increase in chronic absenteeism across the country.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Tom Dee:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> Literally every state for which we had data available – that was nearly all of them – saw substantial increases in chronic absenteeism.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Nimah Gobir:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> According to Tom, states that kept schools closed for a long time during the 2020-21 school year tended to experience the highest rates of absenteeism later on.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Tom Dee:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> Before the pandemic, that rate of chronic absenteeism was around 14% or so, 15%, and it nearly doubled in the 21-22 school year, which was the year when virtually all our kids returned to in-person instruction.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Nimah Gobir:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> In California, where Maple is, chronic absenteeism went from 12% before the pandemic to 30% in the years after. Even though we’re getting further away from the pandemic in terms of time, things have not improved for a lot of schools.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Tom Dee:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> For many schools, their capacity to address these issues is diminishing, because right now the federal financial support that was available to them during the pandemic is beginning to expire.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Niki Espinoza: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">I believe that children excel when they’re on a school campus.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Nimah Gobir: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Here’s Niki again.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cb>Niki Espinoza: \u003c/b>I believe they excel academically, but also socially, emotionally and mentally. \u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Because when a child is on campus, they’re learning to engage with peers, they’re learning to engage with adults. And the social socialization part of school is very rewarding in a young person’s life and in a child’s life.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Nimah Gobir: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Niki recognized the need for intervention.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Niki Espinoza: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">If a child doesn’t want to come to school, that’s a red flag for me. Tell me why. Are you nervous? Is somebody hurting your feelings. Are you being bullied? Do you not understand the assignments and are you getting behind and are you scared? Is something happening at home? See if attendance is monitored and watched in Can help us help children in all other areas of their lives.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Nimah Gobir: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Luckily, one research paper Niki found provided solutions that she could use immediately. We’ll get into her next steps after the break.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb> Nimah Gobir: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">In her quest to find solutions to chronic absenteeism, Niki Espinoza came across a study by a group of researchers, including Carly Robinson. Carly is currently a researcher at Stanford University’s Graduation School of Education.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Carly Robinson: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">In general, I focus on how we can use the various people in children’s lives to improve their outcomes. So, really, how does social support impact students success? Both in terms of their achievement, but also in terms of their well-being.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Nimah Gobir:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> The research revealed something that many parents might not be aware that consistent attendance in grades K-5 is extremely important.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Carly Robinson:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> When people think of a chronically absent student, they think of, you know, students skipping class often, students that are in middle and high school, but in reality, students start being chronically absent as early as kindergarten and we see that students who are absent more in these early grades tend to have much lower academic achievement in third, fourth, fifth grade and, and beyond. And so one really important point is that the biggest predictor of whether a students is going to be chronically absent is their absences from the prior school year. And so these absences just compound.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Nimah Gobir:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> Something else Carly surfaced in her research is that when parents are asked how many days of school their child has missed, they are usually a little off. Actually they are kind of off by a lot.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Carly Robinson: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Parents often underestimate absences by about 50%. So, let’s say my child has missed 20 days of school. If you ask me how many days I think my child has missed, I’m saying about ten days of school.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Nimah Gobir:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> It’s not that the parents are being neglectful. It’s just really hard to keep track of numbers like that.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Carly Robinson:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> It’s often not presented to them by the school \u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">until they see it on report cards or at the end of the year. And so you’re not necessarily, you know, motivated to intervene if you don’t think there’s a problem.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Nimah Gobir:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> In order to address the fact that parents might not know how much school their kid is missing,\u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> Carly and the other researchers designed an intervention that would give parents information that was both timely and accurate.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Carly Robinson:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> And so what we ended up doing was sending a series of mailers with information on how many days of school their child had missed to date, and also link absenteeism with sort of negative outcomes. So highlighting that absences actually can add up to have negative implications for your child’s learning.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Nimah Gobir:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> That’s right. Snail mail turned out to be an effective intervention.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Carly Robinson:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> We did send them in the families home language. T\u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">he mailers tended to have a pretty consistent effect across different populations of students. T\u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">hey were quite responsive to when their parents received these mailers.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Nimah Gobir:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> Niki – the community school coordinator at Maple – read this study and felt energized.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Niki Espinoza:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> I created two postcards. One that says, “We’ve missed you. We want you back at school” and “Your child is actually missed 20 days.”\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Nimah Gobir:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> Carly’s study proved accurate. Niki found that parents did not know how many days their kid was absent.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Niki Espinoza: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">If I called a parent, Nimah and said, “Do you know how many days your son has missed?” They will not know. So why are we as schools holding them to accountable, um, information that they don’t know. Why are we holding them accountable? That’s not fair.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Nimah Gobir:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> They also didn’t know what those absences meant for their child. So she went all in on educating parents by taking her attendance campaign to social media.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Niki Espinoza:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> I started to push out fliers through Instagram, Facebook, through our remind messaging app, that gets a text message to our parents. Nothing was on it but true attendance facts.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Nimah Gobir: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">These facts were showing up once a week across all of Maple’s social feeds.\u003c/span> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Facts like…\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Nimah Gobir: \u003c/b>C\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">hronic absenteeism is associated with lower academic performance.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Nimah Gobir: \u003c/b>S\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">tudents who are chronically absent in early grades are less likely to reach important learning milestones.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Nimah Gobir:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> Chronic absenteeism can be a better indicator of whether a student will drop out than test scores.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Niki Espinoza:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> The postcards are not punitive. They’re not to shame. They’re there to say, “Hey, we love your kid. Attendance matters. We miss them.” In fact it says, “We miss you student. Let me help you.”\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Nimah Gobir: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Niki took a proactive approach by informing parents about their child’s absences before they reached chronic levels. She provided this information under the assumption that parents always want what is best for their child.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Nimah Gobir:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> The number of students who were chronically absent started to decrease almost immediately.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Niki Espinoza:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> We started seeing kids come back to school.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb> Nimah Gobir: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">In Niki’s first batch of mailers she sent over 70 in 2021. That’s nearly a third of students. The following quarter she only needed to send 20.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Nimah Gobir:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> But Maple’s success isn’t just about sending mailers. Niki and her team adopted a holistic approach by getting to the bottom of what is keeping kids from coming to school. Niki started with talking to parents.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Niki Espinoza:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> Begin to call and say, “Hey, I miss so-and-so, you know? Or how are they feeling? Or are they coming back?” Are they nervous to come back?\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Niki Espinoza: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">They were conversations of fear. They were conversations of my child feels like they’re so behind they don’t want to go back. And I had to address those. And I spoke to the teachers and I spoke to my admin, and I said, “Hey, we got to all be on the same page. We got to show these kids that we’re going to help you get caught up. We’re going to be there for you.”\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Nimah Gobir:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> Do you remember the third grader we heard from, Noel? When he returned to school, the thing that he was dreading the most was math.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Noel:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> I didn’t know any multiplication at all. Division too. I didn’t know any division. \u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">I need to catch up on a bunch of stuff!\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Nimah Gobir: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Even though Noel was a bit overwhelmed coming back he felt really supported in getting back on track. Part of the reason for that is he received extra support. Students who need it are taken out of classes to get more focused help.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Noel:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> If I needed help, they’d come help me, explained it to me and then gave me worksheets catch up on multiple occasions and I just do like extra multiplication to, like, catch up.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Nimah Gobir:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> Noel’s concerns were academic,\u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> but the primary causes of chronic absenteeism are homelessness, health problems, and family responsibilities.\u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> \u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">In order take on these barriers, Maple uses the community school model.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Nimah Gobir:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> That means bringing the services and resources families need onto the school campus. The wraparound services Maple has on campus include school psychologists, food pantries and housing services. Local organizations and businesses are a big part of how this small district is able to support students beyond academics. There is only one small hold up for this particular school district…\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Michael Figueroa: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Our districts are separated by miles and miles of farmland.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Nimah Gobir:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> This is Michael Figueroa. He grew up in the Central Valley and now he’s an education consultant that works with school districts in the region.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Michael Figueroa:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> There’s really very few nonprofits, if any, that support our specific region or area.\u003c/span>\u003cb> \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">So just by nature of where the kids live, they have less access to resources.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Nimah Gobir:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> To address this, Michael helped Maple and 5 neighboring rural school districts band together to form a community school consortium. That way they can pool resources.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Nimah Gobir: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">For example the consortium collectively hired a social worker who serves multiple districts at once to save money. By doing this, the social worker gets a full-time salary, which is a good motivator for them. And since the districts in the consortium share the costs, they can afford to pay for a full-time social worker together.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Michael Figueroa:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> By putting resources together, we’re just trying to get even a fraction of what schools 20 miles, 30 miles down the road just get without any supplemental funding.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Nimah Gobir:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> Being a small school in a rural area come with it’s challenges and opportunities. It sometimes hard to find the services they need, but their tight relationships with students ensure that they can identify students who needs the services it the most. For example, Ayden, an 8th grader who missed several days of school after a devastating loss.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Ayden:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> I missed like a whole week because my great grandpa passed away. This, I think it was like two months ago now. And I just really loved him, so I just, I felt like I didn’t want to go to school.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Niki Espinoza: \u003c/b>W\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">e’re here to offer services. We’re here to offer referrals, to get help. We’re here to say we’re here for your family. And that’s really the heart of the matter. That’s how we started looking at it, is let us educate. Let us equip you. No judgments, zero judgments. Tell me what’s going on. Zero judgments. Let’s help your kid.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Nimah Gobir: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Niki’s snail mail campaign coupled with Maple’s community school model has not only reduced chronic absenteeism but it also addressed underlying issues affecting student attendance.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Nimah Gobir:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> The cherry on top is that Maple also does a great job of making coming to school really appealing.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Niki Espinoza:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> A community school will not thrive if there isn’t engagement between the parents, guardians, caregivers, and the school. And that is why we work so hard with doing community engagement and having events on campus where we welcome the community on campus.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Nimah Gobir:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> They purposefully build community beyond the classroom. Ayden told me that there are fun carnival-like events a few times a year that give students an opportunity to build connections with teachers and other kids who may not be in their grade.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Ayden:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> You’re thinking about school, you’re thinking about staying in the classroom, not doing anything but Maple is a lot different because, like, it’s more outgoing.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Ayden:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> It’s a very loving school. Like, you know, everyone here, especially me, I’m like friends with like, the littlest kids.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Nimah Gobir:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> Students have a positive touch point with a teacher or staff person every day because they are excitedly greeted by staff each morning.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Ayden\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">: Maple is a school that you don’t want to miss out.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Nimah Gobir:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> This episode could not have been made with out Julie Boesch, Michael Figueroa, Niki Espinoza, Tom Dee, Carly Robinson, Bryan Easter, Patty De Julian, Nick Aguirre, Christian Brown and staff at Maple School District. Thank you to the students at Maple: Ayden, Nehemiah, Dallas, Noel and Teegan.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Nimah Gobir:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> If you’re interested in hearing more about how the community school model supports students, listen to our episode titled “How Community Schools Can Support Teachers and Families.” It features a school that created a homeless shelter on their school grounds.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Nimah Gobir:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> We’ll have more community schools episodes coming down the pipeline.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad floatright]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Nimah Gobir:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> The MindShift team includes me, Nimah Gobir, Ki Sung, Kara Newhouse, Marlena Jackson-Retondo and Jennifer Ng. Carlos Cabrera Lomeli provided additional reporting. Our editor is Chris Hambrick. Seth Samuel is our sound designer. We receive additional support from Jen Chien, Katie Sprenger, Cesar Saldaña and Holly Kernan. MindShift is supported in part by the generosity of the Stuart Foundation, William and Flora Hewlett Foundation. And members of KQED. Thank you for listening.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\n",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>\u003ca href=\"#episode-transcript\">\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003ci>View the full episode transcript.\u003c/i>\u003c/span>\u003c/a>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">When students didn’t come back to Maple Elementary after COVID-19 restrictions were lifted, Niki Espinoza, the school’s community school coordinator, noticed right away. “I live in the Shafter community, the community that I serve. I see these children out with their parents in the market, at recreational sports, games, at high school sports games and out at restaurants,” she said, emphasizing that the school community is small and close-knit. Situated in a rural district in California with nearly 300 students, Maple Elementary faced the concerning reality that nearly a third of their students were becoming chronically absent.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Chronic absenteeism, \u003c/span>\u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/mindshift/63984/as-chronic-absenteeism-soars-in-schools-most-parents-arent-sure-what-it-is\">\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">defined as students missing 10% or more of the school year\u003c/span>\u003c/a>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">, has long been a concern for educators, but the \u003c/span>\u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/mindshift/59968/a-third-of-public-school-children-were-chronically-absent-after-classrooms-re-opened-advocacy-group-says\">\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">challenges worsened during the pandemic\u003c/span>\u003c/a>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">. Stanford economist Tom Dee’s research revealed that chronic absenteeism rates across the country nearly \u003c/span>\u003ca href=\"https://www.pnas.org/doi/full/10.1073/pnas.2312249121\">\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">doubled on average\u003c/span>\u003c/a>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">. “People just fell out of the habit of going to school, and the experience of remote instruction may have diminished the perceived value of in-person learning,” he said. “This underscores a widespread failure of students to \u003c/span>\u003ca href=\"https://kqed.org/mindshift/61166/3-years-since-the-pandemic-wrecked-attendance-kids-still-arent-showing-up-to-school\">\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">reintegrate into their academic routines\u003c/span>\u003c/a>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> as they return to schools.” Other research on chronically absent students has shown that they are \u003c/span>\u003ca href=\"https://nces.ed.gov/pubs2009/attendancedata/chapter1a.asp\">\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">less likely to graduate\u003c/span>\u003c/a>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> and \u003c/span>\u003ca href=\"https://www.attendanceworks.