Episode 3: How has the Pandemic affected Academic Achievement for Children of Color?

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Take the quiz today. Hi and welcome to another episode of K12 Education Untangled. My name is Dr. Kim Fields, education advocate and researcher, and I'm the host of this podcast. In today's episode, I'll be highlighting some of the major findings about the impact of the pandemic on the academic progress of children of color and their families. Enduring two years of the pandemic has affected all of us in multiple ways as well. It has affected the economy, global markets, and disrupted the logistics and supply chain. It forced schools to take on remote teaching and remote classrooms and has had an unquestionable effect on student learning. You've had to deal with working from home while your kids attended remote classrooms. This promoted a stress filled environment in which many of you were swimming in unchartered waters. How would you still be effective in your job? How would your child be able to keep up with lessons and homework? Your concerns about whether they would be able to keep steady progress academically were warranted and valid. Let's dive into the research to find out what the data revealed about how the pandemic affected educational outcomes for students of color. I'll then translate the findings into practical application. What you can do to accelerate any slowed student achievement. This is a narrow focus, one in which my discussion will entail the impact of the pandemic on student achievement and will not address health care disparities, vaccination issues, mask wearing policies, or mental health and psychological issues of parents and children. And while these issues are important, they will not be addressed in this episode of the podcast COVID 19 pandemic interrupted the education of more than 1 billion children worldwide and over 55 million US school children under the age of 18. A new study by the Curriculum and Assessment group called Amplify indicated that more than one in three children in kindergarten through third grade had little chance of reading on grade level by the end of the 20202021 school year unless major and systemic interventions were implemented. These students accounted for more than a third of kindergarten through third grade students and more than a quarter of students in the fourth and fifth grades. The data for the study comes from more than 400,000 students in kindergarten through fifth grade who participated in the Dynamic Indicators of Basic Early Literacy Skills, which Amplify conducts for each elementary grade. Fewer students were on track for grade level reading during the pandemic as compared to pre pandemic. The most significant finding was that black and Hispanic students who had lower average reading scores compared to white students before the pandemic fell even further behind on average during school disruptions. This makes for more at risk readers because these kids may not be able to read at grade level by the end of the 2020-2021 school year. One of the reasons that black and Hispanic students have been particularly hard hit by this literacy gap is because they stayed in remote classrooms longer on average when compared to their white peers. In July 2021, a majority of fourth graders nationwide made it back to the classroom in person full time, according to federal data. However, there's still large racial and socioeconomic differences in who had access to full time in person instruction. Whereas in April 2021 only 14% of white students were still fully remote, 38% black students and 30% of Hispanic students were attending school remotely since the pandemic. The number of first graders reading on track by mid year fell from 51% to 37% for black students and from 54% to 42% for Hispanic students as compared to a drop from 65% to 58% for white students. The problem with this is is that as students start getting to grades three, four and five, there are compounding effects that become glaringly obvious and it takes more time and resources to actually close the reading scores gap. There are at least 17 states that require districts to hold back students if they aren't reading on grade level by the end of the third grade, and another dozen or so states that allow districts to mandate retention in the midst of the pandemic. However, several states put their existing grade retention policies on hold because of widespread classroom disruptions as well as protests by parents and teachers. Kids with dyslexia, kids that need to be on IEPs, etc. May be harder to track because the tracking actually took place while they were in school. That makes it more difficult to determine whether a reading difficulty came from a learning difference or from interrupted school attendance. So if we take this little bit of background and apply it to K12 education, then we see that tracking the changes in reading literacy rate based on the data from the study is one thing, but schools need to work on rebuilding literacy habits at home as well. An assistant education professor at St. Cloud University in Minnesota indicated that parents of younger children did read to them during the pandemic, but the parents were much more distracted due to other priorities. Primarily, if they were remote workers. So it's up to the schools in cooperative discussions about literacy with with parents and teachers, to implement ways or programs that reduce the distractions so that students at home can have dedicated time set aside for reading. The hours of live instruction for students attending hybrid schools differed significantly from school to school. According to the National Assessment of educational progress, or NAEP. In 2021 school survey indicated that schools that offered remote schooling only about 7% of 8th graders and 4% of 4th graders attended school where there was no live instruction. That survey also found that less than a third of fourth graders and a little more than two fifths of eighth graders attended a school where the remote classes would have been about the same amount of instruction as in person