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Sometime this month, U.S. schools are going to receive $122 billion dollars - which works out to around $2,500 per student - to use as they see fit to get K-12 education moving again. Of this money, a minimum of 20%, or $500 per student, must be spent specifically to mitigate “learning loss.” Learning loss is synonymous with “falling behind” academically - it is the difference between what a student should have learned this school year (or any school year) and what he or she actually learned.
Learning loss has been a major concern all year. Teachers are teaching in unfamiliar ways. Classes and school days are being shortened. Students are cutting corners, tuning out, and even disappearing completely. There are a lot of obstacles this year that have resulted in many, many U.S. students learning much, much less than they usually would in a school year. Catching up students who fall behind is not something schools have a track record of doing well. Most students who fall behind continue to fall farther behind with each passing year. The sheer number of students who have learned less than usual this particular year makes this a scary proposition moving forward. While I’m not an expert on learning loss, I am attentive to the problem and want to see it addressed in a way that actually helps. I was hoping to see more dramatic changes , but $500+ per student is, thankfully, a big move if it is spent in a way that actually helps. So in the spirit of contribution, there are five things I think are important to know about learning loss, and five things I would do about it. Five Things To Know About Learning Loss 1) Yes, there is a such thing as learning loss Over the course of the year, I’ve seen a lot of posts like this one being passed around social media: 
Given the number of shares, thumbs-ups, and blushing-emoji-hugging-the-heart reactions I see to them, I think it is important that I start out by making clear that yes, learning loss is real, yes, it matters, and yes, kids can fall behind. While the sentiment behind this tweet (and all the ones like it) is nice, the truth is that most districts aren’t going to make any substantive changes in response to this year. I wish they would, but the bottom line is that most districts are just going to push everybody up to the next grade and hope for the best.
Learning 7th grade math is harder if you didn’t learn 6th. Learning to read at a 3rd grade level is harder if you didn’t learn to read at a 2nd. Kids may not be behind each other, but they are going to be behind "the system." If the next grade level’s standards stay where they are, kids who didn’t get very far this year are going to be behind them. There isn’t a feel-good tweet that can change that. 2) Most kids were already behind before this year started Learning loss is nothing new. According to the National Assessment of Educational Progress, only about one-third of students were up to grade-level standard before this: 
Consequently, it isn’t going to be as though Covid-19 sends us into uncharted territory in terms of learning loss. However, what I do think these sickening statistics point out is that our educational status quo creates learning loss for more students than not, and that our system does has a terrible track record of correcting it when it happens.
3) Grades - good or bad - don't accurately measure what students did and didn't learn As parents, teachers, and administrators try to assess students’ levels of learning loss this year, I wouldn’t put much stock in their grades, good or bad. Teachers have been teaching in unfamiliar ways, and as such, the grades they’ve assigned may not be very accurate measures of students’ learning. High grades may not mean a student has actually learned all that much, and low grades may not mean the student didn’t learn much. Even in normal circumstances, grades are not always an accurate measure of learning; they’re normally a better measure of how well a student complied with a teacher’s demands than of how much he or she learned. It will be important to figure out what students can and cannot do rather than to just look at grades. 4) One bad year usually isn't the end of the world During open house of my first year teaching 5th grade, I had a family tell me about their student, “we home-schooled her last year. She did great, except we didn’t teach her math. At all. She hasn’t done math for a year.” Students experience and survive one year of learning loss all the time. They get an ineffective teacher. They move. They have surgery. They experience trauma. Their teacher goes on extended leave. And so on. It happens, and students usually bounce back from a bad year once the surrounding circumstances improve. My student who missed a year of math, for instance, did great. We came up with a plan (more on that later), and in the end, that missed year hardly mattered. A lot of kids will bounce back from this. One bad year is not usually the end of the world. 