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/06/Expanded-Learning-May-2022_final.pdf\">\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">more likely to struggle academically\u003c/span>\u003c/a>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Determined not to let students slip through the cracks, Espinoza began to seek solutions. She found a \u003c/span>\u003ca href=\"https://scholar.harvard.edu/files/todd_rogers/files/reducing_student_absenteeism.pdf\">\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">study by Stanford education researcher Carly Robinson\u003c/span>\u003c/a>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> that showed that sending mailers to parents about their child’s attendance could reduce absenteeism. Robinson acknowledged that it may seem like too simple of a solution to an issue that is affecting schools across the nation. “In many cases, schools are already communicating to parents in a variety of different ways,” she said, adding that the mailers helped parents better track missed days and understand the importance of regular attendance.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Seeing that it was a low-cost solution, Espinoza decided to try it out. “I jumped into Canva, and I created two postcards,” she said. One postcard said “We Miss You. We Want You to Come Back to School,” while the other one plainly stated how many days of school the child has missed. Espinoza’s experimentation revealed three insights that are pivotal in addressing absenteeism: Parents aren’t informed about the effect absences have on their child’s education, parents often don’t know how many days of school their child has missed, and schools must be prepared to address the root causes of absences.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_64113\" class=\"wp-caption alignnone\" style=\"max-width: 800px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-medium wp-image-64113\" src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2024/06/240216-ChronicAbsenteeism-116-BL-800x533.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"800\" height=\"533\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2024/06/240216-ChronicAbsenteeism-116-BL-800x533.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2024/06/240216-ChronicAbsenteeism-116-BL-1020x680.jpg 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2024/06/240216-ChronicAbsenteeism-116-BL-160x107.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2024/06/240216-ChronicAbsenteeism-116-BL-768x512.jpg 768w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2024/06/240216-ChronicAbsenteeism-116-BL-1536x1024.jpg 1536w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2024/06/240216-ChronicAbsenteeism-116-BL-2048x1365.jpg 2048w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2024/06/240216-ChronicAbsenteeism-116-BL-1920x1280.jpg 1920w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 800px) 100vw, 800px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">School office secretary Patricia De Julian (left) and Elvia Morales work at the front desk at Maple Elementary School in Shafter, Calif., on Feb. 16, 2024. \u003ccite>(Beth LaBerge/KQED)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003ch2>\u003cb>Attendance in early grades matters\u003c/b>\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Parents may underestimate the impact of missing a day of school here or there. However, even sporadic absences can hurt learning. Contrary to common belief, chronic absenteeism is not exclusive to middle or high school students; it begins \u003c/span>\u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/mindshift/63995/kindergartners-are-missing-a-lot-of-school-this-district-has-a-fix\">\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">as early as kindergarten\u003c/span>\u003c/a>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">. “The biggest predictor of whether a student is going to be chronically absent is their absences from the prior school year,” Robinson said. Absences during the early grades can create a pattern that continues throughout a student’s educational journey, with consequences such as \u003c/span>\u003ca href=\"http://www.floridarti.usf.edu/resources/format/pdf/Chronic%20Absenteeism%20Lit%20Review%202018.pdf\">\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">failing to reach crucial third-grade reading benchmarks\u003c/span>\u003c/a>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">, which is closely linked to future dropout rates.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Espinoza said students who missed school were missing out on other benefits, too. “When a child is on campus, they’re learning to engage with peers, they’re learning to engage with adults,” she said. “The socialization part of school is very rewarding in a young person’s life.”\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">To address parental misconceptions about attendance, Espinoza shared facts about attendance on Maple Elementary’s social media feeds in addition to sending out mailers. “I put the facts in black and white, and I started to educate my parents on why it matters,” she said. By sharing research on the importance of regular attendance, schools can help parents make sure their children consistently attend class.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>\u003cb>Keeping track of absences is hard\u003c/b>\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">In Robinson’s study, researchers used the mailers to provide \u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">parents\u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> with accurate information on their child’s attendance record because parents typically \u003c/span>\u003ca href=\"https://www.attendanceworks.org/parents-really-feel-attendance/#:~:text=Parents%20often%20don't%20know%20how%20many%20days%20their%20children%20miss.&text=only%2030%20percent%20said%20their,what%20we%20consider%20chronic%20absence\">\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">struggle to keep track of their child’s school absences\u003c/span>\u003c/a>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">. “Parents often underestimate their own child’s absences by about 50%. Let’s say my child has missed 20 days of school. If you ask me how many days I think my child has missed, I’m saying about ten days of school,” Robinson said.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">In Espinoza’s district, many parents were unaware of their child’s absenteeism or what constituted chronic absenteeism. “If I call a parent and say your child is chronically absent, they’re going to say, ‘I don’t know what that even means’,” she said. She realized that it was unfair to hold parents accountable for \u003c/span>\u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/mindshift/63984/as-chronic-absenteeism-soars-in-schools-most-parents-arent-sure-what-it-is\">\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">what they did not know\u003c/span>\u003c/a>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">. Espinoza used the mailers as a proactive means to kindly inform parents, often sending them in the family’s home language. Upon receiving the postcards, some parents reached out to her with surprise and embarrassment. “The postcards are not punitive. They’re not meant to shame. They’re there to say, ‘Hey, we love your kid. Attendance matters. We miss them’,” Espinoza said.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>\u003cb>Students may need additional support\u003c/b>\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">In response to the mailers, Espinoza saw the number of chronically absent students decrease significantly. She sent 70 postcards in her first batch – covering almost a third of students. The following term, she only needed to send out 20.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">While mailers can alert parents to their child’s absences, it’s important to recognize the root causes of absenteeism, too. \u003c/span>\u003ca href=\"https://www.attendanceworks.org/chronic-absence/addressing-chronic-absence/3-tiers-of-intervention/root-causes/\">\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Homelessness, health problems and family responsibilities\u003c/span>\u003c/a>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> are among the most common reasons for student absenteeism. In many cases, it’s not enough to just tell parents how many days of school their child has missed. When absences continued after parents received mailers, Espinoza followed up with phone calls to parents and conversations with students to learn what was going on. “There were conversations of fear. There were conversations of ‘My child feels like they’re so behind, they don’t want to go back.’ And I had to address those,” she said.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_64114\" class=\"wp-caption alignnone\" style=\"max-width: 800px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-medium wp-image-64114\" src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2024/06/240216-ChronicAbsenteeism-55-BL-800x533.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"800\" height=\"533\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2024/06/240216-ChronicAbsenteeism-55-BL-800x533.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2024/06/240216-ChronicAbsenteeism-55-BL-1020x680.jpg 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2024/06/240216-ChronicAbsenteeism-55-BL-160x107.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2024/06/240216-ChronicAbsenteeism-55-BL-768x512.jpg 768w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2024/06/240216-ChronicAbsenteeism-55-BL-1536x1024.jpg 1536w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2024/06/240216-ChronicAbsenteeism-55-BL-2048x1365.jpg 2048w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2024/06/240216-ChronicAbsenteeism-55-BL-1920x1280.jpg 1920w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 800px) 100vw, 800px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Teacher Sarah Poettgen leads a reading session for two students at Maple Elementary School in Shafter, Calif., on Feb. 16, 2024. \u003ccite>(Beth LaBerge/KQED)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Maple Elementary’s community school model, which prioritizes social services in addition to academics, proved to be instrumental in addressing the factors contributing to student absenteeism. Once Espinoza identified the reasons for a student’s irregular attendance, she could collaborate with school staff to implement targeted interventions and support services. For example, when Ayden, an eighth grader, missed school after his grandfather died, the school provided referrals to mental health services to help him cope with his grief.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">In many cases students feel as if they have fallen behind and \u003c/span>\u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/mindshift/62271/most-students-are-learning-at-typical-pace-again-but-those-who-lost-ground-during-covid-19-arent-catching-up\">\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">won’t be able to catch up again\u003c/span>\u003c/a>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">. That was the case for Noel, a third grader who felt behind in his studies after missing several days of school when pandemic restrictions were lifted. Literacy and math coaches provided additional academic support during and after school to help him catch up.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Prioritizing collaboration with parents, proactive intervention and holistic support were essential in reducing absenteeism at Maple Elementary. Throughout her attendance campaign, Espinoza recognized a child’s reluctance to attend school \u003c/span>\u003ca href=\"https://childmind.org/article/when-kids-refuse-to-go-to-school/#:~:text=School%20refusal%20usually%20goes%20along,used%20to%20treat%20school%20refusal.\">\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">could signal deeper issues\u003c/span>\u003c/a>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">, such as anxiety, bullying or academic struggles. “Attendance, if monitored and watched, can help us help children in all other areas of their lives,” she said.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c!-- iframe plugin v.4.3 wordpress.org/plugins/iframe/ -->\u003cbr>\n\u003ciframe loading=\"lazy\" frameborder=\"0\" height=\"200\" scrolling=\"no\" src=\"https://playlist.megaphone.fm/?e=KQINC4691385622&light=true\" width=\"100%\" class=\"iframe-class\">\u003c/iframe>\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2 id=\"episode-transcript\">Episode Transcript\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Nimah Gobir:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> Welcome to MindShift, the podcast about the future of learning and how we raise our kids. I’m Nimah Gobir.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Nimah Gobir:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> Do you remember perfect attendance awards? They’re used to encourage students to come to school regularly, but there is a growing debate about whether they are outdated. Word on the street is that they basically award students for having good immune systems – or even worse – for coming to school sick! Also one study found that these kinds of incentives \u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">don’t actually work.\u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> In the study, students who received perfect attendance awards essentially realized they were attending more school than their peers and then they felt like they could miss school going forward.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Nimah Gobir:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> But the importance of attendance – whether it’s perfect or not – is crucial. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Nimah Gobir: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Today’s episode is all about chronic absenteeism. That’s when a child misses 10% or more of the school year. Typically that ends up being around 18 days.\u003c/span>\u003cb> \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Chronic absenteeism has become a major concern across the country, especially after the pandemic when 93% of households had kids doing distance learning. \u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">The experience of being remote may have led kids to see less value in in-person schooling. There are several kids who miss so many days of school that they just stop attending.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Nimah Gobir:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> Niki Espinoza, was determined to not let any of her students slip through the cracks. As Maple School District’s community school coordinator, it’s her job to communicate with parents and students and make sure the school district is meeting their needs.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Niki Espinoza:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> The school community community coordinator is so important because we are bridging that gap. We are standing in the middle of the gap and saying, no, we’re on your side. I’m not your child’s teacher. I’m your child’s advocate on this campus, and I’m your advocate. And I want them to love coming to school.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Nimah Gobir: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Maple is located in the Central Valley, an agricultural region in California. Many of the families who live there work on farms or in packing sheds. Niki lives there too.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Niki Espinoza:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> I see these children out with their parents in the market, at recreational sports, games, at high school sports games, um, out at restaurants. \u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">We’re not urban. We’re in the middle of an orchard. We only have one teacher per grade.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Nimah Gobir:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> It’s a TK-8th grade with about 300 students so pretty small.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Nimah Gobir: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">So just a note here: It’s common for the word “district” to be used to describe a group of schools. But in Maple’s case things are far apart and it’s a rural area. So when we talk about Maple you might hear the word “district” or “school” and we’re talking about the same thing.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Niki Espinoza:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> Covid drove a wedge on a lot of school campuses across the nation, the parents versus the school.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Niki Espinoza:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> It was easy for students to stay home when we started to roll back in, because there was a fear attached to COVID.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Nimah Gobir: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Many students at Maple found returning to school challenging.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Dallas:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> It was kind of tricky coming back to school.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cb>Nimah Gobir: \u003c/b>Students like Dallas, an eighth grader.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Dallas: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">And then you have to interact with people and, and then also you’re like, learning online isn’t like learning in school. So whenever you went back to school, it was a way different, like, environment and everything.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Nimah Gobir:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> Noel, a third grader, faced a similar situation. His parents were hesitant to send him back to school immediately after it reopened.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Noel:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> I was one of the kids, like, took forever to get from, like, virtually to class to, like, here.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Nimah Gobir: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">When Niki noticed students’ attendance starting to lag, she started gathering all the information she could on chronic absenteeism. She did not like what she found.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Niki Espinoza:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> The absenteeism was hurting our children.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Nimah Gobir:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> Niki was not the only educator seeing attendance at her school plummet. Stanford economist Tom Dee has been doing research on the increase in chronic absenteeism across the country.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Tom Dee:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> Literally every state for which we had data available – that was nearly all of them – saw substantial increases in chronic absenteeism.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Nimah Gobir:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> According to Tom, states that kept schools closed for a long time during the 2020-21 school year tended to experience the highest rates of absenteeism later on.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Tom Dee:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> Before the pandemic, that rate of chronic absenteeism was around 14% or so, 15%, and it nearly doubled in the 21-22 school year, which was the year when virtually all our kids returned to in-person instruction.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Nimah Gobir:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> In California, where Maple is, chronic absenteeism went from 12% before the pandemic to 30% in the years after. Even though we’re getting further away from the pandemic in terms of time, things have not improved for a lot of schools.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Tom Dee:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> For many schools, their capacity to address these issues is diminishing, because right now the federal financial support that was available to them during the pandemic is beginning to expire.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Niki Espinoza: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">I believe that children excel when they’re on a school campus.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Nimah Gobir: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Here’s Niki again.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cb>Niki Espinoza: \u003c/b>I believe they excel academically, but also socially, emotionally and mentally. \u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Because when a child is on campus, they’re learning to engage with peers, they’re learning to engage with adults. And the social socialization part of school is very rewarding in a young person’s life and in a child’s life.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Nimah Gobir: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Niki recognized the need for intervention.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Niki Espinoza: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">If a child doesn’t want to come to school, that’s a red flag for me. Tell me why. Are you nervous? Is somebody hurting your feelings. Are you being bullied? Do you not understand the assignments and are you getting behind and are you scared? Is something happening at home? See if attendance is monitored and watched in Can help us help children in all other areas of their lives.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Nimah Gobir: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Luckily, one research paper Niki found provided solutions that she could use immediately. We’ll get into her next steps after the break.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb> Nimah Gobir: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">In her quest to find solutions to chronic absenteeism, Niki Espinoza came across a study by a group of researchers, including Carly Robinson. Carly is currently a researcher at Stanford University’s Graduation School of Education.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Carly Robinson: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">In general, I focus on how we can use the various people in children’s lives to improve their outcomes. So, really, how does social support impact students success? Both in terms of their achievement, but also in terms of their well-being.