schooling. Worth noting is that some advocates have argued that parents should have the option to keep their kids in remote only instruction in order to avoid harassment and bias that the student previously experienced on campus. It was also interesting to note that even after schools were reopened in the LA Unified School District in April of 2021, more than 40% of parents said that they were worried that their students students would face bullying and racism. New analysis of student test data challenges the idea that remote learning alone caused the dips in academic process and the dips in academic progress as well, and suggested that other factors beyond whether students were learning in person or not mattered more for students growth during the 2020-2021 school year. These data come from a new study from the Curriculum Associates, which is a curriculum and assessment company. Their analysis found that there was only a small difference in student growth during the pandemic between students who were learning in person versus those who were learning remotely. This finding is in stark contrast to an emerging body of studies that found that students in remote learning did worse on summative tests than students who learned in person in the 20202021 school year. When the analysts at Curriculum Associates dug even further into the student groups, other observations emerged. For example, students who were further behind at the beginning of the 20202021 school year had minimal academic gains as compared to their peers. Among the learners even further behind were students of color and high percentages of low income families. Noting where students were academically before the pandemic is very important to take into consideration because if these kids were already struggling before the pandemic, then there's a high probability that they are still struggling. The data used in the Curriculum Associates study came from 2 million students who were tested in reading and about 2.4 million who were tested in math in grades K 8, the data revealed that students were improving less during the 20202021 school year than they had been prior to the pandemic. This effect was more pronounced in math than it was in reading in interestingly, in reading, remote students actually made slightly more growth than in person students. What really made the difference was where the students were at the beginning of the school year as far as academic growth in reading. Students who were on grade level stayed on grade level and continued to improve throughout the pandemic whether they were in person or remote. Students who were two or more grade levels behind, however, at the beginning of the year grew less than they had pre Covid. Some students who were two or more grade levels behind actually fared better than others during the 2020-2021 school year. These were students that were in predominantly white suburban schools where there was a low percentage of students from low income families. These students made more gains than students in schools in urban areas that had mostly students of color and high percentages of low income families. This just highlights the fact that the pandemic exacerbated historical inequalities. Let us not forget that the pandemic also impacted kids emotional growth, which in turn affected their academic outcomes. One of the ways to address this is just for the teacher to have a positive, trusting relationship with each student where they really listen to the student and find out where the problems are. It has also shaken the student's sense of themselves over the course of the pandemic. The pandemic and its impact on identity, which is very important for teenage students, has been and will will continue to be quite substantial because of isolation and educational disruption. There is an upside to the pandemic's effect on teen identity, however, and that is that it gave some kids an opportunity to do some personal growth through journaling more or becoming closer to family members. Black Families Engagement in Education of the Children pre Pandemic and during the outbreak of the pandemic Pandemic is often understated. In many cases, the black home is the sanctuary where children are nurtured, protected, supported, affirmed, and where joy and love exist in abundance. Usually there is limited attention in the research literature that draws attention to the balancing act of resiliency among Black families, which became even more apparent during the COVID 19 pandemic. Research indicates that a substantial percentage of the academic gains made by children of color was lost in the process of school closures during the pandemic. Black children in particular are not excluded and protected from the experiences of undeniable individual and systemic racism. The home of a black family could be construed as a single safe haven, a reprieve, as it were, for their children given their daily racial experiences in the school environment. The school lockdowns that started in the spring of 2020 reduced instructional and learning time, both of which are known to impede student performance and has disparate impacts on different groups of students. According to Garcia and Weiss in 2021 article, the negative relationship between absenteeism and student outcomes becomes more intense the more school days a student misses. Research by Allensworth and Evans in 2016 indicated that for each week of absence per semester of the student in the ninth grade was associated with more than 20% decline in the probability of graduating from high school, the necessary requirements for effectiveness were lacking. Online instruction during the pandemic affected teaching and learning. The research on effective online learning indicated that it is critical that students have the tools and the familiarity with those tools in order to enhance learning. Many students do not have a text, desktop, or laptop computer at home, and many have no Internet access as well. Few teachers were well trained in using computers for instruction. Inadequate systems for tracking attendance online made it difficult for teachers when they were unable