FORT WORTH, Texas _ Back in the spring, when they were all working from home, Lonnetta Wilson and her three kids came up with a system.
When her kindergartner, Malachi, had trouble with his online schoolwork, he'd ask his older sister, Kaydi, for help. When Kaydi, a second-grader, had trouble, she'd turn to the oldest, Jeremiah, a sixth-grader. And when Jeremiah had problems, he'd ask his mom.
That was the only way Wilson could make sure all three kids had what they needed and she still had enough time for her own work. Wilson is a single mom and a social worker for Tarrant County Public Health, where she works with some of the county's most vulnerable patients. Trying to balance her job with managing her kids' online school work was daunting, she said.
"There's more of them than me, and that was rough," she said.
Malachi and Kaydi go to Harmony Science Academy, a charter school in Fort Worth. Jeremiah goes to Fort Worth ISD's Young Men's Leadership Academy. Wilson said she feels good about where Jeremiah and Kaydi are academically. They're bright kids, and they adapted to online learning fairly well, she said. But during the shutdown, her youngest, Malachi, missed out on a lot of the foundational concepts that form the building blocks of reading, she said. While she's confident his teachers will be able to help him catch up, she knows he'll start first grade behind.
Wilson is among many parents who worry about how school shutdowns affect their children academically. And those concerns aren't limited to parents. As education researchers, school leaders and policy makers raise alarms about how the school shutdowns will affect students' academic careers, Fort Worth ISD officials are working out plans to help those students make up the ground they lost.
The COVID slide
It's a trend that researchers and education leaders call the COVID slide. During a typical summer, students forget some amount of the material they learned during the previous school year. This year, education leaders and researchers say the weeks of distance learning at the end of the 2019-20 school year, followed by at least a few weeks of online classes at the beginning of the upcoming school year, will compound ordinary summer learning loss.
In some cases, researchers predict the shutdowns could wipe out an entire year's worth of learning. Black and Hispanic students, as well as low-income students of all races, are expected to be hit hardest, widening existing achievement gaps.
Late last month, Fort Worth Superintendent Kent Scribner said district officials expect to see "historic academic regression" as a result of the shutdowns. By the time Fort Worth ISD starts online learning on Sept. 8, they will have been out of the classroom for six months. While the district offered distance learning after schools shut down in March, it was organized and implemented on short notice, and it wasn't as effective as in-person learning.
Once the school year begins, Fort Worth ISD will work with teachers to figure out where students are academically, Scribner said. That process will involve readiness assessments and informal observations by teachers. Once teachers know how much ground their students lost during the shutdowns, they can start to focus on how to catch them up.
When the virus is under control and schools can return to in-person classes, Scribner said he expects the district will extend the school day to help students make up what they lost during the shutdowns. That's a model the district already uses at five low-performing schools Fort Worth ISD transformed into leadership academies. At those schools, the district extended the school day for an hour and kept students on campus after classes ended for tutoring, enrichment activities and extracurricular activities, then sent them home after dinner.
Teachers and school administrators will help students who have fallen behind catch up quickly so they can move ahead with their peers, Scribner said. Education leaders have figured out that model works better than the alternative _ putting lower-achieving students in special remedial classes.
When districts put students in remedial classes, rather than helping them catch up, they often put them at risk of getting stuck and falling even further behind, Scribner said. In some cases, students can see remediation as punishment, he said, which can throw them off track.
Under the acceleration model, students who have fallen behind stay in their regular classes, and teachers work with them to fill in any knowledge gaps and prerequisite skills they may have missed just before they need them. For example, if a class were about to begin a math unit that students couldn't get through unless they already knew how to reduce fractions, a teacher would work with students who hadn't mastered that skill just before they begin the unit.
"The deficit model, looking at students as problems to be solved, doesn't get us anywhere," Scribner said.
