Today, a quarter of elementary school students in the U.S. use the Zearn platform and they have completed more than 7.5 billion math problems since Zearn’s launch in 2016. In the course of doing so, they have allowed us to see patterns that we believe can help get kids’ learning back on track. Here are three: 

1 School closures are undeniably tough on student learning, especially for students in low-income households. But there are steps states and districts can take to prevent interruptions to learning.

Before the pandemic, there was no gap in participation on our platform between children in low-income and high-income schools, but a massive gap emerged when schools closed. By the end of that school year, participation among kids in high-income areas had mostly recovered, but it was still down roughly 40 percent in low-income areas, which has massive implications for learning — students who aren’t participating in lessons aren’t learning and will need to both catch up and move forward in their future learning. 

For much of the country, this alarming opportunity gap persists, yet some states and districts have been able to shrink or even eliminate it. Educators saw that students can’t learn when they can’t connect and treated that as a problem to solve. Keeping schools open whenever possible, distributing devices, expanding internet access and providing families with targeted logistical, technical and learning support —such as technological training so parents can help their children navigate online platforms and academic assistance for students learning remotely — can greatly increase student participation, particularly for low-income children. 

Connecticut understood this from the outset, which is why the state was able to raise participation among students in low-income schools to nearly double the rate it was pre-pandemic. And Louisiana demonstrates that it’s never too late to change course. Three months into the pandemic, average student progress in the state, as measured by lessons students completed by demonstrating mastery, was down by more than 50 percent compared with the previous three months, and down nearly 70 percent for low-income students. When the state’s schools reopened for in-person learning, student participation on Zearn skyrocketed and Louisiana demonstrated a stronger recovery in the 2020-21 school year than any other state in the country.

2 Acceleration, not remediation, is key to getting kids back on track.

Many educators face the daunting task of helping students make up for multiple years of missed learning. Traditionally, this means revisiting the previous year’s content to ensure children understand more basic content before moving on. The problem with this approach is that teachers are likely to spend time on what students should have learned in earlier grades rather than on grade-level skills. It’s also not the most effective way to bring kids up to speed. 

How do we know? Zearn’s recent research with TNTP analyzed more than 6,000 third-, fourth- and fifth-grade classrooms serving more than 50,000 students who missed an entire section of critical math content during the 2019-20 school year.  About half the classrooms followed a traditional approach, starting with below-grade-content first, while the rest took a learning acceleration approach, starting with grade-level content and filling in below-grade-level gaps only as needed.

Students who experienced acceleration struggled less — answering more questions correctly —  and were able to successfully complete 27 percent more grade-level lessons than those who started at the same level but received remedial lessons instead. This strategy is even more effective for students of color (49 percent more grade-level lessons than those receiving remediation) and students from low-income households (28 percent more grade-level lessons than those receiving remediation).

3 Consistent use of quality curricula can propel student learning.

American students’ math performance has long trailed that of children in many other countries, not because of a lack of resources, but because of a flawed approach. In the absence of a quality curriculum, math is often taught as a set of disconnected procedures that students often memorize, instead of a progression of interrelated, foundational concepts. Without a solid grounding in the hows and whys of math, students have difficulty putting it into practice to solve complex problems — and that difficulty breeds dislike. In the context of the pandemic, children are at even higher risk of missing out on key concepts , which could hinder their progress in math for years if left unaddressed.

It doesn’t have to be this way. High-quality curricula focus on sequentially moving through the big concepts and provide support as students need it to ensure they get to mastery — and an independent study of more than 800 schools and 100,000 students in Louisiana showed that this approach produced learning gains equivalent to an additional 1.5 months of instruction over the course of a school year, an effect that compounded over multiple years.

Similarly, in a separate analysis, students in schools with high Zearn usage in Louisiana showed 1.5 to 2.5 times higher growth than students in non-Zearn schools — and the gains were even larger for students in low-income schools and schools predominantly serving Black and Latino students.

For all the ways the pandemic disrupted learning, it also revealed important truths about how to get kids re-engaged and learning more effectively. The way back won’t be easy, but we know what it takes, and we can start today.

Shalinee Sharma is the CEO and co-founder of Zearn Math.