to determine if their students were even online. Students also lost social contacts with classmates and friends, and this created created an interruption in their social emotional learning and their skills like resilience, self control, tolerance, and persistence. Parents reported that when the children were learning remotely, some exhibited worse general behavior, more maladaptive behavioral changes, and more dysregulated behaviors than they exhibited when they were learning in person. Like most parents, you want to support your children on their educational journey. It is a balancing act of how best to nurture and protect your children in the midst of being impacted on a daily basis by racial and cultural assaults on their identities, which were often exacerbated during the pandemic. Here are some ways to practically incorporate reinforcement of academic gains through practices in the home. 1. Set aside time for reading and literacy, such as building vocabulary through word games. 2. Understand the social emotional connection of the teacher to your child and how that connection is reinforced on a daily basis. 3. Prepare your children for the subtle and blatant experiences and messages of racism that occur in the educational system as well as in society by speaking to them about the inherent strengths developed from the cultural contributions of previously notable African Americans. 4. Exchange contact information, especially with other parents, in order to stay connected to what's going on in the classroom, making note of any resources that are missing which could support your child's learning and five Just make sure you continue talking to your kids every day. From babies to teenagers Here's a few takeaways from today's episode. The long ranging effects of the impact of the pandemic on student learning is yet to be fully revealed. The widening of the literacy and skills gap for children of color and low income families needs to be a priority for school administrators and educators. Black and Brown students especially were unable to fully participate in K12 virtual classrooms, and their absence in those classrooms clearly served as yet another painful reminder that not every child had access to computer computers and WI fi, much less to food, housing and other necessities that would help them stay focused in a virtual environment. Interestingly, even babies born during the pandemic appear to be talking less since the pandemic, their language development seems to have suffered. This may have happened because parents and caregivers had less time and energy to engage they, their babies and toddlers in conversation, and this has already begun to show signs of deficiency in their language skills. As these babies grow, they will more than likely need significant supports to be ready for school. Around one year into the pandemic, the average cognitive performance of children ages 3 months to 3 years was the lowest that it had been since the researchers began making measuring it in 2010. And it's not only that they start off low and then they'll get back to normal, but it seems that their language skills continue decreasing as time goes on, which means that the cumulative impact of the COVID environment seems to be getting worse. This is alarming. Researchers including Sean Dione, who is the director of the Advanced Baby Imaging Lab at the Inspire center of Rhode Island Hospital, noted that in three years before the pandemic, a two year old in Rhode island study heard on average 100 to 140 words per hour and had 35 to 50 conversational exchanges with adults around them. By contrast, in 2020 and 2021, a two year old heard about about 20 to 70 words an hour and had 15 to 25 conversational exchanges per hour. The same researchers also noted that toddlers during the pandemic spent a greater portion of their time watching television. By the way, the American Academy of Pediatrics recommends no media use for children under two. Unfortunately, the greatest drop in vocalization was found for the poorest 25% of children. The bottom line is that there is going to be the generation of children who are going to be less ready for schools, and this is not a good sign for society as a whole. The pandemic exacerbated the opportunity gaps that put low income students at a disadvantage when compared to their better off peers. These opportunity gaps included access to the conditions and resources that enhanced learning and development, as well as access to food and nutrition, housing, health insurance and health care, as well as financial relief assistance. A major critical opportunity was the uneven access to development devices and Internet access, which were critical for online learning. All said, the pandemic affected how families and communities juggled health concerns and work and therefore may have been less able to provide learning supports at home. If this is the type of subject matter and discussion that resonates with you, please subscribe subscribe to my podcast on whatever service you're listening to this also, I'd love to hear from you. So please leave me a comment or review and share this episode with anyone that you think would find it valuable. Be sure to tell your friends, family and community about my podcast. Thanks for listening today. I hope you come back for more K12 educational development discussions with even more exciting topics to untangle. By the way, if you have a burning question about a given topic that you'd like for me to cover and explore, shoot me a quick email at Kim liberation through education.com that's kimberation through education.com to let me know what your question is. Is until next time, aim to learn something new every day. Love my show. Consider being a regular subscriber. You can subscribe for as little as $3 per month. Just go to forward/forward/tinyurl.com podcast support there's no contractual obligation. You can cancel at any time. If you choose to subscribe, I'll give you a special shout out thanking you in an upcoming episode. Remember, that's HTT TTPS colon forward slash forward slash tinyurl.com forward slash podcast support to subscribe.