5) Two bad years usually IS the end of the world Students who have an ineffective teacher typically fall about three months behind their peers over the course of a school year. Students who have two ineffective teachers in a row are unlikely to catch up to their peers... ever. I can only assume that the same goes for students who don’t learn much in a given school year for reasons other than an ineffective teacher. Far more kids than usual had a year where they didn’t learn very much. If this was their second consecutive year in that boat, we need to sound the alarm. Same goes if, for whatever reason, next year goes poorly for a student, too. Kids’ educations survive a bad year all the time. They rarely survive two. Five Things I Would Do About This Year's Learning Loss 1) Make absolutely certain that kids who fell behind this year do not get an ineffective teacher next year I think any plan for mitigating learning loss starts with assuring - and I mean assuring - that students who fell behind this year are not placed with ineffective teachers next year. As I said above, most students can survive one bad year, but not two. As such, we need to make certain that we don’t put any students in a position where they’re set up to have a second year of learning loss. Some students fell behind this year because they had a teacher who wasn’t up to the challenge of online/hybrid/pandemic teaching, and others fell behind because they themselves either weren’t up to the same task or didn’t have the means or family support to be. The cause of the learning loss doesn’t matter though. Administrators - you know who your ineffective teachers are. Please make sure that the students who learned the least this year are not set up for a year that might sink them for good. 2) Don't fall into the "the kids can only handle the basics" trap In 2018, The New Teacher Project(TNTP) released a report after following 4,000 students from diverse, high-poverty school districts in an effort to understand learning loss. One of their key findings was that only 17% of lessons and assignments were on-grade-level work. Students who have experienced learning loss - or worse, students who are merely perceived to have fallen behind - generally receive low-level, low-thinking, basic work to do, according to the study. Teachers assume that when students are behind that they must be incapable and "can only handle the basics," causing them to fall even farther behind. Even A-B students, then, find themselves behind, because their high grades came from below-grade-level work!
3) Find a way to (at least) double reading time One of the sure-fire ways to get kids of any age moving in the right direction is reading. If my own students are any indication, most students haven’t done nearly as much in-school or out-of-school reading this year. Libraries have been closed. Classes have been shortened. At-home reading time has been cut. It hasn’t been good. Most of my students are telling me they haven’t read any books other than the ones assigned in their language arts class this year.
4) Software will not catch kids up Kids who have fallen behind will not - and will never - be rescued by software programs. I see these “customized” software programs given to kids who fall behind in normal circumstances all the time, because 1) they’re easy, 2) they’re perceived to be personalized, and 3) they “collect data” that prove that the kid is, in fact, behind. You’ll notice there is no “4) they catch kids up.” They don’t. Kids hate doing them and they don’t work. It doesn’t matter which one, either. Kids don’t need low-level work from a teacher or from a computer. That will only make them fall farther behind. They need to dig into high-level experiences that give them the chance to work, think, and read on grade-level. They need them every day in every subject. 5) Consider doing something drastic with math There’s always been something about math. The way it builds incrementally makes it a particularly insidious subject to fall behind in. Gaps in learning math seem to grow and grow as we push unprepared kids up the ladder, and those gaps quickly become insurmountable. Nothing causes anxiety quite like math.
I have a drastic idea for math, and maybe I’ll write a piece on that later if there is interest (I did!). However, I also have an idea that isn’t very drastic and that I’ve actually tested out. Earlier, I mentioned a student I taught who had gone a whole year without doing math at all. Here’s what we did - she came to school 45 minutes early every Monday morning, and I pre-taught her everything we would be doing in math that week. That’s it. In doing so,
This worked out great. She did wonderfully, ended the year above grade-level, and there weren’t really even many points of struggle. It did, however, take doing something consciously extra to make up for her lost year. In conclusion, I truly hope that planning for next year and spending the additional funds are done with mitigating learning loss in mind. We’ve needed a wake-up call in this area for a long time anyways. If we step up, take stock, and accept responsibility for catching students up from this pandemic, maybe we’ll come out better equipped to prevent and correct typical learning loss in the future, too. If you enjoyed this post, please share it! Want to make sure you never miss a new post? Subscribe below for email notifications of new content.
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About MeI'm an award-winning teacher in the Atlanta area with experience teaching at every level from elementary school to college. Categories
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