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Report: Some NC students are more than a year behind due to pandemic learning loss

Many North Carolina students are months and in some cases more than a year behind where they should be academically in reading and math as a result of learning loss during the pandemic.

A new report released Wednesday by the state Department of Public Instruction shows that elementary and middle school students ended last school year 2.25 months to 7.75 months behind how they should have been doing on state reading exams.

The gap was even wider on state math exams, with students in several grade levels ending the 2020-21 school year more than one school year behind academically.

“Now that we know how much additional time is needed, what can we do to target resources and interventions to help accelerate students to get back on track?” according to a DPI presentation on the report.

The state report is the latest in a string of studies that have found that students across the nation experienced learning gaps during the pandemic. Last school year, North Carolina’s 1.4 million public school students received only limited amounts of in-person instruction because of state COVID-19 health restrictions.

Larger gaps in math performance

In March, DPI released a preliminary report that found that all student groups did not do as well as they should have on state exams in the 2020-21 schoool year. The report released on Wednesday converts the data from the previous report into the months of additional time students would need to recover.

The biggest gaps on the state reading end-of-grade exams were in fourth grade, where students ended seven months behind, and in seventh grade, where students ended 7.75 months or seven months and three weeks behind.

Middle school students and high school Math 1 students were all at least 10 months behind based on last year’s state math exams. The report is based on a nine-month school year, so Math 1 students who were 15.25 months behind need to make up the equivalent of one school year and two-thirds of the next one.

“Mathematics seems to be a little more difficult to teach in this virtual environment than we see face-to-face,” Michael Maher, executive director of DPI’s Office of Learning Recovery, said during a briefing on the new report.

DPI says school districts also indicated that many parents weren’t as comfortable helping their children in middle school and high school with their online math classes.

DPI won’t be releasing data on how many months behind school districts and individual student subgroups are because of concerns about the reliability of estimates at that level.

The report won’t show any progress that may have taken place this school year to get students caught up.

Extend the school year?

DPI says the report doesn’t recommend extending the school year or the school day to address the learning loss. Most public schools are governed by the state’s school calendar law, which sets the first and last days of the school year.

Instead, the state Office of Learning Recovery will suggest strategies that schools can use. DPI will also use federal COVID relief aid for new programs such as helping schools to address the math gap.

Extending the school year is an option that’s being suggested by Thomas Kane, an education and economics professor at Harvard University. Kane is one of the authors of a recently released nationwide report that found that high-poverty schools were more likely to spend longer in remote learning last school year.

Kane’s report found that high-poverty schools lost 22 weeks of instruction compared to 13 weeks at low-poverty schools when both spent at least half of last school year in remote instruction.

With such a wide gap, Kane is encouraging school leaders to add up how many weeks they think they’ll make up with strategies such as intensive tutoring, doubling up on math classes and voluntary summer school programs.

“I think most districts are going to discover that the interventions they are planning are nowhere close to sufficient, especially if it was a district that was remote for half a year or more last year,” Kane said in an interview.

At that point, Kane said schools may have to consider less popular alternatives such as extending the next two school years.

“I think a lot of communities would prefer to extend the school year than to accept a permanent widening and a permanent loss in achievement for kids who have been in school the last couple of years,” Kane said.