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Nimah Gobir:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> The research revealed something that many parents might not be aware that consistent attendance in grades K-5 is extremely important.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Carly Robinson:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> When people think of a chronically absent student, they think of, you know, students skipping class often, students that are in middle and high school, but in reality, students start being chronically absent as early as kindergarten and we see that students who are absent more in these early grades tend to have much lower academic achievement in third, fourth, fifth grade and, and beyond. And so one really important point is that the biggest predictor of whether a students is going to be chronically absent is their absences from the prior school year. And so these absences just compound.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Nimah Gobir:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> Something else Carly surfaced in her research is that when parents are asked how many days of school their child has missed, they are usually a little off. Actually they are kind of off by a lot.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Carly Robinson: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Parents often underestimate absences by about 50%. So, let’s say my child has missed 20 days of school. If you ask me how many days I think my child has missed, I’m saying about ten days of school.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Nimah Gobir:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> It’s not that the parents are being neglectful. It’s just really hard to keep track of numbers like that.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Carly Robinson:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> It’s often not presented to them by the school \u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">until they see it on report cards or at the end of the year. And so you’re not necessarily, you know, motivated to intervene if you don’t think there’s a problem.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Nimah Gobir:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> In order to address the fact that parents might not know how much school their kid is missing,\u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> Carly and the other researchers designed an intervention that would give parents information that was both timely and accurate.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Carly Robinson:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> And so what we ended up doing was sending a series of mailers with information on how many days of school their child had missed to date, and also link absenteeism with sort of negative outcomes. So highlighting that absences actually can add up to have negative implications for your child’s learning.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Nimah Gobir:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> That’s right. Snail mail turned out to be an effective intervention.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Carly Robinson:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> We did send them in the families home language. T\u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">he mailers tended to have a pretty consistent effect across different populations of students. T\u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">hey were quite responsive to when their parents received these mailers.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Nimah Gobir:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> Niki – the community school coordinator at Maple – read this study and felt energized.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Niki Espinoza:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> I created two postcards. One that says, “We’ve missed you. We want you back at school” and “Your child is actually missed 20 days.”\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Nimah Gobir:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> Carly’s study proved accurate. Niki found that parents did not know how many days their kid was absent.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Niki Espinoza: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">If I called a parent, Nimah and said, “Do you know how many days your son has missed?” They will not know. So why are we as schools holding them to accountable, um, information that they don’t know. Why are we holding them accountable? That’s not fair.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Nimah Gobir:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> They also didn’t know what those absences meant for their child. So she went all in on educating parents by taking her attendance campaign to social media.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Niki Espinoza:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> I started to push out fliers through Instagram, Facebook, through our remind messaging app, that gets a text message to our parents. Nothing was on it but true attendance facts.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Nimah Gobir: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">These facts were showing up once a week across all of Maple’s social feeds.\u003c/span> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Facts like…\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Nimah Gobir: \u003c/b>C\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">hronic absenteeism is associated with lower academic performance.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Nimah Gobir: \u003c/b>S\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">tudents who are chronically absent in early grades are less likely to reach important learning milestones.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Nimah Gobir:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> Chronic absenteeism can be a better indicator of whether a student will drop out than test scores.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Niki Espinoza:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> The postcards are not punitive. They’re not to shame. They’re there to say, “Hey, we love your kid. Attendance matters. We miss them.” In fact it says, “We miss you student. Let me help you.”\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Nimah Gobir: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Niki took a proactive approach by informing parents about their child’s absences before they reached chronic levels. She provided this information under the assumption that parents always want what is best for their child.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Nimah Gobir:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> The number of students who were chronically absent started to decrease almost immediately.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Niki Espinoza:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> We started seeing kids come back to school.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb> Nimah Gobir: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">In Niki’s first batch of mailers she sent over 70 in 2021. That’s nearly a third of students. The following quarter she only needed to send 20.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Nimah Gobir:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> But Maple’s success isn’t just about sending mailers. Niki and her team adopted a holistic approach by getting to the bottom of what is keeping kids from coming to school. Niki started with talking to parents.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Niki Espinoza:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> Begin to call and say, “Hey, I miss so-and-so, you know? Or how are they feeling? Or are they coming back?” Are they nervous to come back?\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Niki Espinoza: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">They were conversations of fear. They were conversations of my child feels like they’re so behind they don’t want to go back. And I had to address those. And I spoke to the teachers and I spoke to my admin, and I said, “Hey, we got to all be on the same page. We got to show these kids that we’re going to help you get caught up. We’re going to be there for you.”\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Nimah Gobir:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> Do you remember the third grader we heard from, Noel? When he returned to school, the thing that he was dreading the most was math.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Noel:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> I didn’t know any multiplication at all. Division too. I didn’t know any division. \u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">I need to catch up on a bunch of stuff!\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Nimah Gobir: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Even though Noel was a bit overwhelmed coming back he felt really supported in getting back on track. Part of the reason for that is he received extra support. Students who need it are taken out of classes to get more focused help.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Noel:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> If I needed help, they’d come help me, explained it to me and then gave me worksheets catch up on multiple occasions and I just do like extra multiplication to, like, catch up.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Nimah Gobir:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> Noel’s concerns were academic,\u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> but the primary causes of chronic absenteeism are homelessness, health problems, and family responsibilities.\u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> \u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">In order take on these barriers, Maple uses the community school model.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Nimah Gobir:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> That means bringing the services and resources families need onto the school campus. The wraparound services Maple has on campus include school psychologists, food pantries and housing services. Local organizations and businesses are a big part of how this small district is able to support students beyond academics. There is only one small hold up for this particular school district…\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Michael Figueroa: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Our districts are separated by miles and miles of farmland.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Nimah Gobir:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> This is Michael Figueroa. He grew up in the Central Valley and now he’s an education consultant that works with school districts in the region.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Michael Figueroa:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> There’s really very few nonprofits, if any, that support our specific region or area.\u003c/span>\u003cb> \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">So just by nature of where the kids live, they have less access to resources.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Nimah Gobir:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> To address this, Michael helped Maple and 5 neighboring rural school districts band together to form a community school consortium. That way they can pool resources.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Nimah Gobir: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">For example the consortium collectively hired a social worker who serves multiple districts at once to save money. By doing this, the social worker gets a full-time salary, which is a good motivator for them. And since the districts in the consortium share the costs, they can afford to pay for a full-time social worker together.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Michael Figueroa:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> By putting resources together, we’re just trying to get even a fraction of what schools 20 miles, 30 miles down the road just get without any supplemental funding.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Nimah Gobir:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> Being a small school in a rural area come with it’s challenges and opportunities. It sometimes hard to find the services they need, but their tight relationships with students ensure that they can identify students who needs the services it the most. For example, Ayden, an 8th grader who missed several days of school after a devastating loss.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Ayden:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> I missed like a whole week because my great grandpa passed away. This, I think it was like two months ago now. And I just really loved him, so I just, I felt like I didn’t want to go to school.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Niki Espinoza: \u003c/b>W\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">e’re here to offer services. We’re here to offer referrals, to get help. We’re here to say we’re here for your family. And that’s really the heart of the matter. That’s how we started looking at it, is let us educate. Let us equip you. No judgments, zero judgments. Tell me what’s going on. Zero judgments. Let’s help your kid.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Nimah Gobir: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Niki’s snail mail campaign coupled with Maple’s community school model has not only reduced chronic absenteeism but it also addressed underlying issues affecting student attendance.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Nimah Gobir:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> The cherry on top is that Maple also does a great job of making coming to school really appealing.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Niki Espinoza:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> A community school will not thrive if there isn’t engagement between the parents, guardians, caregivers, and the school. And that is why we work so hard with doing community engagement and having events on campus where we welcome the community on campus.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Nimah Gobir:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> They purposefully build community beyond the classroom. Ayden told me that there are fun carnival-like events a few times a year that give students an opportunity to build connections with teachers and other kids who may not be in their grade.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Ayden:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> You’re thinking about school, you’re thinking about staying in the classroom, not doing anything but Maple is a lot different because, like, it’s more outgoing.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Ayden:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> It’s a very loving school. Like, you know, everyone here, especially me, I’m like friends with like, the littlest kids.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Nimah Gobir:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> Students have a positive touch point with a teacher or staff person every day because they are excitedly greeted by staff each morning.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Ayden\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">: Maple is a school that you don’t want to miss out.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Nimah Gobir:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> This episode could not have been made with out Julie Boesch, Michael Figueroa, Niki Espinoza, Tom Dee, Carly Robinson, Bryan Easter, Patty De Julian, Nick Aguirre, Christian Brown and staff at Maple School District. Thank you to the students at Maple: Ayden, Nehemiah, Dallas, Noel and Teegan.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Nimah Gobir:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> If you’re interested in hearing more about how the community school model supports students, listen to our episode titled “How Community Schools Can Support Teachers and Families.” It features a school that created a homeless shelter on their school grounds.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Nimah Gobir:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> We’ll have more community schools episodes coming down the pipeline.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Nimah Gobir:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> The MindShift team includes me, Nimah Gobir, Ki Sung, Kara Newhouse, Marlena Jackson-Retondo and Jennifer Ng. Carlos Cabrera Lomeli provided additional reporting. Our editor is Chris Hambrick. Seth Samuel is our sound designer. We receive additional support from Jen Chien, Katie Sprenger, Cesar Saldaña and Holly Kernan. MindShift is supported in part by the generosity of the Stuart Foundation, William and Flora Hewlett Foundation. And members of KQED. Thank you for listening.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\n\u003c/div>\u003c/p>",
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"slug": "new-studies-of-online-tutoring-highlight-troubles-with-attendance-and-larger-tutoring-groups",
"title": "New Studies of Online Tutoring Highlight Troubles With Attendance and Larger Tutoring Groups",
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"headTitle": "New Studies of Online Tutoring Highlight Troubles With Attendance and Larger Tutoring Groups | KQED",
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"content": "\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Ever since the pandemic shut down schools in the spring of 2020, education researchers have pointed to tutoring as the most promising way to help kids catch up academically. Evidence from \u003c/span>\u003ca href=\"https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w27476/w27476.pdf\">\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">almost 100 studies\u003c/span>\u003c/a>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> was overwhelming for a particular kind of tutoring, called high-dosage tutoring, where students focus on either reading or math three to five times a week.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">But until recently, there has been little good evidence for the effectiveness of online tutoring, where students and tutors interact via video, text chat and whiteboards. The virtual version has boomed since the federal government handed schools nearly $190 billion of pandemic recovery aid and specifically encouraged them to spend it on tutoring. Now, some new U.S. studies could offer useful guidance to educators.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Online attendance is a struggle\u003c/b>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">In the spring of 2023, almost 1,000 Northern California elementary school children in grades 1 to 4 were randomly assigned to receive online reading tutoring during the school day. Students were supposed to get 20 to 30 sessions each, but only one of five students received that much. \u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Eighty percent didn’t\u003c/span>,\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> and they didn’t do much better than the 800 students in the comparison group who didn’t get tutoring, according to a \u003c/span>\u003ca href=\"https://edworkingpapers.com/ai24-942\">\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">draft paper by researchers from Teachers College\u003c/span>\u003c/a>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">, Columbia University, which was posted to the Annenberg Institute website at Brown University in April 2024. (\u003c/span>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">The Hechinger Report is an independent news organization based at Teachers College, Columbia University.\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">)\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Researchers have previously found that it is important to schedule in-person tutoring sessions during the school day, when attendance is mandatory. The lesson here with online tutoring is that attendance can be rocky with even during the school day. Often, students end up with a low dose of tutoring instead of the high dose that schools have paid for.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">However, online tutoring can be effective when students participate regularly. In this Northern California study, reading achievement increased substantially, in line with in-person tutoring, for the roughly 200 students who got at least 20 sessions across 10 weeks.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">The students who logged in regularly might have been more motivated students in the first place, the researchers warned, indicating that it could be hard to reproduce such large academic benefits for all. During the periods when children were supposed to receive tutoring, researchers observed that some children – often ones who were slightly higher achieving – regularly logged on as scheduled while others didn’t. The difference in student behavior and what the students were doing instead wasn’t explained. Students also seemed to log in more frequently when certain staff members were overseeing the tutoring and less frequently with others. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Small group tutoring doesn’t work as well online\u003c/b>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">The large math and reading gains that researchers documented in small groups of students with in-person tutors aren’t always translating to the virtual world. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Another study of more than 2,000 elementary school children in Texas tested the difference between one-to-one and two-to-one online tutoring during the 2022-23 school year. These were young, low-income children, in kindergarten through 2nd grade, who were just learning to read. Children who were randomly assigned to get \u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">one-to-one tutoring four times a \u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">week\u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> posted small gains\u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> on one test, but not on another, compared to students in a comparison group who didn’t get tutoring. First graders assigned to one-to-one tutoring gained the equivalent of 30 additional days of school. By contrast, children who had been tutored in pairs were statistically no different in reading than the comparison group of untutored children. A \u003c/span>\u003ca href=\"https://edworkingpapers.com/ai24-955\">\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">draft paper about this study\u003c/span>\u003c/a>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">, led by researchers from Stanford University, was posted to the Annenberg website in May 2024. