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The Guardian
Education Dive
Districts lack 'comprehensive' plans to address learning loss this fall, analysis finds
Naaz Modan
Nov. 16, 2020
Dive Brief:
In an ongoing analysis of the nation's 100 most high-profile school
districts, the Center on Reinventing Public Education, a non-partisan
research and policy analysis organization, found slightly more than
half of the districts are offering some extent of in-person
instruction, an increase from one-quarter at the beginning of the
school year.
Most districts surveyed (80%) said they had plans to assess students.
However, the analysis found fewer offered "comprehensive" and
district-wide plans to identify and address learning losses, with 59%
lacking transparent plans around what kinds of assessments will be used
and which data will be made available to parents or the public.
Nearly two-thirds specified strategies like tutoring or small-group instruction for students falling behind.
Dive Insight:
CRPE said a lack of district-wide plans "means students risk receiving
different treatment based on which school they attend or who their
teacher is."
"Instead, we would love to see more districts creating a universal
approach to collecting data on learning loss, communicating their
expectations clearly to families, and using that data to inform how
they allocate resources across schools," Bree Dusseault, one of the
authors of the analysis, told Education Dive in a statement.
Texas' San Antonio Independent School District is highlighted as an
example. The district plans to administer assessments and then
incorporate test results alongside other data to create individualized
learning plans for each student that all their teachers can monitor.
Prior to fall 2020, researchers and educators warned against
misinterpreting assessment results or assessing without clear goals.
Used the wrong way, assessment results could lead to harmful decisions,
like holding students back a grade or providing students with low-level
content, assessment experts said.
However, assessments have the potential to be "really meaningful" when
married to clear district goals, parent-teacher communication, and
teacher training around data interpretation and instruction, said Robin
Lake, director of CRPE.
With fall 2020 in full swing, more districts have reopened with some
extent of in-person learning, which many district officials and the
White House have stressed is important for social-emotional learning
and to address learning losses. However, the new analysis shows larger
districts "are too often consumed by crisis response and the logistical
challenges of reopening to develop new strategies for teaching and
learning."
Results released in August of a survey conducted by the University of
Virginia and the EdTech Evidence Exchange show while a majority of
teachers surveyed believe their students will need personalized
instruction this fall, their PD for remote learning was informal and
self-initiated. Administrators, on the other hand, perceived their
districts as offering formalized PD for teachers at higher rates.
Districts have long sought to effectively use assessment data to inform
PD. Prior to the pandemic, for example, California's Lindsay Unified
School District put in place a data dashboard to track teacher
training, students' academic results and learning losses.
During closures, Lindsay USD paid teachers to attend professional
learning workshops as an incentive. And during this school year, its
dashboard will inform teacher training as the district gets a clearer
image of students' learning losses, Amalia Lopez, director of special
projects, told Education Dive previously.
Using student learning data to inform PD and incentivizing teachers
resulted in "learners making progress as expected [when] compared to
last year," Lopez said.
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