“I think everybody did the best they could. I’m not saying teachers didn’t teach, and I’m not saying kids didn’t try to learn,” said said Beth Carlson, a longtime English teacher with RSU 21. “But it’s different now.” (Photo by Getty Images)
Nationwide, students are showing signs of academic recovery years after the COVID-19 pandemic’s unprecedented disruptions to public education, according to a new report.
That recovery has been possible because of personalized, intensive teaching practices based on evidence. Maine has adopted many of those measures, responding to districts’ calls for mental health supports, additional teaching time and funding for evidence-based education.
But how well Maine’s recovery efforts are working to catch students back up is unclear, because state assessments change every few years and can’t be compared to pre-pandemic years. National testing data, which presents a snapshot of Maine student achievement from two years ago, showed all-time low testing scores, indicating a long road to recovery.
“I, like most people, take test scores as just one of many measures that we should care about, but they are a sign of real concern,” said Amy Johnson of the Maine Policy Education Research Institute.
“And if the anecdotal reports are true, that doesn’t point to rebound and recovery, it points to ongoing challenges.”
Students came back to classrooms frustrated over the years they had lost, and the return to rigorous academic recovery efforts — sitting in classrooms wearing masks and a completely different grading metric — after two years of hybrid learning was jarring for them, said Beth Carlson, a longtime English teacher with RSU 21, which covers Kennebunk, Kennebunkport and Arundel.
“I think everybody did the best they could. I’m not saying teachers didn’t teach, and I’m not saying kids didn’t try to learn,” she said. “But it’s different now. There’s a lot more scaffolding and hand holding that has to be done with kids.”
According to the report published this week by the Center for Reinventing Public Education, a research organization at Arizona State University’s Mary Lou Fulton Teachers College, providing districts with intensive support for students’ needs seems to have worked nationwide in helping with academic recovery efforts.
The report recommended some strategies that Maine has already implemented, according to Marcus Mrowka, spokesperson for the Maine Department of Education (DOE). The department has responded to schools’ needs focusing on student mental health and building relationships; introducing funding for evidence-based learning; and allowing for more learning time, including during the summer, to help students catch up.
What we know about Maine’s academic achievement data
However, the lack of data and multi-year assessments coming from the Maine DOE makes it hard to say how well these efforts are working.
About 64% of students were at or above expectations in English Language Arts, and about 49% in math, according to state assessment data from 2022-23, the latest year available on the Maine DOE’s website. But this data can’t be compared with previous years because the assessments changed, and pre-pandemic data isn’t available publicly.
For example, when Maine was using a different assessment system during and just after the pandemic — which includes the 2022-21 and 2021-22 school years — about 80% of students met or exceeded expectations in both English Language Arts and math. And yet another kind of assessment from the 2018-19 school year — the last full pre-pandemic school year — showed only 37%of students were at or above expectations in math, and 50% in reading.
With the Maine DOE introducing a new state test every few years, national assessment data provides a more consistent metric for Maine schools to track academic progress. However, taken every other year, it’s only a snapshot of Maine’s overall student population, so it does not provide comprehensive academic assessments.
And what the National Assessment of Educational Progress, or NAEP, showed about Maine’s recovery efforts as of spring 2022 was bleak, according to experts. While the state had consistently been above the national average in both reading and math until 2017, scores started declining a few years ago, and hit new lows according to 2022 testing data.
Eighth graders’ average scores in both reading and math were the lowest they had been across Maine in about three decades, since NAEP started testing. Fourth grade reading scores were also at an all-time low since testing started in 1992, and math scores were the lowest they had been since 2000.
When asked about where Maine stands in comparison to the latest national assessment, Mrowka with the Maine DOE said, “While we would not make sweeping determinations or policy changes based on the limited information generated by one assessment, the Maine DOE team recognizes that schools continue to have a lot of work to do.”
Robin Lake, director of CRPE, which authored the new State of the American Student report, argues, “Covid may have left an indelible mark to some degree, especially if we don’t shift course.”
“Evidence-based practices are getting baked in, but they’re not reaching nearly enough students.”
Recovery across the country is slow and uneven
Overall, American students are less than halfway to a full pre-pandemic academic recovery, with 92% of public school leaders expressing concern about their students meeting academic standards this year, the CRPE report said.
While older students may be gradually catching up to historical learning growth trends, younger students continue to fall behind and are struggling to catch up, according to the report’s analysis of results by Curriculum Associates from June 2024. Nationally, poorer students and students of color are recovering slower, the report said.
However, schools and districts now know better what works. The challenge is providing all the personalized, intensive support students are proven to benefit from based on research and evidence while dealing with staffing shortages and expiring pandemic-era funding.
“The challenge is, schools are so flooded right now with all the different things that they’re supposed to be training their teachers on,” Lake from CRPE said.
“It requires some really kind of strategic thinking at the district level and in schools around how they can triage their needs, what’s going to be the biggest payoff for them in terms of training their teachers and knowing that it’s a long haul and requires some investment.”
Maine DOE focused on responding to district needs
Maine was one of the first states to bring students back to in-person learning, which has been proven to be more efficient to bridge learning gaps, according to research. Since then, it has also made all school meals free, removing hunger as a barrier to learning, said Mrowka.
The Maine DOE has also focused on providing resources for classroom support, managing student behaviors, and engaging students through innovative teaching practices, he said. The state used federal emergency funding to bolster mental health, behavioral, and academic needs of Maine students, including access to programs that teach and use trauma-informed practices to manage students and educators emotions in the classroom, increasing supports to multilingual learners and homeless students and expanding outdoor learning opportunities, Mrowka said.
While the department did not respond directly to questions about the impacts of these efforts on academic recovery, and to what extent Maine students are catching up, the continued focus on listening to educators and responding to their needs, is one of the approaches the CRPE report says has worked.
“Our goal is to ensure that district and school leaders, educators, and school staff members have the information, training, resources, and supports that best target the strengths and needs of each of their school communities,” Mrowka said.
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