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Another small study in Grand Forks, North Dakota confirmed the downside of larger groups with online tutoring. Researchers from Brown University directly compared the math progress of middle school students when they received one-to-one tutoring versus small groups of three students. The study was too small, only 180 students, to get statistically strong results, but the half that were randomly assigned to receive individual tutoring appeared to gain \u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">eight extra percentile points\u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">, compared to the students who were assigned to small group tutoring. It was possible that students in the small groups learned a third as much math, the researchers estimated, but these students might have learned much less. A \u003c/span>\u003ca href=\"https://edworkingpapers.com/ai24-976\">\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">draft of this paper\u003c/span>\u003c/a>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> was posted to the Annenberg website in June 2024. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">In surveys, tutors said it was hard to keep all three kids engaged online at once. Students were more frequently distracted and off-task, they said. Shy students were less likely to speak up and participate. With one student at a time, tutors said they could move at a faster pace and students “weren’t afraid to ask questions” or “afraid of being wrong.” (On the plus side, tutors said groups of three allowed them to organize group activities or encourage a student to help a peer.)\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Behavior problems happen in person, too. However, when I have observed in-person small group tutoring in schools, each student is often working independently with the tutor, almost like three simultaneous sessions of one-to-one help. In-person tutors can encourage a student to keep practicing through a silent glance, a smile or hand signal even as they are explaining something to another student. Online, each child’s work and mistakes are publicly exposed on the screen to the whole group. Private asides aren’t as easy; some platforms allow the tutor to text a child privately in a chat window, but that takes time. Tutors have told me that many teens don’t like seeing their face on screen, but turning the camera off makes it harder for them to sense if a student is following along or confused.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Matt Kraft, one of the Brown researchers on the Grand Forks study, suggests that bigger changes need to be made to online tutoring lessons in order to expand from one-to-one to small group tutoring, and he notes that school staff are needed in the classroom to keep students on-task. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">School leaders have until March 2026 to spend the remainder of their $190 billion in pandemic recovery funds, but contracts with tutoring vendors must be signed by September 2024. Both options — in person and virtual — involve tradeoffs. New research evidence is showing that virtual tutoring can work well, especially when motivated students want the tutoring and log in regularly. But many of the students who are significantly behind grade level and in need of extra help may not be so motivated. Keeping the online tutoring small, ideally one-to-one, improves the chances that it will be effective. But that means serving many fewer students, leaving millions of children behind. It’s a tough choice. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad floatright]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">This story about \u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003ca href=\"https://hechingerreport.org/proof-points-studies-online-tutoring-troubles-attendance-larger-groups/\">\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">online tutoring\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003c/a>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> was written by Jill Barshay and produced by \u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003ca href=\"https://hechingerreport.org/special-reports/higher-education/\">\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">The Hechinger Report\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003c/a>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for \u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003ca href=\"https://hechingerreport.org/proofpoints/\">\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Proof Points\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003c/a>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> and other \u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003ca href=\"https://hechingerreport.org/newsletters/\">\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Hechinger newsletters\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003c/a>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">.\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003c/p>\n\n",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Ever since the pandemic shut down schools in the spring of 2020, education researchers have pointed to tutoring as the most promising way to help kids catch up academically. Evidence from \u003c/span>\u003ca href=\"https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w27476/w27476.pdf\">\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">almost 100 studies\u003c/span>\u003c/a>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> was overwhelming for a particular kind of tutoring, called high-dosage tutoring, where students focus on either reading or math three to five times a week.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">But until recently, there has been little good evidence for the effectiveness of online tutoring, where students and tutors interact via video, text chat and whiteboards. The virtual version has boomed since the federal government handed schools nearly $190 billion of pandemic recovery aid and specifically encouraged them to spend it on tutoring. Now, some new U.S. studies could offer useful guidance to educators.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Online attendance is a struggle\u003c/b>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">In the spring of 2023, almost 1,000 Northern California elementary school children in grades 1 to 4 were randomly assigned to receive online reading tutoring during the school day. Students were supposed to get 20 to 30 sessions each, but only one of five students received that much. \u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Eighty percent didn’t\u003c/span>,\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> and they didn’t do much better than the 800 students in the comparison group who didn’t get tutoring, according to a \u003c/span>\u003ca href=\"https://edworkingpapers.com/ai24-942\">\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">draft paper by researchers from Teachers College\u003c/span>\u003c/a>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">, Columbia University, which was posted to the Annenberg Institute website at Brown University in April 2024. (\u003c/span>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">The Hechinger Report is an independent news organization based at Teachers College, Columbia University.\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">)\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Researchers have previously found that it is important to schedule in-person tutoring sessions during the school day, when attendance is mandatory. The lesson here with online tutoring is that attendance can be rocky with even during the school day. Often, students end up with a low dose of tutoring instead of the high dose that schools have paid for.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">However, online tutoring can be effective when students participate regularly. In this Northern California study, reading achievement increased substantially, in line with in-person tutoring, for the roughly 200 students who got at least 20 sessions across 10 weeks.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">The students who logged in regularly might have been more motivated students in the first place, the researchers warned, indicating that it could be hard to reproduce such large academic benefits for all. During the periods when children were supposed to receive tutoring, researchers observed that some children – often ones who were slightly higher achieving – regularly logged on as scheduled while others didn’t. The difference in student behavior and what the students were doing instead wasn’t explained. Students also seemed to log in more frequently when certain staff members were overseeing the tutoring and less frequently with others. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Small group tutoring doesn’t work as well online\u003c/b>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">The large math and reading gains that researchers documented in small groups of students with in-person tutors aren’t always translating to the virtual world. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Another study of more than 2,000 elementary school children in Texas tested the difference between one-to-one and two-to-one online tutoring during the 2022-23 school year. These were young, low-income children, in kindergarten through 2nd grade, who were just learning to read. Children who were randomly assigned to get \u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">one-to-one tutoring four times a \u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">week\u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> posted small gains\u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> on one test, but not on another, compared to students in a comparison group who didn’t get tutoring. First graders assigned to one-to-one tutoring gained the equivalent of 30 additional days of school. By contrast, children who had been tutored in pairs were statistically no different in reading than the comparison group of untutored children. A \u003c/span>\u003ca href=\"https://edworkingpapers.com/ai24-955\">\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">draft paper about this study\u003c/span>\u003c/a>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">, led by researchers from Stanford University, was posted to the Annenberg website in May 2024. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Another small study in Grand Forks, North Dakota confirmed the downside of larger groups with online tutoring. Researchers from Brown University directly compared the math progress of middle school students when they received one-to-one tutoring versus small groups of three students. The study was too small, only 180 students, to get statistically strong results, but the half that were randomly assigned to receive individual tutoring appeared to gain \u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">eight extra percentile points\u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">, compared to the students who were assigned to small group tutoring. It was possible that students in the small groups learned a third as much math, the researchers estimated, but these students might have learned much less. A \u003c/span>\u003ca href=\"https://edworkingpapers.com/ai24-976\">\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">draft of this paper\u003c/span>\u003c/a>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> was posted to the Annenberg website in June 2024. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">In surveys, tutors said it was hard to keep all three kids engaged online at once. Students were more frequently distracted and off-task, they said. Shy students were less likely to speak up and participate. With one student at a time, tutors said they could move at a faster pace and students “weren’t afraid to ask questions” or “afraid of being wrong.” (On the plus side, tutors said groups of three allowed them to organize group activities or encourage a student to help a peer.)\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Behavior problems happen in person, too. However, when I have observed in-person small group tutoring in schools, each student is often working independently with the tutor, almost like three simultaneous sessions of one-to-one help. In-person tutors can encourage a student to keep practicing through a silent glance, a smile or hand signal even as they are explaining something to another student. Online, each child’s work and mistakes are publicly exposed on the screen to the whole group. Private asides aren’t as easy; some platforms allow the tutor to text a child privately in a chat window, but that takes time. Tutors have told me that many teens don’t like seeing their face on screen, but turning the camera off makes it harder for them to sense if a student is following along or confused.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Matt Kraft, one of the Brown researchers on the Grand Forks study, suggests that bigger changes need to be made to online tutoring lessons in order to expand from one-to-one to small group tutoring, and he notes that school staff are needed in the classroom to keep students on-task. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">School leaders have until March 2026 to spend the remainder of their $190 billion in pandemic recovery funds, but contracts with tutoring vendors must be signed by September 2024. Both options — in person and virtual — involve tradeoffs. New research evidence is showing that virtual tutoring can work well, especially when motivated students want the tutoring and log in regularly. But many of the students who are significantly behind grade level and in need of extra help may not be so motivated. Keeping the online tutoring small, ideally one-to-one, improves the chances that it will be effective. But that means serving many fewer students, leaving millions of children behind. It’s a tough choice. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">This story about \u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003ca href=\"https://hechingerreport.org/proof-points-studies-online-tutoring-troubles-attendance-larger-groups/\">\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">online tutoring\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003c/a>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> was written by Jill Barshay and produced by \u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003ca href=\"https://hechingerreport.org/special-reports/higher-education/\">\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">The Hechinger Report\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003c/a>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for \u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003ca href=\"https://hechingerreport.org/proofpoints/\">\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Proof Points\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003c/a>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> and other \u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003ca href=\"https://hechingerreport.org/newsletters/\">\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Hechinger newsletters\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003c/a>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">.\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003c/p>\n\n\u003c/div>\u003c/p>",
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"slug": "they-werent-yet-in-school-when-covid-hit-the-pandemic-still-set-back-the-youngest-students",
"title": "They Weren’t Yet in School When COVID Hit. The Pandemic Still Set Back the Youngest Students.",
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"headTitle": "They Weren’t Yet in School When COVID Hit. The Pandemic Still Set Back the Youngest Students. | KQED",
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"content": "\u003cp>\u003cem>This story was \u003ca href=\"https://www.chalkbeat.org/2024/07/03/pandemic-left-younger-students-struggling-to-make-academic-progress/\" rel=\"canonical\">originally published\u003c/a> by Chalkbeat. Sign up for their newsletters at \u003ca href=\"https://ckbe.at/newsletters\">ckbe.at/newsletters\u003c/a>.\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>While older children are showing \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/mindshift/64116/congress-poured-billions-of-dollars-into-schools-did-it-help-students-learn\">encouraging signs of academic recovery\u003c/a>, younger children are not making that same progress, and are sometimes falling even further behind, especially in math.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ca href=\"https://cdn.bfldr.com/LS6J0F7/at/4rqc5wtpxqf85mk4pxj6rm7/ca-2024-summer-research-student-growth-technical-report.pdf\">New data released Monday\u003c/a> points to the pandemic’s profound and enduring effects on the nation’s youngest public school children, many of whom were not yet in a formal school setting when COVID hit.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“It’s showing that these students — who were either toddlers or maybe in preschool — that their learning was disrupted somehow,” said Kristen Huff, the vice president for research and assessment at Curriculum Associates, which provides math and reading tests to millions of students each year and authored the new report. “It’s striking.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Researchers and other experts have suggested several potential reasons for this trend. One is that the pandemic disrupted early childhood education and \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/mindshift/57373/why-we-need-to-pay-more-attention-to-the-youngest-children-right-now-and-their-parents\">made it harder for many kids to learn foundational skills\u003c/a> — gaps that can compound over time. Fewer children enrolled in \u003ca href=\"https://www.nprillinois.org/2022-04-26/the-pandemic-erased-a-decade-of-public-preschool-gains\">preschool\u003c/a> and \u003ca href=\"https://www.chalkbeat.org/2020/9/22/21451625/kindergarten-enrollment-decline-coronavirus-pandemic-shift/\">kindergarten\u003c/a>, and many young children struggled with remote learning. \u003ca href=\"https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2024/07/01/upshot/pandemic-children-school-performance.html\">Increased parental stress and screen time\u003c/a> may also be factors.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>It’s also possible that schools \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/mindshift/63826/these-teens-were-missing-too-much-school-heres-what-it-took-to-get-them-back\">targeted more academic support to older children and teens\u003c/a>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“We can see it as a call to action to make sure that we, as an educational community, are prioritizing those early grades,” Huff said. Those are critical years when children learn their letters and numbers and start reading and counting. “These are all the basics for being able to move along that learning trajectory for the rest of your schooling career.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/mindshift/64123/pandemic-aid-to-schools-paid-off-but-we-dont-know-how\">A slew of recent reports\u003c/a> have examined students’ academic progress post-pandemic. \u003ca href=\"https://www.chalkbeat.org/2024/02/05/learning-loss-study-finds-surprising-academic-recovery-growing-inequality/\">Some researchers found\u003c/a> that students in third to eighth grade are making larger-than-usual gains, but that most kids are still behind their pre-pandemic peers. Meanwhile, academic gaps between students from low-income backgrounds and their more affluent peers have widened.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The new Curriculum Associates report, which analyzed results from some 4 million students, is unique in that it includes data points for younger children who haven’t yet taken state tests. Researchers looked at how students who entered kindergarten to fourth grade during the 2021-22 school year performed in math and reading over three years, and compared that against kids who started the same grades just prior to the pandemic.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Children who began kindergarten in the fall of 2021, for example, scored close to what kindergartners did prior to the pandemic in reading. But over the last few years, they’ve fallen behind their counterparts. Kids who started first grade in the fall of 2021 have been consistently behind children who started first grade prior to the pandemic in reading.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In math, meanwhile, students who started kindergarten, first grade, and second grade in the fall of 2021 all started off scoring lower than their counterparts did prior to the pandemic. And they’ve consistently made less progress — putting them “significantly behind” their peers.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Younger children made less progress than their pre-pandemic peers regardless of whether they went to schools in cities, suburbs or rural communities. And the students who started off further behind had the most difficulty catching up.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Schools may want to consider changing up their academic interventions to focus more on early elementary schoolers, researchers said. It will be especially important to pinpoint exactly which missing skills kids need to master so they can follow along with lessons in their current grade, Huff added. This year, many of the report’s struggling students will be entering third and fourth grade.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In Charleston County, South Carolina, where \u003ca href=\"https://screportcards.com/overview/academics/academic-achievement/details/?q=eT0yMDIyJnQ9RCZzaWQ9MTAwMTAwMA\">younger students are outperforming\u003c/a> others \u003ca href=\"https://ed.sc.gov/data/test-scores/state-assessments/sc-ready/2023/state-scores-by-grade-level/?districtCode=9999&districtName=Statewide&schoolCode=999\">in their state\u003c/a>, especially in math, the district is using a few strategies that officials think have helped.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The district made \u003ca href=\"https://www.live5news.com/2024/04/24/charleston-co-school-district-working-improve-reading-performance-levels/\">improving reading instruction a top priority\u003c/a>. Officials purchased a new curriculum to better align with the science of reading, gave teachers \u003ca href=\"https://www.edweek.org/teaching-learning/letrs-program-teacher-training\">extensive literacy skills training\u003c/a>, and started providing families more information about their kids’ academic performance.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Crucially, said Buffy Roberts, who oversees assessments for Charleston County schools, the district identified groups of kids who were very behind and what it would take to catch them up over several years. Taking a longer view helped teachers break down a big job and ensured kids who needed a lot of help got more support.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“We really helped people understand that if our students were already behind, making typical growth is great, but it’s not going to cut it,” Roberts said. “It was really thinking very strategically and being very targeted about what a child needs in order to get out of that, I hate to call it a hole, but it is a hole.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ci>Kalyn Belsha is a senior national education reporter based in Chicago. Contact her at \u003c/i>\u003ca href=\"mailto:kbelsha@chalkbeat.org\">\u003ci>kbelsha@chalkbeat.org\u003c/i>\u003c/a>\u003ci>.\u003c/i>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ca href=\"https://www.chalkbeat.org/2024/07/03/pandemic-left-younger-students-struggling-to-make-academic-progress/\" rel=\"canonical\">Chalkbeat\u003c/a> is a nonprofit news site covering educational change in public schools.\u003c/p>\n\n",