In order to return to school in person post-summer break, all eligible students were required to show proof of receiving at least one dose. Today, 89 percent of the young population are at least partially vaccinated, a rate higher than any other mainland U.S. state or territory.

The CDC also reports 98 percent of Puerto Rico’s school workforce of roughly 60,000 was vaccinated by the end of March, within six weeks of opening eligibility to the group. To prepare for school reopenings, teachers were included in the second eligible wave, accessing shots just after health and residential care workers.

The island of about 3 million has boasted higher-than-average vaccination rates since rollout, having finalized its robust mass vaccination plan in October 2020, well before distribution. Their work provides an opportunity for a case study of successful adolescent vaccination, as most U.S. states struggle to get shots into their school-age population.

That mass vaccination efforts in Puerto Rico are outperforming mainland U.S. states may come as a surprise to those accustomed to stateside news outlets which frequently depict the island as being in constant disaster recovery. While Puerto Rico has faced serious hardship, it appears to have pulled together in the face of COVID-19 in a way that has eluded other Americans.

When folks think about highly vaccinated places in America

They think Vermont or CT or MA

Those places are good

But not the most vaccinated place in America

So who’s #1?

Puerto Rico!

But PR has gotten way too little attention

Its worth reflecting on how they did it

Thread

— Ashish K. Jha, MD, MPH (@ashishkjha) October 17, 2021

“In Puerto Rico, the pandemic was never politicized … People were really rowing in the same direction.” Daniel Colón-Ramos told NBC News back in March. Colón-Ramos is a professor of cellular neuroscience at Yale University and president of Puerto Rico’s Scientific Coalition, a group of experts advising Gov. Pedro Pierluisi on the island’s Covid-19 response.

As of Sept. 29, 56 percent of U.S. youth aged 12-17 had taken at least one dose of the vaccine, according to the American Academy of Pediatrics, while 68 percent of adults have completed their sequence. Yet the rates drastically vary by region; in 21 states, less than half of youth are vaccinated. About a third of adolescents hospitalized with the virus required intensive care, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Scholars, residents and local leaders chalk Puerto Rico’s comparative success up to far-reaching mandates across industries, lower political polarization, older generations’ trust in a once-public health care system and a common belief in getting students back in classrooms — by any means necessary.

“They urgently needed to get students back to school in person because they couldn’t take it any more. They were hurting and needed to be there, with their teachers,” said Edgar Bonilla, a single father of three living in Caugus, a mountainous city about 20 miles south of San Juan.

Bonilla, one of several island residents interviewed by The 74 in Spanish, said he witnessed at least five of his children’s peers leave school last year out of frustration and feeling lost with online learning. Those that stayed may have progressed to the next school grade, he says, but need support with understanding material.

And while there have been a few dismayed teachers since the mandate, he believes “you have to see the other side” — students without needed resources, those who can’t effectively learn online with audio or speech disabilities or who live with chronic health conditions.

“The student who’s unvaccinated, for religious or health reasons, has to take COVID-19 tests the whole week to enter school. Really all have to be vaccinated. There are students with chronic asthma, diabetes, or who are cancer patients like myself,” Bonilla said. The stress of everyone’s health during the pandemic, “has affected me a lot mentally.”

His 14- and 15-year-olds excitedly got both doses before this school year. Their household continues to wear masks outside their home and washes their hands regularly, to protect their unvaccinated 11-year-old sister.

And at the Bonillas’ public high school, youth stay in the same classroom all day. Only teachers rotate between rooms, to make any student quarantines smaller and easier to roll out. Lunch is outside, in small groups with open air, or in smaller capacity classrooms for younger children.

Puerto Rico Department of Health’s July 22 administrative order extended the vaccine requirement to all school staff and anyone entering school buildings. Families told The 74 enforcement is strict to minimize contacts — if you forget your vaccination card, for instance, school staff or your child must come find you outside or meet at your car. No exceptions.

The only comparable sweeping K-12 mandate in the mainland is for California’s K-12 children. Gov. Gavin Newsom announced the requirement for all eligible students on Oct. 1, yet it’s unlikely to go into effect until July 2022.

Some California districts are weighing vaccination mandates because of concerningly low vaccination rates among youth. And where they have been adopted stateside, many are not complying and at least two — in Los Angeles and San Diego — are being challenged in court.

