Pandemic Learning Loss: Where Are We Now?

A few years ago, classrooms were empty, and instruction took place through a school-issued laptop screen. Teachers would conduct their classes through online platforms, such as Zoom. Some students had entire semesters of their education without ever seeing their teacher or peers in person.

This was the reality for many at the end of the 2019-20 school year and during 2020-21. The entire country was facing the COVID-19 pandemic, which shut down businesses and schools alike. Now, an entire generation of students faces substantial learning loss stemming from that event, and one of the subjects hit hardest was math.

“Children have resumed learning, but largely at the same pace as before the pandemic,” Harvard University’s Center for Education Policy Research faculty director Thomas Kane said in a study from The Education Recovery Scorecard. “There’s no hurrying up teaching fractions or the Pythagorean theorem. The hardest hit communities, like Richmond, Virginia, St. Louis, Missouri, and New Haven, Connecticut, where students fell behind by more than 1.5 years in math, would have to teach 150% of a typical year’s worth of material for three years in a row just to catch up.”

The study found that the average third–eighth grade public school student across the country lost about half a year of learning in math. The decline in average test scores spanned all demographics, regardless of income or race, according to the study.

Fortunately, it appears that progress has been made. A report from the Education Recovery Scorecard released in January shows that nearly one-third of students had recovered the loss in math between spring 2022 and spring 2023, aka the “first recovery year.”

“Such improvements in grade levels in a single school year mean that students learned 17% more math content and 8% more reading content than they would typically have learned in a pre-pandemic school year,” the report states. “These gains are large relative to historical changes in math and reading achievement on the National Assessment of Educational Progress.”

The Texas Education Agency’s latest STAAR scores reported for the 2023-24 school year might give the impression that the state is still struggling to increase test scores for math. Algebra I scores had remained relatively the same from the previous year.  However, according to ATPE Lobbyist Tricia Cave, these scores do not tell the whole story. In a Teach the Vote blog post, Cave explains that TEA’s data for passing/failing goes off of a student-level accountability level. Based off their test scores, students are labeled as either “masters,” “meets,” “approaches,” or “does not meet.” A student who reaches “approaches” or higher has passed. However, TEA’s press release relies on the “meets” label to measure performance, one level higher than “approaches,” and not how the actual passing standard is measured.

“Although TEA’s language is not technically false,” Cave says, “it could well leave the impression that an entire cohort of students had not passed the STAAR when they actually did.”

When looking at the overall data, Algebra I students who passed have risen from 72% in Spring 2021 to 79% in Spring 2024. However, this is still below the 84% reached in Spring 2019 before the pandemic. So, what have districts done to try and return to their previous mark?

School districts across the country were included in a $190 billion federal pandemic relief measure, and according to the same Education Recovery Scorecard report, 40% of school districts planned to use this new funding by providing more small group tutoring, 60% planned to increase outside of regular school hours learning (summer and after school), and one-third of school districts planned to tackle the mental health issues of students by hiring counselors and mental health professionals.

Advanced Math Pathways

During the 2023 Legislature, Senate Bill (SB) 2124, authored by Texas Sen. Brandon Creighton (R-Conroe) and co-authored by Sen. Angela Paxton (R-McKinney), was signed into law by Gov. Greg Abbott (R) and went into effect May 27, 2023.

This legislation established an advanced mathematics program in each district or open-enrollment charter school that would allow students to enroll in Algebra I by the eighth grade. It also automatically enrolls students who scored in the top 40% on the fifth-grade STAAR tests to advanced math classes for sixth grade, but students are able to opt out.

Hays CISD has implemented a system of expanding enrollment in its advanced math courses since the pandemic started, according to Hays CISD Executive Officer of Curriculum and Instruction Derek McDaniel. Since the district made this change, enrollment in advanced math courses has risen from 20%–25% to 35%–40%.”

E3 Alliance is an organization that aims to assist Central Texas schools. According to its website, it is partnered with 15 school districts, several colleges, including the University of Texas at Austin, and several nonprofit organizations. The idea behind these partnerships is to collaborate and improve education in the region. Some of the areas E3 Alliance aims to improve are school culture, instruction, special education, and leadership.

“We’ve seen that increase in our low socioeconomic students,” McDaniel says. “Another increase was gender-based. A lot of work that E3 Alliance did was making sure that girls were represented and were being placed in advanced math pathways.”

McDaniel believes that advanced math pathways make these classes more equitable, diversifying the student population in the classroom both demographically and academically, which will lead to a slight adjustment for teachers.

“Some of your non-traditional advanced students are in those classes now,” McDaniel says. “So that was a little bit of an adjustment because you’ve got more people in your advanced math classes, and you’ve got a more diverse population.”