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"excerpt": "A new report finds that early elementary school students are having an especially hard time catching up to their pre-pandemic peers in math and reading. Schools may need to provide them with more intensive support.",
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"title": "They Weren’t Yet in School When COVID Hit. The Pandemic Still Set Back the Youngest Students. | KQED",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>\u003cem>This story was \u003ca href=\"https://www.chalkbeat.org/2024/07/03/pandemic-left-younger-students-struggling-to-make-academic-progress/\" rel=\"canonical\">originally published\u003c/a> by Chalkbeat. Sign up for their newsletters at \u003ca href=\"https://ckbe.at/newsletters\">ckbe.at/newsletters\u003c/a>.\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>While older children are showing \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/mindshift/64116/congress-poured-billions-of-dollars-into-schools-did-it-help-students-learn\">encouraging signs of academic recovery\u003c/a>, younger children are not making that same progress, and are sometimes falling even further behind, especially in math.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ca href=\"https://cdn.bfldr.com/LS6J0F7/at/4rqc5wtpxqf85mk4pxj6rm7/ca-2024-summer-research-student-growth-technical-report.pdf\">New data released Monday\u003c/a> points to the pandemic’s profound and enduring effects on the nation’s youngest public school children, many of whom were not yet in a formal school setting when COVID hit.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“It’s showing that these students — who were either toddlers or maybe in preschool — that their learning was disrupted somehow,” said Kristen Huff, the vice president for research and assessment at Curriculum Associates, which provides math and reading tests to millions of students each year and authored the new report. “It’s striking.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Researchers and other experts have suggested several potential reasons for this trend. One is that the pandemic disrupted early childhood education and \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/mindshift/57373/why-we-need-to-pay-more-attention-to-the-youngest-children-right-now-and-their-parents\">made it harder for many kids to learn foundational skills\u003c/a> — gaps that can compound over time. Fewer children enrolled in \u003ca href=\"https://www.nprillinois.org/2022-04-26/the-pandemic-erased-a-decade-of-public-preschool-gains\">preschool\u003c/a> and \u003ca href=\"https://www.chalkbeat.org/2020/9/22/21451625/kindergarten-enrollment-decline-coronavirus-pandemic-shift/\">kindergarten\u003c/a>, and many young children struggled with remote learning. \u003ca href=\"https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2024/07/01/upshot/pandemic-children-school-performance.html\">Increased parental stress and screen time\u003c/a> may also be factors.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>It’s also possible that schools \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/mindshift/63826/these-teens-were-missing-too-much-school-heres-what-it-took-to-get-them-back\">targeted more academic support to older children and teens\u003c/a>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“We can see it as a call to action to make sure that we, as an educational community, are prioritizing those early grades,” Huff said. Those are critical years when children learn their letters and numbers and start reading and counting. “These are all the basics for being able to move along that learning trajectory for the rest of your schooling career.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/mindshift/64123/pandemic-aid-to-schools-paid-off-but-we-dont-know-how\">A slew of recent reports\u003c/a> have examined students’ academic progress post-pandemic. \u003ca href=\"https://www.chalkbeat.org/2024/02/05/learning-loss-study-finds-surprising-academic-recovery-growing-inequality/\">Some researchers found\u003c/a> that students in third to eighth grade are making larger-than-usual gains, but that most kids are still behind their pre-pandemic peers. Meanwhile, academic gaps between students from low-income backgrounds and their more affluent peers have widened.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The new Curriculum Associates report, which analyzed results from some 4 million students, is unique in that it includes data points for younger children who haven’t yet taken state tests. Researchers looked at how students who entered kindergarten to fourth grade during the 2021-22 school year performed in math and reading over three years, and compared that against kids who started the same grades just prior to the pandemic.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Children who began kindergarten in the fall of 2021, for example, scored close to what kindergartners did prior to the pandemic in reading. But over the last few years, they’ve fallen behind their counterparts. Kids who started first grade in the fall of 2021 have been consistently behind children who started first grade prior to the pandemic in reading.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In math, meanwhile, students who started kindergarten, first grade, and second grade in the fall of 2021 all started off scoring lower than their counterparts did prior to the pandemic. And they’ve consistently made less progress — putting them “significantly behind” their peers.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Younger children made less progress than their pre-pandemic peers regardless of whether they went to schools in cities, suburbs or rural communities. And the students who started off further behind had the most difficulty catching up.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Schools may want to consider changing up their academic interventions to focus more on early elementary schoolers, researchers said. It will be especially important to pinpoint exactly which missing skills kids need to master so they can follow along with lessons in their current grade, Huff added. This year, many of the report’s struggling students will be entering third and fourth grade.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In Charleston County, South Carolina, where \u003ca href=\"https://screportcards.com/overview/academics/academic-achievement/details/?q=eT0yMDIyJnQ9RCZzaWQ9MTAwMTAwMA\">younger students are outperforming\u003c/a> others \u003ca href=\"https://ed.sc.gov/data/test-scores/state-assessments/sc-ready/2023/state-scores-by-grade-level/?districtCode=9999&districtName=Statewide&schoolCode=999\">in their state\u003c/a>, especially in math, the district is using a few strategies that officials think have helped.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The district made \u003ca href=\"https://www.live5news.com/2024/04/24/charleston-co-school-district-working-improve-reading-performance-levels/\">improving reading instruction a top priority\u003c/a>. Officials purchased a new curriculum to better align with the science of reading, gave teachers \u003ca href=\"https://www.edweek.org/teaching-learning/letrs-program-teacher-training\">extensive literacy skills training\u003c/a>, and started providing families more information about their kids’ academic performance.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Crucially, said Buffy Roberts, who oversees assessments for Charleston County schools, the district identified groups of kids who were very behind and what it would take to catch them up over several years. Taking a longer view helped teachers break down a big job and ensured kids who needed a lot of help got more support.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“We really helped people understand that if our students were already behind, making typical growth is great, but it’s not going to cut it,” Roberts said. “It was really thinking very strategically and being very targeted about what a child needs in order to get out of that, I hate to call it a hole, but it is a hole.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ci>Kalyn Belsha is a senior national education reporter based in Chicago. Contact her at \u003c/i>\u003ca href=\"mailto:kbelsha@chalkbeat.org\">\u003ci>kbelsha@chalkbeat.org\u003c/i>\u003c/a>\u003ci>.\u003c/i>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ca href=\"https://www.chalkbeat.org/2024/07/03/pandemic-left-younger-students-struggling-to-make-academic-progress/\" rel=\"canonical\">Chalkbeat\u003c/a> is a nonprofit news site covering educational change in public schools.\u003c/p>\n\n\u003c/div>\u003c/p>",
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"title": "Pandemic Aid to Schools Paid Off, But We Don't Know How",
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"content": "\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Reports about schools squandering their $190 billion in federal pandemic recovery money have been troubling. Many districts spent that money on things that had nothing to do with academics, particularly building renovations. Less common, but more \u003c/span>\u003ca href=\"https://defendinged.org/investigations/wasteful-esser-expenditures/\">\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">eye-popping were stories\u003c/span>\u003c/a>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> about new football fields, swimming pool passes, hotel rooms at Caesar’s Palace in Las Vegas and even the purchase of an ice cream truck.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">So I was surprised that two independent academic analyses released in June 2024 found that some of the money actually trickled down to students and \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/mindshift/64116/congress-poured-billions-of-dollars-into-schools-did-it-help-students-learn\">helped them catch up academically\u003c/a>. Though the two studies used different methods, they arrived at strikingly similar numbers for the average growth in math and reading scores during the 2022-23 school year that could be attributed to each dollar of federal aid.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">One of the research teams, which includes Harvard University economist Tom Kane and Stanford University sociologist Sean Reardon, likened the gains to \u003c/span>\u003ca href=\"https://educationrecoveryscorecard.org/\">\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">six days of learning in math and three days of learning in reading \u003c/span>\u003c/a>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">for every $1,000 in federal pandemic aid per student. Though that gain might seem small, high-poverty districts received an average of $7,700 per student, and those extra “days” of learning for low-income students added up. Still, these neediest children were projected to be one third of a grade level behind low-income students in 2019, before the pandemic disrupted education.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">“Federal funding helped and it helped kids most in need,” \u003ca href=\"https://x.com/RbnLake/status/1805957194942398492\">wrote Robin Lake\u003c/a>, director of the Center on Reinventing Public Education, on X in response to the two studies. Lake was not involved in either report, but has been closely tracking pandemic recovery. “And the spending was worth the gains,” Lake added. “But it will not be enough to do all that is needed.”\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">The academic gains per aid dollar were close to what \u003c/span>\u003ca href=\"https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/app.20220279\">\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">previous researchers had found for increases in school spending\u003c/span>\u003c/a>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">. In other words, federal pandemic aid for schools has been just as effective (or ineffective) as other infusions of money for schools. The Harvard-Stanford analysis calculated that the seemingly small academic gains per $1,000 could boost a student’s lifetime earnings by $1,238 – not a dramatic payoff, but not a public policy bust either. And that payoff doesn’t include other societal benefits from higher academic achievement, such as lower rates of arrests and teen motherhood.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">The most interesting nuggets from the two reports, however, were how the academic gains varied wildly across the nation. That’s not only because some schools used the money more effectively than others but also because some schools got much more aid per student.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">The poorest districts in the nation, where 80% or more of the students live in families whose income is low enough to qualify for the federally funded school lunch program, demonstrated meaningful recovery because they received the most aid. About 6% of the 26 million public schoolchildren that the researchers studied are educated in districts this poor. These children had recovered almost half of their pandemic learning losses by the spring of 2023. The very poorest districts, representing 1% of the children, were potentially on track for an almost complete recovery in 2024 because they tended to receive the most aid per student. However, these students were far below grade level before the pandemic, so their recovery brings them back to a very low rung.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Some high-poverty school districts received much more aid per student than others. At the top end of the range, students in Detroit received about $26,000 each – $1.3 billion spread among fewer than 49,000 students. One in 10 high-poverty districts received more than $10,700 for each student. An equal number of high-poverty districts received less than $3,700 per student. These surprising differences for places with similar poverty levels occurred because pandemic aid was allocated according to the same byzantine rules that govern federal Title I funding to low-income schools. Those formulas give large minimum grants to small states, and more money to states that spend more per student.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">On the other end of the income spectrum are wealthier districts, where 30% or fewer students qualify for the lunch program, representing about a quarter of U.S. children. The Harvard-Stanford researchers expect these students to make an almost complete recovery. That’s not because of federal recovery funds; these districts received less than $1,000 per student, on average. Researchers explained that these students are on track to approach 2019 achievement levels because they didn’t suffer as much learning loss. Wealthier families also had the means to hire tutors or time to help their children at home.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Middle-income districts, where between 30% and 80% of students are eligible for the lunch program, were caught in between. Roughly seven out of 10 children in this study fall into this category. Their learning losses were sometimes large, but their pandemic aid wasn’t. They tended to receive between $1,000 and $5,000 per student. Many of these students are still struggling to catch up.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">In the second study, researchers Dan Goldhaber of the American Institutes for Research and Grace Falken of the University of Washington estimated that schools around the country, on average, would need an additional \u003c/span>\u003ca href=\"https://caldercenter.org/sites/default/files/CALDER%20WP%20301-0624.pdf\">\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">$13,000 per student\u003c/span>\u003c/a>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> for full recovery in reading and math. That’s more than Congress appropriated.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">There were signs that schools targeted interventions to their neediest students. In school districts that separately reported performance for low-income students, these students tended to post greater recovery per dollar of aid than wealthier students, the Goldhaber-Falken analysis shows.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Impact differed more by race, location and school spending. Districts with larger shares of white students tended to make greater achievement gains per dollar of federal aid than districts with larger shares of Black or Hispanic students. Small towns tended to produce more academic gains per dollar of aid than large cities. And school districts that spend less on education per pupil tended to see more academic gains per dollar of aid than high spenders. The latter makes sense: an extra dollar to a small budget makes a bigger difference than an extra dollar to a large budget.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">The most frustrating part of both reports is that we have no idea what schools did to help students catch up. Researchers weren’t able to connect the academic gains to tutoring, summer school or any of the other interventions that schools have been trying. Schools still have until September to decide how to spend their remaining pandemic recovery funds, and, unfortunately, these analyses provide zero guidance.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">And maybe some of the non-academic things that schools spent money on weren’t so frivolous after all. A draft paper circulated by the National Bureau of Economic Research in January 2024 calculated that school spending on \u003c/span>\u003ca href=\"https://www.barbarabiasi.com/uploads/1/0/1/2/101280322/bls_whatworks.pdf\">\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">basic infrastructure\u003c/span>\u003c/a>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">, such as air conditioning and heating systems, raised test scores. Spending on athletic facilities did not.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Meanwhile, the final score on pandemic recovery for students is still to come. I’ll be looking out for it.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad floatright]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">This story about \u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003ca href=\"https://hechingerreport.org/proof-points-190-billion-question-partially-answered/\">\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">federal funding for education\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003c/a>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> was written by Jill Barshay and produced by \u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003ca href=\"https://hechingerreport.org/special-reports/higher-education/\">\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">The Hechinger Report\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003c/a>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for \u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003ca href=\"https://hechingerreport.org/proofpoints/\">\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Proof Points\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003c/a>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> and other \u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003ca href=\"https://hechingerreport.org/newsletters/\">\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Hechinger newsletters\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003c/a>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">.\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003c/p>\n\n",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Reports about schools squandering their $190 billion in federal pandemic recovery money have been troubling. Many districts spent that money on things that had nothing to do with academics, particularly building renovations. Less common, but more \u003c/span>\u003ca href=\"https://defendinged.org/investigations/wasteful-esser-expenditures/\">\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">eye-popping were stories\u003c/span>\u003c/a>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> about new football fields, swimming pool passes, hotel rooms at Caesar’s Palace in Las Vegas and even the purchase of an ice cream truck.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">So I was surprised that two independent academic analyses released in June 2024 found that some of the money actually trickled down to students and \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/mindshift/64116/congress-poured-billions-of-dollars-into-schools-did-it-help-students-learn\">helped them catch up academically\u003c/a>. Though the two studies used different methods, they arrived at strikingly similar numbers for the average growth in math and reading scores during the 2022-23 school year that could be attributed to each dollar of federal aid.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">One of the research teams, which includes Harvard University economist Tom Kane and Stanford University sociologist Sean Reardon, likened the gains to \u003c/span>\u003ca href=\"https://educationrecoveryscorecard.org/\">\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">six days of learning in math and three days of learning in reading \u003c/span>\u003c/a>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">for every $1,000 in federal pandemic aid per student. Though that gain might seem small, high-poverty districts received an average of $7,700 per student, and those extra “days” of learning for low-income students added up. Still, these neediest children were projected to be one third of a grade level behind low-income students in 2019, before the pandemic disrupted education.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">“Federal funding helped and it helped kids most in need,” \u003ca href=\"https://x.com/RbnLake/status/1805957194942398492\">wrote Robin Lake\u003c/a>, director of the Center on Reinventing Public Education, on X in response to the two studies. Lake was not involved in either report, but has been closely tracking pandemic recovery. “And the spending was worth the gains,” Lake added. “But it will not be enough to do all that is needed.”\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">The academic gains per aid dollar were close to what \u003c/span>\u003ca href=\"https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/app.20220279\">\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">previous researchers had found for increases in school spending\u003c/span>\u003c/a>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">. In other words, federal pandemic aid for schools has been just as effective (or ineffective) as other infusions of money for schools. The Harvard-Stanford analysis calculated that the seemingly small academic gains per $1,000 could boost a student’s lifetime earnings by $1,238 – not a dramatic payoff, but not a public policy bust either. And that payoff doesn’t include other societal benefits from higher academic achievement, such as lower rates of arrests and teen motherhood.