School systems have invested huge amounts of time and money since the pandemic in efforts to mitigate the damage caused by “learning loss” among students.
Online and in-person tutoring. Summer learning programs. New approaches to academic recovery woven into curriculum, professional development, and other resources.
How much progress do school district leaders believe their systems are making in addressing learning loss — or “unfinished learning,” as some school systems prefer to describe it?
EdWeek Market Brief has sought to get at the answer through a survey of district and school administrators and classroom teachers around the county. The survey, conducted by the EdWeek Research Center in December, is a follow-up to one conducted on the depth of learning loss a year earlier, in 2023.
The need to invest in learning recovery emerged in force after the pandemic, when national test scores revealed a collapse in student performance in math and reading. Since then, a number of analyses of student learning have revealed that students have made uneven progress, at best, in climbing back.
The nationally representative, online survey was conducted by the EdWeek Research Center of 134 district leaders, 97 school leaders, and 759 teachers. The results offer a number of insights, some of them discouraging.
Collectively, they lay out the breadth of the continuing academic challenges that K-12 leaders are counting on providers of academic resources to help them address.
One takeaway is that school district officials and educators see the same or nearly the same degree of severity in learning loss they did more than a year ago in a variety of academic areas at the elementary and secondary level.
In some subjects, in fact, K-12 officials say the degree of unfinished learning has actually gotten worse over the past year.
And when the survey responses are broken down by job title, teachers consistently see an even higher level of learning loss than district and school administrators do.
Marginal Improvements in Math, Reading
In elementary-grades math and English/language arts, 33 percent and 31 percent of the administrators and educators surveyed in December categorize the level of learning loss in those subjects as “severe” or “very severe,” respectively.
That’s a minimal improvement from the 2023 survey, when 37 percent of respondents said the learning loss in math was at least severe in elementary grades, and 31 percent said the same thing about ELA.
In the years since the worst of the pandemic knocked them off course, students in the Wake County Schools in North Carolina have made more of an academic rebound in math than they have in English/language arts, said Stacey Wilson-Norman, the district’s chief academic advancement officer.
Wilson-Norman attributes the slower progress in ELA to a variety of factors, particularly struggles of teachers to ground students in research-based, foundational reading skills during remote-learning era of the pandemic.
“It’s a bit easier to fill the deficit in math than it is in reading,” said Wilson-Norman.
She’s confident the 160,000-student district — the state’s largest — is now on the right track. Early-grades teachers in the school system are being grounded in “science of reading” principles, as are educators in other parts of North Carolina, as a result of state policies adopted in recent years to require that training.
In math, the Wake County district has made progress by increasing professional development for teachers and giving schools new access to supplemental academic resources. Individual schools are allowed to choose the math resources they want from a list the district has approved, Wilson-Norman explained.
“We hold tight on vetting the programs” for quality, she said.
The EdWeek Market Brief survey found that in some subjects, district and school leaders and teachers perceive students as having taken a step backward academically.
A year ago, 22 percent of those surveyed categorized learning loss as severe or very severe in science, and the same portion said that about social studies.
In the latest survey results, those numbers had risen. Thirty-one percent of district and school leaders and teachers said learning loss in science is severe or very severe, and 28 percent said it reaches that level in social studies.
At the middle and high school level, the perceived level of unfinished learning in a number of subjects was roughly unchanged from a year ago.
The portion of middle and high school respondents who say learning loss is severe or very severe stands at 37 percent in math, up from 36 percent a year earlier. In English/language arts, it is 26 percent, slightly higher than the 24 percent a year earlier.
Colorado, like many states, has approved policies requiring school districts to use evidence-based reading practices. Those mandates are shaping instruction in places like the 60,000-student Douglas County Schools, which has mandated a set number of hourly training for teachers in scientifically based approaches to reading, said Erica Mason, the district’s director of curriculum, instruction, and assessment.
The district has dramatically cut the number of approved reading materials its schools can choose from, in an effort to bring more consistency and evidence-based practices to instruction.
Additionally, the Douglas County schools are putting an stronger emphasis on writing as part of English/language arts, an effort that could have the tangential benefit of helping students on reading tests.
