Nearly three years after the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, school closures and lost instructional time continue to take a toll on students and schools.

The latest National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) – also called the Nation’s Report Card – found significant drop-offs in reading and math proficiency for fourth and eighth grade students both in Ohio and across the country. (See The Hannah Report, 10/24/22.) The pandemic also exacerbated existing gaps in the education system with students from low income families and Black and Hispanic students faring far worse than higher income, White students.

The Columbus Metropolitan Club’s (CMC) Wednesday forum aimed to further digest the toll of the pandemic on students and families and to offer some ways to move forward.

The event featured panelists Amy Gordon, executive director and CEO of Communities In Schools of Ohio; Cheryl Ward, vice president of Success by Third Grade for the United Way of Central Ohio; and Stephane Lavertu, a professor and director of doctoral studies at Ohio State University. Eric Karolak, CEO of Action for Children, moderated.

Looking ahead, Lavertu suggested schools and policy makers might need to moderate their expectations of how much learning loss can be quickly recovered.

“From a researcher perspective, I think it's really important for everybody to understand the magnitude of the declines that we've seen. There are very few educational interventions that have ever been shown to recover that amount of learning loss quickly,” he said. “And the few that have, we should be skeptical that we can scale them up quickly because one of the things that we found in education is that we have success in these small experiments, and then you scale it up and it fails. What happens? The people delivering it change, it doesn't stay the same intervention.”

Lavertu used the example of tutoring, saying that intensive, one-on-one tutoring has been seen in many education spaces as a way to recover lost ground.

“But what we've done with the [federal] money that we've gotten for tutoring is we've created programs that are not exactly one-on-one -- that are virtual … that are opt-in -- when you make things opt-in, virtual, then you're replicating the exact situation that's gotten us here,” he said.

Lavertu said the gains that were made on the NAEP test were made through incremental improvements across 30 years and just by doing the “little things” right over several decades. He suggested a major way to recover learning loss is by reducing chronic absenteeism, which drastically increased during the pandemic.

“Look, we got to moderate our expectations a little bit even though there's a lot of pressure to get everything back right away,” he said.

The other panelists, Gordon and Ward, discussed how the economic instability of the pandemic affected students, many of whom relied on schools for meals and even heating and cooling in some cases, as well as their mental health. Moving forward, learning interventions would require the involvement of communities and families, they said.

The full forum can be viewed at https://tinyurl.com/33wd66kd.