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">The most interesting nuggets from the two reports, however, were how the academic gains varied wildly across the nation. That’s not only because some schools used the money more effectively than others but also because some schools got much more aid per student.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">The poorest districts in the nation, where 80% or more of the students live in families whose income is low enough to qualify for the federally funded school lunch program, demonstrated meaningful recovery because they received the most aid. About 6% of the 26 million public schoolchildren that the researchers studied are educated in districts this poor. These children had recovered almost half of their pandemic learning losses by the spring of 2023. The very poorest districts, representing 1% of the children, were potentially on track for an almost complete recovery in 2024 because they tended to receive the most aid per student. However, these students were far below grade level before the pandemic, so their recovery brings them back to a very low rung.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Some high-poverty school districts received much more aid per student than others. At the top end of the range, students in Detroit received about $26,000 each – $1.3 billion spread among fewer than 49,000 students. One in 10 high-poverty districts received more than $10,700 for each student. An equal number of high-poverty districts received less than $3,700 per student. These surprising differences for places with similar poverty levels occurred because pandemic aid was allocated according to the same byzantine rules that govern federal Title I funding to low-income schools. Those formulas give large minimum grants to small states, and more money to states that spend more per student.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">On the other end of the income spectrum are wealthier districts, where 30% or fewer students qualify for the lunch program, representing about a quarter of U.S. children. The Harvard-Stanford researchers expect these students to make an almost complete recovery. That’s not because of federal recovery funds; these districts received less than $1,000 per student, on average. Researchers explained that these students are on track to approach 2019 achievement levels because they didn’t suffer as much learning loss. Wealthier families also had the means to hire tutors or time to help their children at home.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Middle-income districts, where between 30% and 80% of students are eligible for the lunch program, were caught in between. Roughly seven out of 10 children in this study fall into this category. Their learning losses were sometimes large, but their pandemic aid wasn’t. They tended to receive between $1,000 and $5,000 per student. Many of these students are still struggling to catch up.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">In the second study, researchers Dan Goldhaber of the American Institutes for Research and Grace Falken of the University of Washington estimated that schools around the country, on average, would need an additional \u003c/span>\u003ca href=\"https://caldercenter.org/sites/default/files/CALDER%20WP%20301-0624.pdf\">\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">$13,000 per student\u003c/span>\u003c/a>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> for full recovery in reading and math. That’s more than Congress appropriated.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">There were signs that schools targeted interventions to their neediest students. In school districts that separately reported performance for low-income students, these students tended to post greater recovery per dollar of aid than wealthier students, the Goldhaber-Falken analysis shows.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Impact differed more by race, location and school spending. Districts with larger shares of white students tended to make greater achievement gains per dollar of federal aid than districts with larger shares of Black or Hispanic students. Small towns tended to produce more academic gains per dollar of aid than large cities. And school districts that spend less on education per pupil tended to see more academic gains per dollar of aid than high spenders. The latter makes sense: an extra dollar to a small budget makes a bigger difference than an extra dollar to a large budget.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">The most frustrating part of both reports is that we have no idea what schools did to help students catch up. Researchers weren’t able to connect the academic gains to tutoring, summer school or any of the other interventions that schools have been trying. Schools still have until September to decide how to spend their remaining pandemic recovery funds, and, unfortunately, these analyses provide zero guidance.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">And maybe some of the non-academic things that schools spent money on weren’t so frivolous after all. A draft paper circulated by the National Bureau of Economic Research in January 2024 calculated that school spending on \u003c/span>\u003ca href=\"https://www.barbarabiasi.com/uploads/1/0/1/2/101280322/bls_whatworks.pdf\">\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">basic infrastructure\u003c/span>\u003c/a>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">, such as air conditioning and heating systems, raised test scores. Spending on athletic facilities did not.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Meanwhile, the final score on pandemic recovery for students is still to come. I’ll be looking out for it.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">This story about \u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003ca href=\"https://hechingerreport.org/proof-points-190-billion-question-partially-answered/\">\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">federal funding for education\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003c/a>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> was written by Jill Barshay and produced by \u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003ca href=\"https://hechingerreport.org/special-reports/higher-education/\">\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">The Hechinger Report\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003c/a>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for \u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003ca href=\"https://hechingerreport.org/proofpoints/\">\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Proof Points\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003c/a>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> and other \u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003ca href=\"https://hechingerreport.org/newsletters/\">\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Hechinger newsletters\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003c/a>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">.\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003c/p>\n\n\u003c/div>\u003c/p>",
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"content": "\u003cp>America’s schools received an unprecedented $190 billion in federal emergency funding during the pandemic. Since then, one big question has loomed over them: Did that historic infusion of federal relief help students make up for the learning they missed?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Two new research studies, conducted separately but both released on Wednesday, offer the first answer to that question: Yes, the money made a meaningful difference. But both studies come with context and caveats that, along with that headline finding, require some unpacking.\u003c/p>\n\u003ch3>How much of a difference did the money make?\u003c/h3>\n\u003cp>$190 billion is an enormous amount of money by any measure. But districts were only required to spend a fraction of the relief on academic recovery, by paying for proven interventions like summer learning and high-quality tutoring. So how much additional student learning did the federal aid actually buy?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ca href=\"https://educationrecoveryscorecard.org/\">Study #1\u003c/a>, a collaboration including Tom Kane at Harvard’s Center for Education Policy Research and Sean Reardon at Stanford’s Educational Opportunity Project, estimates that every $1,000 in federal relief spent per student bought the kind of math test score gains that come with 3% of a school year, or about six school days of learning. That’s during the 2022-23 academic year.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Improvements in reading scores were smaller: roughly three school days of progress per $1,000 in federal relief spending per student.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The federal relief “was worth the investment,” Reardon tells NPR. “It led to significant improvements in children’s academic performance… It wasn’t enough money, or enough recovery, to get students all the way back to where they were in 2019, but it did make a significant difference.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ca href=\"https://caldercenter.org/publications/esser-and-student-achievement-assessing-impacts-largest-one-time-federal-investment-k12\">Study #2\u003c/a>, co-authored by researcher Dan Goldhaber at the University of Washington and American Institutes for Research, offers a similar estimate of math gains. The increase in reading scores, according to Goldhaber, appeared comparable to those math gains, though he says they’re less precise and a little less certain.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“It did have an impact,” Goldhaber tells NPR, an impact that’s “in line with estimates from prior research about how much money moves the needle of student achievement.”\u003c/p>\n\u003ch3>Who benefited the most?\u003c/h3>\n\u003cp>The federal recovery dollars came in three waves, known as ESSER (\u003ca href=\"https://oese.ed.gov/offices/education-stabilization-fund/elementary-secondary-school-emergency-relief-fund/\">Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief Fund\u003c/a>) I, II and III. The first two waves were relatively small, roughly $68 billion, compared to the $122 billion of ESSER III.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The windfall was distributed to schools based largely on need – specifically, based on the proportion of students living in or near poverty. The assumption being: Districts with higher rates of student poverty would need more help recovering. COVID hit high-poverty communities harder, with higher rates of infection, death, unemployment and remote schooling than in many affluent communities.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“These and other factors likely caused greater learning loss during the pandemic and dampened academic recovery,” Goldhaber writes in Study #2, pointing out that, “the Detroit, MI public school district received about $25,800 per pupil across all waves of ESSER… [while] Grosse Pointe, MI (a nearby suburb) only received about $860 per pupil.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Here’s where the story of these federal dollars gets complicated, because the learning they appear to have bought wasn’t experienced evenly, according to Goldhaber.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In Study #2, he and co-author Grace Falken, found larger academic benefits from federal spending in districts serving low shares of Black and Hispanic students. Though he tells NPR, these patterns “do not necessarily imply that ESSER’s impacts vary \u003cem>because\u003c/em> of student demographics. Rather, the results could reflect other district characteristics that happen to correlate with the student populations the districts serve.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Reardon and Kane did not find statistically significant evidence of this kind of variation.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Goldhaber and Falken also found that towns saw more math gains than cities, while rural areas led the way in reading growth. Interestingly, suburban districts generally experienced “smaller, insignificant impacts” from the federal spending in both subjects.\u003c/p>\n\u003ch3>But did the money help enough?\u003c/h3>\n\u003cp>If your standard for “enough” is a full recovery for all students from the learning they missed during the pandemic, then no, the money did not remedy the full problem.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But the researchers behind both studies say that’s an unrealistic and unreasonable yardstick. After all, Congress only required that districts spend at least 20% of ESSER III funds on learning recovery. The rest of the relief came with relatively few strings attached.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Instead, the researchers say, the money’s effectiveness should be judged by a more realistic standard, based on what previous research has shown money can and cannot buy.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Harvard’s Tom Kane, of Study #1, points out that their results do line up with pre-pandemic research on the impact of school spending, and suggest a clear, long-term return on investment.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“These academic gains will translate into improvements in earnings and other outcomes that will last a lifetime,” Kane tells NPR.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>For example, the academic gains associated with every $1,000 in per student spending would be worth $1,238 in future earnings, Kane estimates. Increased academic achievement also comes with valuable social returns, he says, including lower rates of arrest and teen motherhood.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>What’s more, Reardon tells NPR, because these federal dollars disproportionately went to lower-income districts, “not only do we find that the federal investment raised test scores, but we also find that it reduced educational inequality.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But the work’s not over.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In Study #2, Goldhaber and Falken write, “to recover from these remaining losses, our estimates suggest schools would need between $9,000 and $13,000 in additional funds per pupil, assuming the return on those funds is similar to what we estimated for ESSER III.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>They also warn that middle-income districts could continue to struggle – because they experienced academic losses but got less federal aid.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In a presidential election year, it’s unlikely Congress will agree to send schools more money. And Goldhaber worries, as ESSER funds begin to expire this year, districts will have to cut staff.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Some districts, particularly high poverty, high minority districts, are going to lose so much money that I think teacher layoffs are inevitable,” Goldhaber tells NPR. “So I’m worried that the funding cliff – there’s a downside that we’re not thinking hard enough about.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The good news, says Kane, is that ESSER was a massive, “brute force” effort, and a far smaller, state-driven effort could still make a big difference, so long as it’s hyper-focused on academic interventions.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Kane says, “It falls to states to complete the recovery.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad floatright]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Copyright 2024 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.\u003c/p>\n\n",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>America’s schools received an unprecedented $190 billion in federal emergency funding during the pandemic. Since then, one big question has loomed over them: Did that historic infusion of federal relief help students make up for the learning they missed?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Two new research studies, conducted separately but both released on Wednesday, offer the first answer to that question: Yes, the money made a meaningful difference. But both studies come with context and caveats that, along with that headline finding, require some unpacking.\u003c/p>\n\u003ch3>How much of a difference did the money make?\u003c/h3>\n\u003cp>$190 billion is an enormous amount of money by any measure. But districts were only required to spend a fraction of the relief on academic recovery, by paying for proven interventions like summer learning and high-quality tutoring. So how much additional student learning did the federal aid actually buy?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ca href=\"https://educationrecoveryscorecard.org/\">Study #1\u003c/a>, a collaboration including Tom Kane at Harvard’s Center for Education Policy Research and Sean Reardon at Stanford’s Educational Opportunity Project, estimates that every $1,000 in federal relief spent per student bought the kind of math test score gains that come with 3% of a school year, or about six school days of learning. That’s during the 2022-23 academic year.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Improvements in reading scores were smaller: roughly three school days of progress per $1,000 in federal relief spending per student.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The federal relief “was worth the investment,” Reardon tells NPR. “It led to significant improvements in children’s academic performance… It wasn’t enough money, or enough recovery, to get students all the way back to where they were in 2019, but it did make a significant difference.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ca href=\"https://caldercenter.org/publications/esser-and-student-achievement-assessing-impacts-largest-one-time-federal-investment-k12\">Study #2\u003c/a>, co-authored by researcher Dan Goldhaber at the University of Washington and American Institutes for Research, offers a similar estimate of math gains. The increase in reading scores, according to Goldhaber, appeared comparable to those math gains, though he says they’re less precise and a little less certain.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“It did have an impact,” Goldhaber tells NPR, an impact that’s “in line with estimates from prior research about how much money moves the needle of student achievement.”\u003c/p>\n\u003ch3>Who benefited the most?\u003c/h3>\n\u003cp>The federal recovery dollars came in three waves, known as ESSER (\u003ca href=\"https://oese.ed.gov/offices/education-stabilization-fund/elementary-secondary-school-emergency-relief-fund/\">Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief Fund\u003c/a>) I, II and III. The first two waves were relatively small, roughly $68 billion, compared to the $122 billion of ESSER III.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The windfall was distributed to schools based largely on need – specifically, based on the proportion of students living in or near poverty. The assumption being: Districts with higher rates of student poverty would need more help recovering. COVID hit high-poverty communities harder, with higher rates of infection, death, unemployment and remote schooling than in many affluent communities.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“These and other factors likely caused greater learning loss during the pandemic and dampened academic recovery,” Goldhaber writes in Study #2, pointing out that, “the Detroit, MI public school district received about $25,800 per pupil across all waves of ESSER… [while] Grosse Pointe, MI (a nearby suburb) only received about $860 per pupil.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Here’s where the story of these federal dollars gets complicated, because the learning they appear to have bought wasn’t experienced evenly, according to Goldhaber.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In Study #2, he and co-author Grace Falken, found larger academic benefits from federal spending in districts serving low shares of Black and Hispanic students. Though he tells NPR, these patterns “do not necessarily imply that ESSER’s impacts vary \u003cem>because\u003c/em> of student demographics. Rather, the results could reflect other district characteristics that happen to correlate with the student populations the districts serve.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Reardon and Kane did not find statistically significant evidence of this kind of variation.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Goldhaber and Falken also found that towns saw more math gains than cities, while rural areas led the way in reading growth. Interestingly, suburban districts generally experienced “smaller, insignificant impacts” from the federal spending in both subjects.\u003c/p>\n\u003ch3>But did the money help enough?\u003c/h3>\n\u003cp>If your standard for “enough” is a full recovery for all students from the learning they missed during the pandemic, then no, the money did not remedy the full problem.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But the researchers behind both studies say that’s an unrealistic and unreasonable yardstick. After all, Congress only required that districts spend at least 20% of ESSER III funds on learning recovery. The rest of the relief came with relatively few strings attached.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Instead, the researchers say, the money’s effectiveness should be judged by a more realistic standard, based on what previous research has shown money can and cannot buy.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Harvard’s Tom Kane, of Study #1, points out that their results do line up with pre-pandemic research on the impact of school spending, and suggest a clear, long-term return on investment.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“These academic gains will translate into improvements in earnings and other outcomes that will last a lifetime,” Kane tells NPR.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>For example, the academic gains associated with every $1,000 in per student spending would be worth $1,238 in future earnings, Kane estimates. Increased academic achievement also comes with valuable social returns, he says, including lower rates of arrest and teen motherhood.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>What’s more, Reardon tells NPR, because these federal dollars disproportionately went to lower-income districts, “not only do we find that the federal investment raised test scores, but we also find that it reduced educational inequality.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But the work’s not over.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In Study #2, Goldhaber and Falken write, “to recover from these remaining losses, our estimates suggest schools would need between $9,000 and $13,000 in additional funds per pupil, assuming the return on those funds is similar to what we estimated for ESSER III.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>They also warn that middle-income districts could continue to struggle – because they experienced academic losses but got less federal aid.