Early on in the pandemic, I shared some observations at the start of the 2020-2021 school year that opened with one word: “Pray.” It was a depressing and dispiriting time as my zoom zombies and I tried to hold class, and Notes from the Trenches remains probably the darkest thing I have ever allowed myself to publish.
Yet for nearly a month now, I have had to fight the urge to open all of my writing with that exact same word.
Because the news pouring out of education just keeps getting grimmer.
It started with a report from Atlanta where the elementary teachers there have documented that—due to the interruptions of the pandemic—74% of their third graders entered the year reading (if at all) at only a first-grade level. This leaves those teachers only the year to try and get their students caught up for the higher reading expectations of fourth grade—where the demands for independent learning start to be significantly greater—and the stakes couldn’t be higher. Children who aren’t reading fluently by the end of third grade are four times more likely to fail to finish high school, and those who don’t earn their diploma are more likely to end up in prison (with a 70% greater chance if you are a person of color). It is a race against time, and it is a race in schools across the country, where unlike the Atlanta district, few are adding an extra 30 minutes to the school day and not all of them are using research supported phonics-based curricula to tackle the problem (Go Atlanta!).
Yet, even such intensive efforts may be for naught given what researchers at Harvard and Stanford reported discovering in the data from nearly 8,000 school districts earlier this month. When examining previous situations similar to the interruptions of the pandemic—e.g. a single district hit heavily by an outbreak of the flu during a given year—the researchers found not only the anticipated declines in reading levels; they found that the declines stayed put. As Stanford’s Sean Reardon put it in an NPR interview: “what was, I think, striking and surprising and a little sobering was that when there’s a big decline in one year, those cohorts don’t seem to catch up for those three or four years that we can follow them into the future.” Therefore, he warns, “parents and public officials shouldn’t just assume that schools can make up for all that lost ground because history shows in those test scores, without a concerted effort, much of it will just stay lost.”
And one of the potential impacts of it staying lost was revealed when the National Assessment for Educational Progress (NAEP)—sometimes referred to as “the nation’s report card”—released its latest results for 8th graders on the history and civics tests. The scores were the lowest since the test’s inception, with civics dropping for the first time ever, and though it makes sense given the plummet in NAEP reading scores that came out last fall—since learning both history and civics obviously depend on reading comprehension—that doesn’t make it any less fraught with alarming implications for our future as a society. As Brown University professor of political science, public policy, and education, Jonathan Collins remarked when asked how worried he was about these results:
Well, deeply concerned – and not just because I think the understanding of the world is important, but I think there’s an additional step there, which is the understanding of the world in order to address the major problems that the world faces. So when we think about whether it’s climate change, whether it’s growing economic or racial inequality – these big, major, huge social problems that seem to be growing more and more by the day – if students aren’t getting a handle on how our political system works, then this impacts their ability to be a part of a structure that’s supposed to bring people together to solve these big problems.
Our civic institutions are already dysfunctional enough as it is right now without pouring this additional fuel of ignorance onto the flames. Hence, I find it hard to learn of the NAEP results and not feel just a little disheartened.
Which brings me to the “salt in the wounds” provided by all this recent news. As I shared in a previous post about the state of education today, the statistics on the teacher shortage in the U.S. show that we are risking a crisis, and apparently, governors around the country have finally awakened to this fact and are starting to call for raises in districts nation-wide. However, for many in education, it is a situation of “too little, too late” since what is sometimes referred to as the “pay penalty” for choosing to teach when compared to other college-educated professions has only grown over the past decade, reaching a record 23.5% in 2021.
Basically, what that means is that teachers now earn 76.5 cents for every dollar earned by other college-educated professionals, and while no one goes into teaching for the money, others in the “caring professions” (nursing, social work, etc.) don’t begin to have that big a gap. My sister, the social worker, makes 18K more than I do and has a similar amount of leave time. Hence, as if the current situation in education wasn’t wounding enough, now this new news. Like I said, “salt.”
I know; I know. Anyone who has read pretty much any of my other writing knows that I can’t leave it there. I am simply constitutionally incapable of not responding to all of the pandemic’s impact on children’s learning with caring and support. Tomorrow morning, I’ll be right back in the classroom, authentically engaged, trying as always to “light candles.”
But oh, sometimes, it is damn hard not just to “curse the darkness.”
Coda
Hope. And my kind of hope. Hope as verb.
While I was finishing the final edits before posting this essay, I took a break to read the paper, and there it was, a headline reading: “Kids’ reading scores soar across the South amid reforms.”
It turns out that the perennial punching bag of educational failure and ineptitude, the state of Mississippi, has gone from having the second worst reading test scores among 4th graders in the country to only the 21st worse scores. It, along with Louisiana and Alabama, have invested in training thousands of teachers in the science of reading (i.e. phonics!), and they are requiring every K-3 teacher and elementary principal and assistant principal to take 55-hours of training in how to teach children to read. The consequences have been so dramatic that some in education are referring to it as “the Mississippi Miracle,” and one can argue that that is not hyperbole given Mississippi was among the only three states to see modest gains in their reading test scores during the pandemic, rather than the learning loss seen nearly everywhere else.
It is amazing what happens when we actually invest in our children. And pay attention to the science!
References
Carrillo, S. (May 3, 2023) National Student Assessment Has Educators and Legislators Worried. NPR All Things Considered. https://www.npr.org/2023/05/03/1173776611/national-student-assessment-has-educators-and-legislators-worried.
Levy, M. (May 10, 2023) Raises for Teachers Make Governors’ Agendas. The Baltimore Sun. https://digitaledition.baltimoresun.com/html5/desktop/production/default.aspx?&edid=6629bd6c-1045-4d60-ab0d-dfc40b85b777.
Lurye, S. (May 20, 2023) Kids’ Reading Scores Soar Across the South Amid Reforms. The Baltimore Sun. https://digitaledition.baltimoresun.com/html5/desktop/production/default.aspx?&edid=c6a27048-5d52-413e-93c2-ffb4ecf32ba8.
Martinez, A. & Turner, C. (May 12, 2023) How Much Learning Did Students Miss During the Pandemic? Researchers Have an Answer. NPR Morning Edition. https://www.npr.org/2023/05/12/1175711862/how-much-learning-did-students-miss-during-the-pandemic-researchers-have-an-answ.
Pfeiffer, S.; Jarenwattananon, P.; & Lim, M. (May 3, 2023) 8th-Graders’ History and Civics Scores Drop on a National Test. NPR All Things Considered. https://www.npr.org/2023/05/03/1173776447/8th-graders-history-and-civics-scores-drop-on-a-national-test.
Toness, B. V. (April 23, 2023) “Too Much to Learn” The Baltimore Sun. https://digitaledition.baltimoresun.com/html5/desktop/production/default.aspx?&edid=27971d2d-1a90-49e9-8cb5-c12bfdc0fc25.
Trotter, S. (April 22, 2022) Hidden in Plain Sight: Putting Tech Before Teaching. Quillette. https://quillette.com/2022/04/22/hidden-in-plain-sight-why-we-should-stop-putting-tech-before-teaching/.
Light a Candle 