‘New lower level’: Experts call for fresh approach to learning loss in 2024

Educators grappling with horrendous learning loss among U.S. students say 2024 is the time to meet kids where they are and change approaches. 

Over the past four years, studies have shown extreme learning loss in reading and mathematics, especially among already low-performing students. While reading has had some recovery, U.S. students are still well behind in important topics despite major financial investments in education and targeted programs such as high-dose tutoring.  

“We made a pretty decent amount of progress in reading and addressing it and sort of got back most of what was lost, but in math, not really so much,” said Morgan Polikoff, associate professor of education at the University of Southern California, Rossier, arguing efforts to catch students up have “leveled off at this new lower level.”    

The latest disappointing numbers came from a Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) exam that found U.S. students hit an all-time low in mathematics achievement.  

The 2022 score for math for the U.S. was 18 points lower than it was in 2003, when the exam was first taken. For reading, no significant changes occurred.  

“These results are another piece of evidence showing the crisis in mathematics achievement,” Peggy Carr, commissioner of the National Center for Education Statistics, said at the time.  

And reading is still a concern, too, after the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) found drops in both reading and math scores for 13-year-olds. 

“The ‘green shoots’ of academic recovery that we had hoped to see have not materialized, as we continue to see worrisome signs about student achievement and well-being more than two years after most students returned for in-person learning,” Carr said last year.  

The U.S. knew as early as 2021 that students were losing ground in critical subjects due to COVID-19 and time spent out of the classroom. Billions of dollars have been spent trying to fix the problem, but those investments have not yielded the hoped for results.

Melody Schopp, director of education industry consulting at the SAS Institute, said with all the money invested the U.S. “missed the mark” and hasn’t been “able to really move forward.”

At this point in the game, Schopp, the former secretary of education for South Dakota, said students need two things: time and better teachers.

“If we really want kids to catch up or increase their pace of learning, which is if we’re going to get kids back on track, it’s a matter of increasing the pace, and the pace can only be done if we increase time,” she said.  

Schopp detailed SAS Institute’s efforts working on combatting learning loss, such as working with Virginia to launch a “visualization analytics solution” that gives schools information about academic growth, reports about students and other information so institutions can make informed decisions about their situations.

Schools have been aggressively seeking such data as some of their biggest barriers to moving forward have included chronic absenteeism, defined as missing more than 10 percent of school days. Different approaches have been taken to combat the problem, such as offering telehealth services or setting up texting reminders for parents to be notified when their students aren’t in school.

But no matter what interventions states and schools deploy, they won’t do much good without quality educators leading the charge, Schopp said.

“It was like throwing spaghetti at a wall and hoping something was going to stick,” she said of the different strategies schools tried to combat learning loss, adding “the one thing” that did not receive much attention is making sure students had “a great teacher.”

“And if every kid had a great teacher, and we could increase the pace, it’s all going to come together. It’s going to be the most important factor in making sure that kids have the opportunity to catch up, to grow, to learn in the future,” she added. 

There have been strategies to mitigate the effects over the past few years that have not been the great fix they were hoped to be. Many schools spent COVID-19 money on programs such as tutoring to help students get extra time in the classroom and catching up on concepts they need to know.

“The main policies to address COVID learning loss has been tutoring, and I think that what we’ve seen in terms of tutoring is that high-quality tutoring hasn’t really reached that many kids. Our own work has found less than 5 percent of kids have gotten tutoring with all the elements,” Polikoff said. 

After three years, he feels learning and student attendance hit a “new lower level” and the “sort of the urgency around addressing it has kind of waned.” 

In his research, Polikoff found part of the problem is a disconnect between parents and experts on how severely reading and math were impacted over the pandemic. If parents do not feel there is an issue, he says, solutions such as tutoring will not be taken advantage of because parents will not stay after late or drop their kids off for it.

One of the things that has given him hope is “states are increasingly recognizing that they have an important role to play, especially with regard to curriculum issues.” 

For reading, states have been successful at interventions such as changing how they are teaching the subject, with many switching their schools to the science of reading, a strategy that has students focus more on phonics.

Addressing the mathematics curriculum has been more of a challenge as educators debate the best way to get students back on track. California adopted a controversial framework that moved algebra to higher grade levels and focused on data science.

“I think that the idea that we will get things back to where they were with some kind of easy intervention that is appended to the school day or that we just tack on or that we offer to people, I think that is clearly not going to happen. You know, we’ve reached the point where that should be obvious,” Polikoff said. “I think what that means is, to some extent, we have to accept where kids are at.”