Goals and Recs for a Strongest Year Yet
This morning, a coalition of local education support and advocacy organizations formally launches a new campaign to ensure the 2021-22 school year is our Strongest Year Yet. This blog post is a summary of why EmpowerK12 believes in the coalition’s mission and how an equity-centric, continuous improvement-oriented approach can help us exceed ambitious goals we must set for a quick recovery.
Our resilient educators and students are poised for a strong year
DC educators worked tirelessly over the last year to deliver lessons in new and innovative ways from a distance to mitigate hardship caused by the pandemic, while school leaders pivoted to delivering meals and devices to students during the early days of COVID-19. Through it all, students learned new and engaging content.
A year ago, national think tanks modeled scenarios of expected learning loss based on typical summer slide, publishing dire warnings of the pandemic’s possible impact on student achievement. Academic slide in early reports projected the loss in numbers of years which has not been the case. DC data from the fall and winter clearly demonstrate students are outperforming those alarming learning loss predictions.
Data from the winter administration of the DC Student Well-Being Survey, a cross-section of more than 2,000 students in public charter schools grades 3-12, show students still feel it is important to do well in class, and they generally remain confident they will finish the year with success.
This level of adult and student resiliency holds promise for a strong and immediate recovery this summer and into the 2021-22 school year.
Academic and social-emotional hardship has not been felt evenly across the city
In December, we released a comprehensive review of data from nationally normed math and reading assessments administered to over 30,000 students K-8 in DCPS and charter schools this fall and last fall.
Overall, students, on average, demonstrated one month less of learning in reading and 4 months less in math from fall 2019 to fall 2020 than is typically gained.
For students designated as most likely at risk of school failure, the learning slides are estimated to be 4 months in reading and 6 months in math as of the fall.
In early reading, there was an 11 percentage point drop overall in students deemed proficient over the past year. At-risk students have seen a 16 percentage point drop in proficiency, while students who live in DC’s 2 most impoverished wards, who are almost all Black, have seen a drop in early reading proficiency of almost 20 percentage points.
Last month, in partnership with JerseyCAN, we analyzed fall-to-winter growth data for a group of New Jersey districts that were predominantly urban and executing distance learning with some higher-income districts and schools that offered hybrid and in-person learning opportunities. We found ongoing COVID academic slide through the fall, but not the same rate of slide experienced in the immediate pandemic aftermath last spring and summer.
Given one key finding from our DC report was evidence of COVID slide through the fall testing window, our knowledge of some fall-to-winter growth data through our DC school-based partnerships, and that growth’s resemblance to findings from our New Jersey report, we feel confident that DC students, especially students designated at-risk, have slipped further behind the typical annual growth pace in math and reading.
The pandemic’s impact is not limited to math and reading academic slide. Student well-being, social-emotional, science and social studies skills have also been affected. The DC Student Well-Being Survey found:
Nearly half (45 percent) report that their family’s financial situation has become somewhat or significantly more stressful due to the pandemic.
One in five students recently experienced the loss of an adult they care about.
Students experiencing food insecurity were more likely to express concerning social-emotional states:
Moreover, LEAs reported to us the disparate impact on outcomes in other areas for at-risk students versus non-at-risk students, for example:
Significant increase in failing grades (D’s and F’s) for at-risk versus non-at-risk students.
Twice the level of truancy and chronic absenteeism for at-risk students versus non-at-risk students.
The Challenge: a rapid recovery for students requires unprecedented growth
Here are our latest achievement estimates for students designated as at-risk, if they are required to take the PARCC assessment this spring (OSSE recently submitted a waiver request to cancel PARCC in favor of local assessments that provide educators with quicker, better feedback to support summer and fall planning):
We think a three-year ambitious recovery is possible with achievement rates by 2024 that meet or exceed pre-pandemic achievement levels:
What level of growth is necessary to accomplish this rapid rate of improvement for students designated as at-risk? In some respects, unprecedented levels of student growth are needed, but many of our schools, including the Bold Performance and Bold Improvement schools, frequently demonstrate high and improved levels of academic growth. Both higher and improved student growth lead to sustained improved overall achievement:
Median growth percentile, one of two growth measures on the STAR framework, compares students with prior test score histories to find where their new score ranks, demonstrating how much they grew compared to similar students. A growth percentile of 50 represents the average, and historically, students designated as at-risk have demonstrated growth on par with their peers of all socioeconomic statuses with improvement in that growth over time in ELA. The improved growth in ELA led to strong achievement gains from 2015-2019 as shown in this post’s first at-risk achievement chart.
To meet the three-year recovery achievement goals, our schools will need to post the following improvement in median growth percentile for students designated as at-risk:
The Opportunity: use stimulus funds to invest in Equity and Continuous Improvement
Our city’s Bold Performance and Bold Improvement schools have taught the broader community that amazing outcomes are possible for our students designated as at-risk. We know many of the pre-pandemic strategies these schools utilized to close achievement gaps will still be applicable to post-pandemic schooling, including:
Culture of continuous feedback and improvement
Innovative talent development grounded in improvement science approaches
Offer opportunities for individualized support and joyful learning projects through the strategic use of extended school year and day
Increase collaboration within the classroom and school as well as across schools
Ensure students are ready to learn by setting high expectations and creating a warm social-emotional environment
A focus on student and educator mental health and well-being
We suggest distributing a large portion of ARP stimulus funds to LEAs based on the three-year moving average of at-risk students served. Schools that accept stimulus funds agree to use them on interventions designed to rapidly improve social-emotional and academic outcomes and to collect and provide data on the interventions in use across the LEA. A portion of the funds should be used to implement a Response to Intervention (RTI) or Multi-tiered System of Supports (MTSS) tracking system to efficiently collect data on the interventions schools and teachers assign for students.
Given how important sustained school-wide and individual intervention improvement is to achievement, we also suggest stimulus funds be used to create multiple cross-sector continuous improvement networks that help school leaders and teachers collect timely, robust student-level data and review intervention effectiveness in short-interval cycles. Educators then share what they learn from their short-interval cycles on a quarterly basis to promote rapid traction of promising practices throughout the District.
Equity-centric stimulus spending should complement local equitable funding initiatives for maximum impact
In addition to an equitable disbursement of stimulus funds, local leaders must find ways to increase the at-risk weight in the school funding formula. As a “part two” of this blog post next week, we will examine data that suggests DC is undercounting the number of students who are most likely to be at risk of academic failure, primarily due to substantial increases in minimum wage that lead to nonuse of TANF/SNAP benefits. The possible undercount means recent increases in at-risk weight and UPSFF base rates have not “in practice” lead to substantial financial investments for students who are more likely to need the additional supports.