Losing academic ground
In a white paper released last April, researchers from the nonprofit school assessment organization NWEA, formerly known as the Northwest Evaluation Association, laid out forecasts for how deep the effects of the COVID slide would be in certain grade levels and subjects. Researchers predict students in most grades could come back to school in the fall with less than half of the gains they made last year in math. In some grades, researchers say, students are at risk of losing all the progress they made last year.
The effects are expected to be less severe in reading, where students are expected to retain, on average, about 70% of the progress they made the year before, according to the NWEA study.
Researchers at NWEA, Brown University and the University of Virginia also released a working paper that showed that students in low-income families are likely to see greater learning losses than their peers.
Black, Hispanic, low-income students hit hardest
Beth Tarasawa, a researcher at NWEA, said there are a wide range of factors driving that trend, some of which come from broader social inequities that are out of school districts' control. Low-income students are more likely to live in families where a parent can't work from home, placing them at greater risk of becoming infected with COVID-19. Students whose parents get sick will probably suffer academically. Likewise, if a student's parent loses a job, it could also do damage to a student's academic outlook, she said.
In a separate study, researchers at the consulting firm McKinsey & Co. predicted that Black, Hispanic and low-income students would lose the most ground. Those students are less likely to have access to high-quality remote learning, high-speed internet access or a quiet place at home where they can do their work, the study's authors wrote, factors that will translate into greater learning loss.
But the study's authors write that school districts can mitigate some of those losses by implementing high-quality online learning programs in the fall. They note that examples of effective distance learning programs already exist.
Jimmy Sarakatsannis, a partner in McKinsey's Washington, D.C., office and one of the paper's authors, said most high-quality online learning programs don't only think of the academic elements of instruction. They also take students' broader emotional well-being into account so they can offer interventions when students have problems.
While good online programs generally don't try to replicate the structure of an in-person school day, they usually include some sort of routine for students, Sarakatsannis said. They may have morning check-ins, meeting times in the afternoons and checkouts at the end of the day, he said. In many cases, they also offer teachers the same kind of structure, he said. They may have daily faculty meetings to help teachers feel like they're members of a team. Teaching can be an isolating profession, Sarakatsannis said, and doubly so for teachers who do all their work from home. Offering teachers a chance to connect with each other can help them do their jobs more effectively, he said.
Online training helpful for parents
The best online learning programs also include students' families, he said. Those schools typically offer training for families in the same way that they train their teachers. That training might include an overview of the content itself, so parents feel comfortable helping their kids with schoolwork, but it generally also offers advice on how to build their children's schedules and how to set up a good work space for their children at home.
Before the pandemic, online-only schools had an advantage that the districts now trying to adopt distance learning don't: they were only dealing with families who had opted into the remote model, Sarakatsannis said. When schools shut down last spring, students who had been going to school in person were forced online. Some of those students' families were equipped to deal with that change and some weren't, Sarakatsannis said, and that factor will continue to be a challenge for districts that are starting online this fall.
The most important thing that school officials who are trying to build high-quality online programs can do is stay in touch with their communities, Sarakatsannis said. Each community needs something different, he said _ some may want hard daily schedules, and others may prefer more flexibility. Some may need one-on-one tutoring, while others might want better support for families so they can walk their own students through their schoolwork.
"All districts are working more than you can imagine at trying to figure this out," he said.
Technology gap
Wilson, the Fort Worth mom, said she's seen the effects the shutdowns have had, particularly on students of color. Wilson, who is Black, said students of color often don't have the same access to high-speed internet, devices and other resources as white students. It's a disparity she's seen in her own community and one she thinks could put those students behind.
At the beginning of the shutdown, Wilson's youngest two kids shared a single device to do school work. That didn't work well, she said, but a friend lent her a computer so each of her three kids would be able to do school work while Wilson was doing her own work.
Like everyone else, members of Wilson's family had their struggles during the shutdowns last spring. But she's not overly worried about it throwing her kids off track academically. They're bright kids, she said, and she's confident their teachers will be able to help them make up anything they lost.
"I have full faith in the education system that I put my children into," Wilson said.