The traditional model at Hays CISD also needed to be changed.

“This has been the traditional model: You put kids in advanced classes, and six weeks in, if they don’t have an A or a B average, then they have to get out of these classes,” McDaniel said. “We have changed that model to say, ‘No, we’re going to leave them in there, and we’re going to support them along the way because it may take them six months. It may take them eight months.’”

Hays CISD is also utilizing its Summer Bridge Camp, which allows later grade students the chance to qualify for advanced math courses over the summer.

“We always wanted that door to be open to where if I’m a seventh grade student and I kind of turn it on or something kind of clicks for me, I get an opportunity to try advanced math,” McDaniel says. “We send them to a Summer Bridge Camp where they get some instruction for some of the content that they may have missed or that they may need to prepare for the upcoming school year. That could be an in-person Summer Bridge Camp, but we also have an online (camp).”

While Advanced Math Pathways has opened the door for a more diverse student population in advanced math classes, there is still work to be done for creating a more equitable environment in classrooms.

Educational Equity

Liz Bergeron, managing director of strategy at New Tech Network, talked about pandemic learning loss during a session at SXSW Edu 2024. There, she said learning loss is nothing new.

“I personally find the use of the word ‘learning loss’ problematic,” Bergeron said during the session. “I find it problematic because it implies that before the pandemic, everyone was learning. We know that is not the case. Learning loss is not new for a large population of students.”

The session From Setbacks to Strengths: Reframing Learning Loss, where both Bergeron and New Tech Network Research and Policy Manager Chloe Jordan presented, focused on education inequity rather than the idea of returning to pre-COVID normal. This session is now available in the ATPE Professional Learning Portal.

From the session, both speakers stressed the importance of “equity pedagogy,” which is loosely defined as a teaching practice that promotes cultural inclusivity teaching strategies, classroom environments, and school cultures that help students from diverse backgrounds improve their knowledge, skills, and attitudes. However, there are 11 equity-centered pedagogies, according to the Intercultural Development Research Association, that have varying definitions.

Northshore School District in Bothell, Washington, includes equity pedagogy in its Strategic Plan and Diversity and Equity Policy. This includes:

• Cultivating the gifts, talents and diverse backgrounds of each and every student
• Interrupting practices that negatively impact vulnerable and marginalized students
• Reducing the predictability of who succeeds and who fails
• Fair access and support

Austin ISD has something similar in its Equity Action Plan. Between August 2019 and March 2020, the district used several workshops to collect data from staff, the community, and grassroots organizations to formulate a plan that would seek to provide equity for all students.

Making education more equitable is how Texas and several school districts across the country are fighting back against what was lost due to the pandemic. However, there is another issue that districts face, and that is a lack of time to catch up. Across the country, the idea of increasing instructional time is catching on.

Changes in Educational Time

A study conducted by Matthew Kraft and Sarah Novicoff and published on the Brookings Institution website suggests that increasing instructional time improves math and reading scores. The study analyzed research from Mexico, Sweden, and the United States and found a slight increase in test scores when 10 days are added to the academic calendar.

Kraft and Novicoff suggest that the biggest impact comes from increasing the number of days in the academic calendar, but they also concede that it does not always have that same effect. For example, the Expanded Learning Time in Massachusetts initiative, which enabled schools to expand the hours and days within the school year, had no real change in test scores for several subjects.

Texas law currently requires a minimum of 75,600 minutes of instruction each school year, which includes time for classroom instruction, recess, and lunch. According to a report by the Education Commission of the States, Texas is one of the states that require the most minimum instructional time in a school year.

Another way that states and school districts are also looking to add extra instructional time is through summer learning. While not a new concept, it is increasing in popularity across the country.

The impact of summer learning has been positive, according to a study from the Center for Analysis of Longitudinal Data in Education Research (CALDER).

Compared to the 2022-23 school year, the study finds an estimated improvement of 2% to 3% in total learning loss in math by using summer programs.

However, these results are modest increases, according to a 2023 article from Chalkbeat. Study co-author and University of Washington professor Dan Goldhaber had a similar statement.

“It’s a glass-half-full, glass-half-empty story,” Goldhaber says in the article. “Only a small slice of the damage that was done from the pandemic is recovered from summer school.”

Although summer learning is no panacea, a combination of all these different approaches could be the answer for pandemic learning loss. With the recent STAAR test scores reported by The Texas Tribune, it is clear that fighting back against pandemic learning loss will be an ongoing battle for a long time. However, this battle does have a chance to be resolved through the use of strategies like summer programs and Advanced Math Pathways. In a mix of old and new ideas, both of these solutions have already seen results and, when backed by adequate resources and funding, can give students who may have fallen behind a chance to catch up and forge ahead.