“You’ve got to enhance that writing skill to be able to see the measurement of the reading,” said Mason, adding that for many students, “Teachers have told us that writing is still very challenging.”
The EdWeek Market Brief survey shows that in social studies and science in middle and high school, the percentage of K-12 administrators and educators who said they see severe or very severe learning setbacks, as in elementary schools, also ticked upward, though relatively slightly.
Mason attributed the K-12 concerns about academic regression in science and social studies to school districts refocusing on them, after years of intense concentration on reading and math.
“People didn’t worry too much about science and social studies during COVID, immediately following COVID,” she said, and so back then, “some of those generalizations about loss were not as evident.”
School officials’ belief that social studies and science performance has suffered is probably tied to student struggles in reading and math, the Colorado administrator said.
When it comes to students acquiring knowledge in science and social studies, “both of those are dependent” to some degree on the other subjects, Mason said.
The survey also asked about perceptions of learning setbacks in social-emotional learning — even though it is not generally regarded as an academic subject — and found mixed results.
Many school systems in recent years have embraced SEL strategies, which are generally focused on helping students cultivate sound decision-making, social awareness, self-management, and related skills. Those strategies also gained popularity during and after the pandemic, as districts struggled to reacclimate students with in-person learning.
At the elementary level, 42 percent of the K-12 officials surveyed categorize learning loss in SEL as severe or very severe in 2023. There was improvement this year, as just 34 percent said the learning setbacks reached that level.
In middle and high schools, however, the portion of respondents who consider learning loss in SEL to severe or very severe rose slightly, from 34 percent to 37 percent today.
Wilson-Norman, who oversees student support services in the Wake County Schools, said teachers began reporting a major need for social-emotional support for students during and after the pandemic. In response, the district has established efforts to create a “welcoming environment” for students, she said, in which they learn how to “behave in certain situations, how to communicate their feelings.”
“Academics and student wellness go together,” she said. “As we think about the learning environments and … our curriculum, we’re no longer trying to look at it as two separate things.”
In the Douglas County school system, concerns about social-emotional learning soared after the pandemic and are a persistent concern “in every single one of our middle schools,” Mason said.
Schools are combatting influences over which they have limited control, she said, such as the prevalence of social media, which encourages the need for immediate gratification, and can undermine student well-being.
I think all of that’s impacting their social emotional status, and I also think it’s impacting their learning,” she said.
“Their ability to self-regulate, to self-manage, to delay gratification, to just even executive functioning skills.”
The survey results also show that teachers consistently believe that students’ academic woes are even worse than district and school leaders perceive it to be. For example:
- Just 22 percent of district and school administrators see the level of unfinished learning in elementary schools as severe or very severe. But a much higher portion of teachers, 35 percent, see the problem rising to that level.
- Similarly, in math 28 percent of district and school leaders believe unfinished learning in elementary schools is severe or very severe. But 35 percent of classroom educators believe learning loss reaches that threshold.
- In science, the gap in perception is especially stark. Just 17 percent of district and school administrators believe unfinished learning is severe or very serve at the elementary level. But teachers have a much bleaker view, with 37 percent indicating academic losses meet that threshold.
- Only 10 percent of district and school administrators believe learning loss in career-technical education is severe or very severe in secondary schools. But 27 percent of classroom teachers believe it is.
Takeaways: Research suggests school districts have made uneven progress in helping students climb out of the academic wreckage of the pandemic.
Education companies in the market should go into conversations with school district leaders knowing that many K-12 leaders still see a long journey ahead, in terms of academic recovery. Many of K-12 leaders are likely to be open to strategies that can help raise student performance. And not just in the subjects that have received the most attention since the pandemic — reading and math — but science and social studies, too.
While the financial conditions in school systems have changed with the end of federal stimulus aid, the underlying academic needs in many school systems clearly have not.
In addition, concerns about student social-emotional skills remain strikingly high in school systems. Companies should be aware that those needs could surface in their discussions with district officials, and that any solutions vendors can offer are likely to solidify the relationship.