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In a presidential election year, it’s unlikely Congress will agree to send schools more money. And Goldhaber worries, as ESSER funds begin to expire this year, districts will have to cut staff.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Some districts, particularly high poverty, high minority districts, are going to lose so much money that I think teacher layoffs are inevitable,” Goldhaber tells NPR. “So I’m worried that the funding cliff – there’s a downside that we’re not thinking hard enough about.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The good news, says Kane, is that ESSER was a massive, “brute force” effort, and a far smaller, state-driven effort could still make a big difference, so long as it’s hyper-focused on academic interventions.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Kane says, “It falls to states to complete the recovery.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cp>Fifth-grader Andreana Campbell and third-grader Kewon Wells are tending to a garden box after school at Eugene Field Elementary School in Tulsa, Okla.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“I want to try this kale,” Kewon says, pointing to one of their crops. He picks some off the plant and pops it in his mouth.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“I don’t think you’re supposed to take the kale off, and you’re supposed to wash it!” Andreana tells him with a giggle.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>At this after-school program, each participant gets a garden box to plan, decorate, plant and harvest from throughout the school year.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>It’s one of countless after-school programs across the country that rely on federal pandemic-era relief dollars known as Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief, or ESSER, funds. But those federal dollars are starting to expire this fall, leaving the future of many after-school programs – including the one at Eugene Field – up in the air.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“The unfortunate reality is that some of those programs are going to close,” says Erik Peterson, senior vice president for policy at the nonprofit Afterschool Alliance.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>His organization \u003ca href=\"https://afterschoolalliance.org/documents/Investments-in-Student-Recovery-2023.pdf\">analyzed\u003c/a> 6,300 school districts across all states and the District of Columbia, and found that those districts spent at least $8.1 billion in ESSER funds on after-school and summer programs. As a result, an estimated 4 million \u003cem>more \u003c/em>students were able to access these programs.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Peterson says schools will need to find \u003ca href=\"https://toolkit.afterschoolalliance.org/sustaining-a-program/sustainability-federal-pandemic-funding/\">diverse funding streams\u003c/a> to sustain the after-school programming boom that temporary federal funds made possible.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“There’s not going to be one funding stream that just comes in and takes over. It’s going to be a patchwork,” he explains.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Even if schools do pull that off, he says “it’s not going to be enough to match” what the federal government was providing.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Many of Tulsa’s afterschool programs are supported by an organization called \u003ca href=\"https://theopp.org/\">The Opp\u003c/a>. Leaders there say ESSER funds allowed The Opp to expand its program offerings from seven school sites to 63. It supports 450 programs across those schools. But once the ESSER funds are gone, that will shrink to just 75 programs, unless they can find funding on their own.\u003c/p>\n\u003ch3>The return on investment for after-school programs\u003c/h3>\n\u003cp>Peterson says quality after-school programs come with all kinds of benefits. Not only do they help foster relationships with trusted adults, but they also help students develop \u003ca href=\"https://afterschoolalliance.org/documents/Afterschool-Supports-Childrens-Well-Being-and-Healthy-Development-2023.pdf\">important skills\u003c/a>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Communication skills — both written and oral — learning to problem solve, learning to resolve conflicts with peers and with others,” Peterson explains. “And really, all those skills that employers look for in terms of so-called ‘21st-century skills’ or workforce skills, but also really the skills just anyone needs to be successful — both in school, but really, in life.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>A growing \u003ca href=\"https://escholarship.org/content/qt0995q98p/qt0995q98p_noSplash_15b19e239ae1edbd1414b4b3df8a6f8a.pdf\">body\u003c/a> of \u003ca href=\"https://afterschoolalliance.org/documents/COVID-recovery-national-Factsheet-020121.pdf\">research\u003c/a> shows students who participate in out-of school activities, including after-school programs, are more likely to have higher vocabulary scores, better reading comprehension, better math achievement and better social confidence.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>These programs also provide a safe place for students to keep learning after the school day ends.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“I had an opportunity to chat with a fourth-grade student as she was waiting for her chess club to begin,” says Lauren Sivak, executive director at \u003ca href=\"https://theopp.org/\">The Opp\u003c/a>. “And she said to me, ‘If I wasn’t here, I’d probably be home alone.’ And I have not forgotten that statement since those words left her mouth. And that is a big concern to me.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>According to The Opp’s data, students who participated in The Opp’s after-school programs were 43% less likely to be chronically absent — that’s when students miss at least 10% of school days in a school year.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Sivak says these programs also provide a place where students can expand their interests and work on life skills without worrying about grades or other classroom pressures.\u003c/p>\n\u003ch3>When after-school funding competes with in-school needs\u003c/h3>\n\u003cp>Caroline Crouch, of Tulsa Public Schools, says prioritizing state dollars for after-school opportunities – over in-school ones – can be a tough sell. And in fact, in Oklahoma, lawmakers are focusing their funding priorities on teacher recruitment and retention, not filling the gaps for after-school programs once the ESSER money expires.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Crouch previously oversaw after-school programs for the district, and she currently works in the communications office. She says policymakers and donors need to know about the return on investment after-school programming provides.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“It feels to a lot of people like it’s soft and fuzzy, right? You know, this ain’t no reading, writing and arithmetic,” Crouch says.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But the district has seen the difference these programs can make for Tulsa students: “A few years ago, we had the first- or second-year [after-school] debate club at Walt Whitman Elementary. And every single student who was in their debate club did better on their English language [and] math assessments than they had before.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Sivak, of The Opp, says she doesn’t think policymakers in Oklahoma will step in with funding unless they feel a sense of urgency from their communities — and that probably won’t happen until the programs go away.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“I don’t know if the appetite for sustainable funding will be there until we see what is lost.”\u003c/p>\n\u003ch3>After-school lessons in pesto\u003c/h3>\n\u003cp>At Eugene Field Elementary, the after-school gardeners aren’t thinking about funding; they’re more focused on making a harvested carrot-top pesto spread.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Students gather around a table to chop carrot greens, spinach, basil and kale. They add oil, lemon juice and garlic into a food processor, and garden educator Mary Smith talks through potential flavor profiles as she folds in the pesto with whipped butter.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The students spread the pesto over slices of bread and take a bite. Many go back for seconds, and some for thirds.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Afterward, Smith gathers the students on the carpeted floor and asks what they appreciated that day. Surrounded by gardening calendars, an enormous indoor grow tower, photos of the students in the garden and cooking supplies, the kids say they appreciate the teachers at this after-school program, the carrot-top pesto and getting to do a garden scavenger hunt earlier that afternoon.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Then they put their hands together and count off: “Three, two, one — pesto rocks!”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad floatright]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>Beth Wallis covers education for StateImpact Oklahoma.\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\n",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>Fifth-grader Andreana Campbell and third-grader Kewon Wells are tending to a garden box after school at Eugene Field Elementary School in Tulsa, Okla.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“I want to try this kale,” Kewon says, pointing to one of their crops. He picks some off the plant and pops it in his mouth.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“I don’t think you’re supposed to take the kale off, and you’re supposed to wash it!” Andreana tells him with a giggle.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>At this after-school program, each participant gets a garden box to plan, decorate, plant and harvest from throughout the school year.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>It’s one of countless after-school programs across the country that rely on federal pandemic-era relief dollars known as Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief, or ESSER, funds. But those federal dollars are starting to expire this fall, leaving the future of many after-school programs – including the one at Eugene Field – up in the air.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“The unfortunate reality is that some of those programs are going to close,” says Erik Peterson, senior vice president for policy at the nonprofit Afterschool Alliance.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>His organization \u003ca href=\"https://afterschoolalliance.org/documents/Investments-in-Student-Recovery-2023.pdf\">analyzed\u003c/a> 6,300 school districts across all states and the District of Columbia, and found that those districts spent at least $8.1 billion in ESSER funds on after-school and summer programs. As a result, an estimated 4 million \u003cem>more \u003c/em>students were able to access these programs.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Peterson says schools will need to find \u003ca href=\"https://toolkit.afterschoolalliance.org/sustaining-a-program/sustainability-federal-pandemic-funding/\">diverse funding streams\u003c/a> to sustain the after-school programming boom that temporary federal funds made possible.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“There’s not going to be one funding stream that just comes in and takes over. It’s going to be a patchwork,” he explains.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Even if schools do pull that off, he says “it’s not going to be enough to match” what the federal government was providing.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Many of Tulsa’s afterschool programs are supported by an organization called \u003ca href=\"https://theopp.org/\">The Opp\u003c/a>. Leaders there say ESSER funds allowed The Opp to expand its program offerings from seven school sites to 63. It supports 450 programs across those schools. But once the ESSER funds are gone, that will shrink to just 75 programs, unless they can find funding on their own.\u003c/p>\n\u003ch3>The return on investment for after-school programs\u003c/h3>\n\u003cp>Peterson says quality after-school programs come with all kinds of benefits. Not only do they help foster relationships with trusted adults, but they also help students develop \u003ca href=\"https://afterschoolalliance.org/documents/Afterschool-Supports-Childrens-Well-Being-and-Healthy-Development-2023.pdf\">important skills\u003c/a>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Communication skills — both written and oral — learning to problem solve, learning to resolve conflicts with peers and with others,” Peterson explains. “And really, all those skills that employers look for in terms of so-called ‘21st-century skills’ or workforce skills, but also really the skills just anyone needs to be successful — both in school, but really, in life.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>A growing \u003ca href=\"https://escholarship.org/content/qt0995q98p/qt0995q98p_noSplash_15b19e239ae1edbd1414b4b3df8a6f8a.pdf\">body\u003c/a> of \u003ca href=\"https://afterschoolalliance.org/documents/COVID-recovery-national-Factsheet-020121.pdf\">research\u003c/a> shows students who participate in out-of school activities, including after-school programs, are more likely to have higher vocabulary scores, better reading comprehension, better math achievement and better social confidence.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>These programs also provide a safe place for students to keep learning after the school day ends.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“I had an opportunity to chat with a fourth-grade student as she was waiting for her chess club to begin,” says Lauren Sivak, executive director at \u003ca href=\"https://theopp.org/\">The Opp\u003c/a>. “And she said to me, ‘If I wasn’t here, I’d probably be home alone.’ And I have not forgotten that statement since those words left her mouth. And that is a big concern to me.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>According to The Opp’s data, students who participated in The Opp’s after-school programs were 43% less likely to be chronically absent — that’s when students miss at least 10% of school days in a school year.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Sivak says these programs also provide a place where students can expand their interests and work on life skills without worrying about grades or other classroom pressures.\u003c/p>\n\u003ch3>When after-school funding competes with in-school needs\u003c/h3>\n\u003cp>Caroline Crouch, of Tulsa Public Schools, says prioritizing state dollars for after-school opportunities – over in-school ones – can be a tough sell. And in fact, in Oklahoma, lawmakers are focusing their funding priorities on teacher recruitment and retention, not filling the gaps for after-school programs once the ESSER money expires.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Crouch previously oversaw after-school programs for the district, and she currently works in the communications office. She says policymakers and donors need to know about the return on investment after-school programming provides.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“It feels to a lot of people like it’s soft and fuzzy, right? You know, this ain’t no reading, writing and arithmetic,” Crouch says.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But the district has seen the difference these programs can make for Tulsa students: “A few years ago, we had the first- or second-year [after-school] debate club at Walt Whitman Elementary. And every single student who was in their debate club did better on their English language [and] math assessments than they had before.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Sivak, of The Opp, says she doesn’t think policymakers in Oklahoma will step in with funding unless they feel a sense of urgency from their communities — and that probably won’t happen until the programs go away.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“I don’t know if the appetite for sustainable funding will be there until we see what is lost.”\u003c/p>\n\u003ch3>After-school lessons in pesto\u003c/h3>\n\u003cp>At Eugene Field Elementary, the after-school gardeners aren’t thinking about funding; they’re more focused on making a harvested carrot-top pesto spread.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Students gather around a table to chop carrot greens, spinach, basil and kale. They add oil, lemon juice and garlic into a food processor, and garden educator Mary Smith talks through potential flavor profiles as she folds in the pesto with whipped butter.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The students spread the pesto over slices of bread and take a bite. Many go back for seconds, and some for thirds.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Afterward, Smith gathers the students on the carpeted floor and asks what they appreciated that day. Surrounded by gardening calendars, an enormous indoor grow tower, photos of the students in the garden and cooking supplies, the kids say they appreciate the teachers at this after-school program, the carrot-top pesto and getting to do a garden scavenger hunt earlier that afternoon.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Then they put their hands together and count off: “Three, two, one — pesto rocks!”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"title": "How COVID-19 Narrowed the STEM Pipeline",
"headTitle": "How COVID-19 Narrowed the STEM Pipeline | KQED",
"content": "\u003cp class=\"p7\">Universities, philanthropies and even the U.S. government are all trying to encourage more young Americans to pursue careers in STEM, an acronym for science, technology, engineering and mathematics. Many business sectors, from high tech to manufacturing, are plagued with \u003ca href=\"https://www.oxfordeconomics.com/resource/understanding-the-gaps-in-the-us-stem-labor-market/\">\u003cspan class=\"s2\">shortages of workers with technical skills\u003c/span>\u003c/a>. In New York City, where I live, the subway is frequently plastered with \u003ca href=\"https://www.rit.edu/news/rit-expands-advertising-new-york-citys-grand-central-station-and-metro-north-rail-lines\">\u003cspan class=\"s2\">advertisements\u003c/span>\u003c/a> carrying the message that \u003ca href=\"https://x.com/DKThomp/status/1769363055341604947?s=20\">\u003cspan class=\"s2\">STEM fields pay well\u003c/span>\u003c/a>. But studying STEM requires more than an interest in science or a desire to make good money. Students also need adequate training, even in elementary and middle school.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp class=\"p7\">That’s why it’s concerning that high-achieving students, who’ve received less public attention than lower achieving students, were also set back by remote learning and pandemic uncertainty. Fewer students with math skills shrinks the pool of people who are likely to cultivate an expertise in science, engineering and technology a decade from now. In other words, the STEM pipeline – a metaphor for the development of future scientists, engineers and other high tech workers – likely starts with a narrower funnel in the post-pandemic era.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp class=\"p7\">The stakes are high not only for Gen Z, as they age out of school and enter the workforce, but also for the future of the U.S. economy, which needs skilled scientists and engineers to grow.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp class=\"p7\">The leading indicators of STEM troubles ahead are apparent within the 2022 scores from a national test called the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP). The immediate headlines from that first post-pandemic test focused on the fact that two decades of academic progress had been suddenly erased. Low-achieving children, who tend to be poor, had lost the most ground. An alarming number of American children – as high as \u003ca href=\"https://www.nationsreportcard.gov/mathematics/nation/achievement/?grade=8\">\u003cspan class=\"s2\">38%\u003c/span>\u003c/a> of eighth graders – were functioning below the “basic” level in math, meaning that they didn’t have even the most rudimentary math skills.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp class=\"p7\">Statisticians at the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) have continued to dig into the 2022 data, and they’ve been also turning their attention to students at the top. These children are on grade level, but the eighth grade NAEP assessment shows that far fewer of them are hitting an advanced performance level, or even a proficient one. Math scores among top performers dropped as steeply as scores did among low performers. Even the scores of students at Catholic schools, who otherwise weathered the pandemic well, plummeted in eighth grade math.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp class=\"p7\">We don’t have data for other private schools because they have refused to participate in NAEP testing, but the eighth grade math declines among both high-achieving public school and Catholic school students are not good signs.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp class=\"p7\">NAEP tests reading and math in both fourth and eighth grades every two years in order to track educational progress. It’s one of the only tests that can be used for comparisons across states and generations. More than \u003ca href=\"https://www.nationsreportcard.gov/mathematics/?grade=4\">\u003cspan class=\"s2\">400,000 students\u003c/span>\u003c/a> are specially selected to represent the regions and demographic characteristics of the nation.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp class=\"p7\">Among the four NAEP tests, eighth grade math showed the sharpest pandemic drop. Math took a bigger hit than reading because kids can still read at home, while math is something that students primarily learn at school. If you didn’t read “The Hobbit” in your seventh grade English class because you were out sick with Covid, you can still be a good lifelong reader But not getting enough practice with rates, ratios and percentages in middle school can derail someone who might have otherwise excelled.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp class=\"p7\">Why eighth grade math was hit harder than fourth grade math is a bit less obvious. One explanation is that the concepts that students need to learn are more difficult. Square roots and exponents are possibly more challenging to master than multiplication and division. And fewer parents are able to assist with homework as the math increases in complexity.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp class=\"p7\">Yet another explanation is a psychological one. These eighth graders were in sixth grade when the pandemic erupted in the spring of 2020. This is a critical time in adolescent development when children are figuring out who they are and where they belong. A lot of this development occurs through social interaction. The isolation may have stunted psychological development and that ultimately affected motivation, study skills and the ability to delay gratification – all necessary to excel in math.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp class=\"p7\">Let’s walk through the numbers together.