Call it the big reset—downward—in public education.
The alarming plunge in academic performance during the pandemic was met with a significant drop in grading and graduation standards to ease the pressure on students struggling with remote learning. The hope was that hundreds of billions of dollars of emergency federal aid would enable schools to reverse the learning loss and restore the standards.
Four years later, the money is almost gone and students haven’t made up that lost academic ground, equaling more than a year of learning for disadvantaged kids. Driven by fears of a spike in dropout rates, especially among blacks and Latinos, many states and school districts are apparently leaving in place the lower standards that allow students to get good grades and graduate even though they have learned much less, particularly in math.
It’s as if many of the nation’s 50 million public school students have fallen backward to a time before rigorous standards and accountability mattered very much.
“I’m getting concerned that, rather than continuing to do the hard work of addressing learning loss, schools will start to accept a new normal of lower standards,” said Amber Northern, who oversees research at the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, a group that advocates for academic rigor in schools.
The question is, why did the windfall of federal funding do so little to help students catch up?
Northern and other researchers, state officials, and school leaders interviewed for this article say many districts, facing staffing shortages and a spike in absenteeism, didn’t have the bandwidth to take on the hard work of helping students recover. But other districts, including those that don’t take academic rigor and test scores very seriously, share in the blame. They didn’t see learning loss as a top priority to tackle. It was easier to spend the money on pay rises for staff and upgrading buildings.
The Depths of Learning Loss
During COVID-19 all types of students fell behind, partly because of chronic absenteeism of more than 25 percent that persisted even after they returned to in-person schooling. On average, students fell behind by the equivalent of a half year’s worth of learning in math and a bit less in reading, while those in high-poverty cities such as St. Louis regressed three times that much, according to a joint Harvard–Stanford study. Reading scores in 2022–23 resembled those of the 1970s, before the era of school accountability.“It’s alarming to us that the academic growth in 2022–23 was actually more sluggish than the previous year,” said Ms. Lewis, co-author of the study. “The students are missing those building blocks in their skills that allow them to understand grade level content.”
A Gusher of Federal Funding
The federal government’s COVID-19 rescue spending made what may be the single largest investment ever in public education. The Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief (ESSER) funds provided almost $190 billion to schools, starting in March 2020 and ending this September. That amounts to an average annual funding increase of about 6 percent for each school district over four years, according to University of Chicago researchers.No one knows exactly how districts have been spending the money. State officials are supposed to oversee and report on their districts’ spending. But like other COVID-19 spending programs that have been plagued by fraud and waste, ESSER reporting rules are vague. As many as 20 states either don’t know, or haven’t revealed, how their districts spent the money beyond the total amount deployed, says Marguerite Roza, director of Georgetown’s Edunomics Lab.
Ms. Roza says that while reversing learning loss is a priority in some districts, in others, it isn’t. Some school leaders simply aren’t worried about plunging test scores of their students, reflecting today’s dismissive view of high academic standards and accountability.
“It has become very fashionable to poo-poo state assessments and student outcomes as not being valuable,” Ms. Roza said. “Some districts might not even track how big a hit their students took. That’s the mood right now in some states.”
In states that do report how their districts used the money, almost half of it went to staffing, making it the largest category of spending, Ms. Roza says. Many planned to hire new staff, including math and reading specialists, to help students catch up. They also planned to give salary increases and retention bonuses to existing teachers.
Learning Loss Programs Flop
More concerning, experts say, is that many of the targeted efforts to address learning loss were ineffective. An assessment of districts in 10 states by CALDER, a group of education scholars at many universities, concluded that “recovery efforts often fell short of original expectations for program scale, intensity of treatment, and impact.”A widespread problem is that most of the programs have been voluntary and held after school or in the summer. Although this approach is easier for schools because classroom space is available and the sessions don’t disrupt the daily schedule, the downside is that most kids who need extra help don’t show up, reflecting the continuing crisis in classroom absenteeism.
The low turnout in Connecticut’s Waterbury School District, with many of its 19,000 students from low-income families, is typical of programs across the country. Only 551 high school students took part in the Waterbury summer learning program.
Intensive Tutoring Gets Results
It is possible for students to recover at least some of what they lost. Experts have rallied around small group tutoring, in which instructors can customize lessons to target their students’ deficits, as a very effective approach. But for it to work, tutoring must be integrated into the school day so it’s taken seriously and occur at least three times a week. Hence the name—“high-dosage tutoring.”A decade ago, public schools in Chicago, in collaboration with the University of Chicago Education Lab, rolled out high-dosage tutoring for ninth-grade math in 12 high schools. Some 2,000 students received small group tutoring in an elective class during the school day. Researchers found that they learned twice as much math over the course of a year than their peers who didn’t receive the extra help. The results were replicated the following year.
“We saw really impressive gains,” said Monica Bhatt, senior research director at the university lab. “It was very heartening.”
When the pandemic hit, the Chicago school district eagerly expanded the program to 200 schools and hired 800 tutors with the help of $50 million in ESSER funding.
For high-dosage tutoring to be effective, administrators and teachers must be willing to put in the hard work to change business as usual. The daily schedule must be revamped to accommodate a fleet of newly hired tutors and find classrooms to add hundreds of tutoring sessions. Teachers and tutors have to coordinate instruction and track the progress of students.
Districts in Connecticut are making the effort, supported by $11.5 million in ESSER grants from the state. More than a third of the state’s 200 districts applied for funds to deploy high-dosage tutoring, a sign that they will do what it takes to follow best practices, says Ajit Gopalakrishnan, chief performance officer at the state education department. If the program lifts math performance, then the state plans to support other districts in adopting the model.
But so far, high-dosage tutoring hasn’t caught on nationwide. In the wake of the pandemic, only 2 percent to 10 percent of students received it, said USC’s Amie Rapaport, adding that the number should be “significantly higher” given all the ESSER money districts received.
University of Chicago researchers say some schools lack the will to make the big changes that the practice requires. Inertia is a powerful force.
A New Normal in Academic Standards
With students far behind, districts have opted to keep academic standards depressed in what some experts fear could become a lasting change.“COVID triggered the lowering of standards, but there have been other concerns like equity in education and mental health that make it hard for districts to go back to the pre-pandemic standards,” said Tulane’s Mr. Harris.
Districts treat the graduation rate as a balancing act between the need to maintain challenging standards and the desire to keep poorer performers in school, where they still can learn. Had administrators not lowered graduation requirements, Mr. Harris says, there would have been a “precipitous drop” in the rate.
But lower standards may not be doing any favors to the at-risk students they are meant to help. To some degree, students’ performance will rise or decline based on the expectations set for them.
It’s the opposite outcome that lowering standards is meant to achieve.
“I worry about this. You want students to be challenged,” Mr. Harris said. “If schools keep going down this route, there is a point where it’s no longer helping.”