Three weeks ahead of its deadline, Los Angeles Unified estimated 80,000 students had not yet gotten a dose. The district recently extended its deadline for educators to Nov. 15, fearing the original cutoff would worsen critical shortages, though roughly 95 percent of educators have met the requirement. And New York City’s mandate for educators faced protests, legal and union challenges, but now about 96 percent of their teaching force has gotten one dose.

Overall, there are more states that ban vaccine mandates for school staff (14) than have instituted them (11). In further contrast, when Puerto Rico did announce its mandates, no formal opposition followed.

In late March and April, the island saw an uptick in cases. And though no outbreaks were linked to the roughly 100 schools then open part-time for special education and young children, all closed for two weeks in an abundance of caution. The closures seemed typical of the system’s strict approach to COVID-19 safety.

Following a July vaccine order for all government employees, Gov. Pierluisi also mandated this August that many private businesses, including restaurants, salons, casinos and gyms, require all employees to show proof of vaccination. Those claiming an exemption must show negative test results weekly. Businesses must also require that their customers show proof of vaccination or cut capacity by 50 percent.

The constant guidance from health and government officials has helped families return to in-person learning, though some schools are now facing closures amid a wave of random blackouts unrelated to the pandemic. In addition to dealing with infrastructure damage from years of destructive hurricanes, Puerto Rico’s circa 1976 power generation units are twice as old as those stateside and due for major replacements.

For many, vaccination is the one factor they can control to keep children in school.

Daniel Pacheco says there’s a “responsibility” felt among families when it comes to the mandates. His family of four lives in Aguadilla, a city of about 55,000 on the island’s northwest tip where about 73 percent of the population has been vaccinated, and has seen the pandemic’s impact firsthand. His wife, Marizabel, is a nurse.

“My wife and I think the same way, that teachers in direct contact with children have to be vaccinated to avoid the spread,” he said. “I think [the vaccine] should be approved and given to all kids because there’s already scientific evidence that it’s really beneficial for them to get vaccinated.”

Their school hosted a virtual open house before classes resumed to explain how exactly quarantine protocols would work. His two children, ages 6 and 10, returned to school for the first time fully in person this August and will be vaccinated once eligibility is extended to their age group. The Federal Drug Administration will review Pfizer’s request to extend vaccine eligibility for youth 5-11 on Oct. 26, and authorization may follow in early to mid- November.

While parents in Puerto Rico say there hasn’t been much widespread hesitation, a recent parent poll across the U.S. revealed roughly 51 percent would vaccinate their children when eligible. Low adolescent vaccination rates raise concern for recently opened mainland schools now facing threats of closure with student and staff quarantines. As of Oct. 10, COVID-19 outbreaks in the 2021-22 school year precipitated about 2,265 school closures in 580 districts according to Burbio, a website tracking school policies and schedules.

For instance, amid rising Delta variant cases, recent efforts in Newark, New Jersey were able to double the city’s youth vaccination rate to 55 percent, a rate still leagues behind Puerto Rico’s. The key, local leaders say, was making the shot available at schools, churches and essential community organizations; stopping misinformation and deploying health officials throughout the community to address concerns.

One Puerto Rican nonprofit leader whose organization distributed vaccines told the Miami Herald that he believes using community groups to administer vaccines has made the difference for small populations skeptical of the government or pharmaceutical industry.

The strategy of spreading secure information at the local level could help Puerto Rico reach herd immunity, local journalist and mother Paola Arroyo said.

Similar to the anti-vaccination camps on the mainland, some of those holding out, “are not very aware of how beneficial the vaccine is and are carried away by fake news on social networks or platforms that aren’t necessarily official,” she said. Others aren’t vaccinated for religious or health reasons, or lead a kind of natural lifestyle and prefer to build immunity without vaccination.

A 29 year-old resident of Guaynabo, just outside of San Juan on the northern coast, Arroyo stays cautiously hopeful. She regularly sees youth, even infants, wearing masks outside and taking stock of health guidelines posted outside businesses.

“Youth are very aware of the problem that we’re confronting. They’re more aware than adults themselves,” she said.

Arroyo had her first child during the pandemic, and though vaccines weren’t available during her pregnancy, she was “confident” when getting both doses as soon as she became eligible. With encouragement from her pediatrician, she is passing antibodies onto her 9-month-old daughter Valentina through breastfeeding.