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp class=\"p8\">\u003cb>Highest achieving students lost ground in eighth grade math\u003c/b>\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_63378\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 800px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-medium wp-image-63378\" src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2024/03/image3-1-800x437.png\" alt=\"\" width=\"800\" height=\"437\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2024/03/image3-1-800x437.png 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2024/03/image3-1-1020x557.png 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2024/03/image3-1-160x87.png 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2024/03/image3-1-768x419.png 768w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2024/03/image3-1.png 1410w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 800px) 100vw, 800px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Source: NAEP Report Card Mathematics 2022\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp class=\"p7\">This \u003cspan class=\"s2\">chart\u003c/span> shows that the highest performing students, those at the top 10% and the top 25%, lost as much as low-achieving students at the bottom in eighth grade math. These eighth graders were in the spring of sixth grade when the pandemic hit in 2020, and it’s possible that they didn’t master important prerequisite skills, such as rates and ratios. These kids at the top are performing at grade level, but not as high performing as past eighth graders.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp class=\"p8\">\u003cb>Fewer eighth grade students hit advanced and proficient levels\u003c/b>\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_63379\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 800px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-medium wp-image-63379\" src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2024/03/image2-1-800x175.png\" alt=\"\" width=\"800\" height=\"175\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2024/03/image2-1-800x175.png 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2024/03/image2-1-1020x223.png 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2024/03/image2-1-160x35.png 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2024/03/image2-1-768x168.png 768w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2024/03/image2-1.png 1364w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 800px) 100vw, 800px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Source: NAEP Report Card Mathematics 2022\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp class=\"p7\">This \u003cspan class=\"s2\">bar chart\u003c/span> shows that before the pandemic 10% of the nation’s eighth graders were performing at an advanced level in math. That fell to 7%. And the number of students deemed proficient in eighth grade math fell even more, from 24% to 20%. Before the pandemic, arguably, 34% of the eighth grade population was on track to pursue advanced math in high school and a future STEM career if they wanted one. After the pandemic in 2022, only 27% were well prepared.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp class=\"p7\">Students at Catholic schools are generally much higher performing than students at public schools. In large part, that’s because of family income; wealthier students tend to have higher test scores than poorer students. Catholic school students tend to be wealthier; their families can afford private school tuition. In recent years, the Catholic Church has closed hundreds of schools that catered to low-income families, leaving a higher income population in its remaining classrooms.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp class=\"p7\">\u003cb>Catholic schools outperformed public schools but also dropped \u003c/b>\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_63377\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 780px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-63377\" src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2024/03/image4.png\" alt=\"\" width=\"780\" height=\"414\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2024/03/image4.png 780w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2024/03/image4-160x85.png 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2024/03/image4-768x408.png 768w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 780px) 100vw, 780px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Source: NAEP Report Card Mathematics 2022\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp class=\"p7\">This \u003cspan class=\"s2\">chart\u003c/span> shows that Catholic school students, depicted by the diamonds, outperformed public school students, depicted by the circles, in eighth grade math. But it was still a sharp five-point decline in eighth grade math performance for Catholic school students, almost as large as the eight-point decline for public school students. Scores of white students at Catholic schools declined five points; scores of students at Catholic schools in the suburbs declined seven points. Almost a quarter of Catholic school students are now functioning below a basic level in math for their grade.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp class=\"p7\">Despite the good academic reputation of Catholic schools and the praise Catholic schools received for resuming in-person instruction sooner, math scores suggest a problem. And it’s a problem that potentially extends to the whole private school universe, where \u003ca href=\"https://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/indicator/cgc/private-school-enrollment\">\u003cspan class=\"s2\">9% of students are enrolled\u003c/span>\u003c/a>, according to the most recently available data from 2019.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp class=\"p7\">I talked with Ron Reynolds, the executive director of the California Association of Private School Organizations, who explained that not just Catholic schools, but also many other private schools suffered even if they hadn’t been closed for long. Reynolds said that private schools were still hit by illnesses, deaths and absences and that might have affected instruction.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp class=\"p7\">“Private schools are tightly knit communities in which teachers tend to be more intertwined in the lives of the children and families they serve,” he said. “When you have a crisis, and so many people experiencing stress and loss, that can certainly impact the teacher in some significant ways.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp class=\"p7\">Unfortunately, we don’t know exactly how other private schools fared during the pandemic because they have refused to participate in the NAEP tests for the past decade. Reynolds, who serves on the governing board that oversees the NAEP exam, has been trying to lobby more private schools to participate, but so far, to no avail.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp class=\"p7\">Together private schools, selective public schools and affluent suburban schools have been important training grounds for the nation’s future scientists and engineers. Of course, it is possible that these high achieving students, now 10th graders, will catch up. Many of them are from wealthier families who can afford tutors, or attend well-resourced schools. But I am not seeing much evidence that schools have had the ability to think about the pipeline of advanced students when many students are so needy. And with post-pandemic grade inflation, students and parents may not be getting the signals they need to seek extra help independently.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp class=\"p7\">The administration of the 2024 NAEP test wrapped up in March, but results won’t be known for many months. I’ll be keeping an eye on eighth grade math and on SAT, ACT and Advanced Placement scores in the years to come.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad floatright]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp class=\"p7\">\u003ci>This story about\u003c/i> \u003ca href=\"https://hechingerreport.org/proof-points-how-covid-narrowed-the-stem-pipeline/\">\u003cspan class=\"s2\">\u003ci>math scores\u003c/i>\u003c/span>\u003c/a>\u003ci> was written by Jill Barshay and produced by \u003c/i>The Hechinger Report\u003ci>, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for the \u003c/i>\u003ca href=\"https://hechingerreport.org/proofpoints/\">\u003cspan class=\"s2\">\u003ci>Proof Points newsletter\u003c/i>\u003c/span>\u003c/a>\u003ci>.\u003c/i>\u003c/p>\n\n",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp class=\"p7\">Universities, philanthropies and even the U.S. government are all trying to encourage more young Americans to pursue careers in STEM, an acronym for science, technology, engineering and mathematics. Many business sectors, from high tech to manufacturing, are plagued with \u003ca href=\"https://www.oxfordeconomics.com/resource/understanding-the-gaps-in-the-us-stem-labor-market/\">\u003cspan class=\"s2\">shortages of workers with technical skills\u003c/span>\u003c/a>. In New York City, where I live, the subway is frequently plastered with \u003ca href=\"https://www.rit.edu/news/rit-expands-advertising-new-york-citys-grand-central-station-and-metro-north-rail-lines\">\u003cspan class=\"s2\">advertisements\u003c/span>\u003c/a> carrying the message that \u003ca href=\"https://x.com/DKThomp/status/1769363055341604947?s=20\">\u003cspan class=\"s2\">STEM fields pay well\u003c/span>\u003c/a>. But studying STEM requires more than an interest in science or a desire to make good money. Students also need adequate training, even in elementary and middle school.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp class=\"p7\">That’s why it’s concerning that high-achieving students, who’ve received less public attention than lower achieving students, were also set back by remote learning and pandemic uncertainty. Fewer students with math skills shrinks the pool of people who are likely to cultivate an expertise in science, engineering and technology a decade from now. In other words, the STEM pipeline – a metaphor for the development of future scientists, engineers and other high tech workers – likely starts with a narrower funnel in the post-pandemic era.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp class=\"p7\">The stakes are high not only for Gen Z, as they age out of school and enter the workforce, but also for the future of the U.S. economy, which needs skilled scientists and engineers to grow.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp class=\"p7\">The leading indicators of STEM troubles ahead are apparent within the 2022 scores from a national test called the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP). The immediate headlines from that first post-pandemic test focused on the fact that two decades of academic progress had been suddenly erased. Low-achieving children, who tend to be poor, had lost the most ground. An alarming number of American children – as high as \u003ca href=\"https://www.nationsreportcard.gov/mathematics/nation/achievement/?grade=8\">\u003cspan class=\"s2\">38%\u003c/span>\u003c/a> of eighth graders – were functioning below the “basic” level in math, meaning that they didn’t have even the most rudimentary math skills.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp class=\"p7\">Statisticians at the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) have continued to dig into the 2022 data, and they’ve been also turning their attention to students at the top. These children are on grade level, but the eighth grade NAEP assessment shows that far fewer of them are hitting an advanced performance level, or even a proficient one. Math scores among top performers dropped as steeply as scores did among low performers. Even the scores of students at Catholic schools, who otherwise weathered the pandemic well, plummeted in eighth grade math.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp class=\"p7\">We don’t have data for other private schools because they have refused to participate in NAEP testing, but the eighth grade math declines among both high-achieving public school and Catholic school students are not good signs.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp class=\"p7\">NAEP tests reading and math in both fourth and eighth grades every two years in order to track educational progress. It’s one of the only tests that can be used for comparisons across states and generations. More than \u003ca href=\"https://www.nationsreportcard.gov/mathematics/?grade=4\">\u003cspan class=\"s2\">400,000 students\u003c/span>\u003c/a> are specially selected to represent the regions and demographic characteristics of the nation.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp class=\"p7\">Among the four NAEP tests, eighth grade math showed the sharpest pandemic drop. Math took a bigger hit than reading because kids can still read at home, while math is something that students primarily learn at school. If you didn’t read “The Hobbit” in your seventh grade English class because you were out sick with Covid, you can still be a good lifelong reader But not getting enough practice with rates, ratios and percentages in middle school can derail someone who might have otherwise excelled.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp class=\"p7\">Why eighth grade math was hit harder than fourth grade math is a bit less obvious. One explanation is that the concepts that students need to learn are more difficult. Square roots and exponents are possibly more challenging to master than multiplication and division. And fewer parents are able to assist with homework as the math increases in complexity.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp class=\"p7\">Yet another explanation is a psychological one. These eighth graders were in sixth grade when the pandemic erupted in the spring of 2020. This is a critical time in adolescent development when children are figuring out who they are and where they belong. A lot of this development occurs through social interaction. The isolation may have stunted psychological development and that ultimately affected motivation, study skills and the ability to delay gratification – all necessary to excel in math.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp class=\"p7\">Let’s walk through the numbers together.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp class=\"p8\">\u003cb>Highest achieving students lost ground in eighth grade math\u003c/b>\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_63378\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 800px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-medium wp-image-63378\" src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2024/03/image3-1-800x437.png\" alt=\"\" width=\"800\" height=\"437\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2024/03/image3-1-800x437.png 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2024/03/image3-1-1020x557.png 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2024/03/image3-1-160x87.png 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2024/03/image3-1-768x419.png 768w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2024/03/image3-1.png 1410w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 800px) 100vw, 800px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Source: NAEP Report Card Mathematics 2022\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp class=\"p7\">This \u003cspan class=\"s2\">chart\u003c/span> shows that the highest performing students, those at the top 10% and the top 25%, lost as much as low-achieving students at the bottom in eighth grade math. These eighth graders were in the spring of sixth grade when the pandemic hit in 2020, and it’s possible that they didn’t master important prerequisite skills, such as rates and ratios. These kids at the top are performing at grade level, but not as high performing as past eighth graders.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp class=\"p8\">\u003cb>Fewer eighth grade students hit advanced and proficient levels\u003c/b>\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_63379\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 800px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-medium wp-image-63379\" src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2024/03/image2-1-800x175.png\" alt=\"\" width=\"800\" height=\"175\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2024/03/image2-1-800x175.png 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2024/03/image2-1-1020x223.png 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2024/03/image2-1-160x35.png 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2024/03/image2-1-768x168.png 768w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2024/03/image2-1.png 1364w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 800px) 100vw, 800px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Source: NAEP Report Card Mathematics 2022\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp class=\"p7\">This \u003cspan class=\"s2\">bar chart\u003c/span> shows that before the pandemic 10% of the nation’s eighth graders were performing at an advanced level in math. That fell to 7%. And the number of students deemed proficient in eighth grade math fell even more, from 24% to 20%. Before the pandemic, arguably, 34% of the eighth grade population was on track to pursue advanced math in high school and a future STEM career if they wanted one. After the pandemic in 2022, only 27% were well prepared.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp class=\"p7\">Students at Catholic schools are generally much higher performing than students at public schools. In large part, that’s because of family income; wealthier students tend to have higher test scores than poorer students. Catholic school students tend to be wealthier; their families can afford private school tuition. In recent years, the Catholic Church has closed hundreds of schools that catered to low-income families, leaving a higher income population in its remaining classrooms.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp class=\"p7\">\u003cb>Catholic schools outperformed public schools but also dropped \u003c/b>\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_63377\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 780px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-63377\" src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2024/03/image4.png\" alt=\"\" width=\"780\" height=\"414\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2024/03/image4.png 780w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2024/03/image4-160x85.png 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2024/03/image4-768x408.png 768w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 780px) 100vw, 780px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Source: NAEP Report Card Mathematics 2022\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp class=\"p7\">This \u003cspan class=\"s2\">chart\u003c/span> shows that Catholic school students, depicted by the diamonds, outperformed public school students, depicted by the circles, in eighth grade math. But it was still a sharp five-point decline in eighth grade math performance for Catholic school students, almost as large as the eight-point decline for public school students. Scores of white students at Catholic schools declined five points; scores of students at Catholic schools in the suburbs declined seven points. Almost a quarter of Catholic school students are now functioning below a basic level in math for their grade.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp class=\"p7\">Despite the good academic reputation of Catholic schools and the praise Catholic schools received for resuming in-person instruction sooner, math scores suggest a problem. And it’s a problem that potentially extends to the whole private school universe, where \u003ca href=\"https://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/indicator/cgc/private-school-enrollment\">\u003cspan class=\"s2\">9% of students are enrolled\u003c/span>\u003c/a>, according to the most recently available data from 2019.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp class=\"p7\">I talked with Ron Reynolds, the executive director of the California Association of Private School Organizations, who explained that not just Catholic schools, but also many other private schools suffered even if they hadn’t been closed for long. Reynolds said that private schools were still hit by illnesses, deaths and absences and that might have affected instruction.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp class=\"p7\">“Private schools are tightly knit communities in which teachers tend to be more intertwined in the lives of the children and families they serve,” he said. “When you have a crisis, and so many people experiencing stress and loss, that can certainly impact the teacher in some significant ways.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp class=\"p7\">Unfortunately, we don’t know exactly how other private schools fared during the pandemic because they have refused to participate in the NAEP tests for the past decade. Reynolds, who serves on the governing board that oversees the NAEP exam, has been trying to lobby more private schools to participate, but so far, to no avail.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp class=\"p7\">Together private schools, selective public schools and affluent suburban schools have been important training grounds for the nation’s future scientists and engineers. Of course, it is possible that these high achieving students, now 10th graders, will catch up. Many of them are from wealthier families who can afford tutors, or attend well-resourced schools. But I am not seeing much evidence that schools have had the ability to think about the pipeline of advanced students when many students are so needy. And with post-pandemic grade inflation, students and parents may not be getting the signals they need to seek extra help independently.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp class=\"p7\">The administration of the 2024 NAEP test wrapped up in March, but results won’t be known for many months. I’ll be keeping an eye on eighth grade math and on SAT, ACT and Advanced Placement scores in the years to come.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp class=\"p7\">\u003ci>This story about\u003c/i> \u003ca href=\"https://hechingerreport.org/proof-points-how-covid-narrowed-the-stem-pipeline/\">\u003cspan class=\"s2\">\u003ci>math scores\u003c/i>\u003c/span>\u003c/a>\u003ci> was written by Jill Barshay and produced by \u003c/i>The Hechinger Report\u003ci>, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for the \u003c/i>\u003ca href=\"https://hechingerreport.org/proofpoints/\">\u003cspan class=\"s2\">\u003ci>Proof Points newsletter\u003c/i>\u003c/span>\u003c/a>\u003ci>.\u003c/i>\u003c/p>\n\n\u003c/div>\u003c/p>",
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"info": "Our weekly podcast explores how the media 'sausage' is made, casts an incisive eye on fluctuations in the marketplace of ideas, and examines threats to the freedom of information and expression in America and abroad. For one hour a week, the show tries to lift the veil from the process of \"making media,\" especially news media, because it's through that lens that we see the world and the world sees us",
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