“I’m going to get the booster when it’s available and continue breastfeeding to protect her,” Arroyo said. “I believe in the power that vaccines have and understand that it’s a social responsibility.”

The towers, which stand 60-to-80 feet tall, have been erected by the school district at  Dunbar High School, Morningside Middle School, Rosemont Middle School and Eastern Hills High School. 

One-quarter of students most in need of internet access have been connected. The remaining 75% of students will get internet service when phase two of the project begins in December. Zip codes that are underserved will be targeted, according to the district. 

The pandemic and its effects, including the rise of virtual learning, exposed the digital divide, particularly in communities of color. Those students lack wifi access, exacerbating the already existing racial achievement gap in many schools across the country. 

The towers are meant to help combat that problem in Fort Worth where an estimated 60,000 residents lack internet access. 

“Our towers are up and functional,” said Chief Information Officer Marlon Shears in a statement. “We are continuing to deploy service by getting modems to students in need. We also have begun the process to put up more towers, extending service into additional areas.”

Voters approved funding the project in November 2020 through the Tax Ratification Election (TRE).

According to the 2019 Worst Connected Cities report from the National Digital Inclusion Alliance, Fort Worth ranked No. 245 out of 625 cities in terms of connectivity. The report, based on data from the 2019 American Community Survey, found that 11% of  Fort Worth households did not have broadband and nearly 28% of households lacked a cable, fiber optic line or DSL. This was an improvement over 2018, when 31% of households did not have cable, fiber optic or DSL. 

NDIA Executive Director Angela Siefer said 36 million U.S. households don’t have a home broadband subscription. Of the 36 million, 26 million are in urban areas. 

“So we know we have an infrastructure availability issue in rural areas,” she said. “And what we know in urban areas is even when the infrastructure is there, people don’t always subscribe. And why don’t people subscribe? It’s expensive, digital literacy issues, trust issues about getting stuck with large bills. 

“So there needs to be alternative solutions,” Siefer continued. “And what some school districts are doing … is they’ve come up with an alternative solution, which is, you know what, we’re just going to build it ourselves.”

That’s what Fort Worth is doing.  

Clay Robison, spokesman for Texas State Teachers Association, noted that most students in Texas are no longer learning remotely, but are back in classrooms. 

“The new Fort Worth towers should benefit students and teachers who are still involved in remote instruction,” he said, adding students learn best with a teacher in the classroom.  

“If the Fort Worth district continues to provide wifi access. This will help students with their homework and studies at home and, we hope, help narrow the digital divide between low-income and more-fortunate students,” he said, later adding: “Most school districts were scrambling after the pandemic broke out to provide digital access to students who needed it. Some districts were more successful than others.”

Middle- and upper-income families were more likely to say their schools solicited parent opinions than those with household incomes of less than $50,000 a year. Just 17 percent of low-income parents say they were asked how the money should be used, versus 28 percent of those earning $75,000 or more.

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Echelon Insights surveyed 1,000 parents on behalf of the organization from Sept. 9 to 13, after the school year had begun in most places. Slightly more than half, or 51 percent, had heard little or nothing about the funds, while just 13 percent said they have heard a lot.

The parents union pegged the release of its latest poll to the launch of a campaign called Everyday Parents Impacting Change, or EPIC, with the aim of holding local officials accountable for how they spend their American Rescue Plan Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief (ESSER lll) funds.

“Since we weren’t invited to a full seat at the table, we really need to play a watchdog role,” says Keri Rodrigues, parents union president and co-founder. “If you aren’t going to engage us on our priorities, we are going to hold you accountable for where every single one of these dollars is going.”

District spending plans are due to be submitted to states Oct. 1, but early glimpses show that in a number of places, school system leaders have committed to expenditures that education finance experts have cautioned will create steep fiscal cliffs when the stimulus funds run out in three years. Among these is increasing salaries, plugging pre-pandemic budget deficits caused by long-term enrollment declines and hiring new permanent staff.

While the federal funding can be used for an array of expenses, Congress has sought to prod schools to spend a hefty portion on addressing the pandemic’s outsized impact on academic achievement among underserved children who were already at increased risk of performing below their affluent classmates.

Ninety percent of the funds are being sent directly to districts according to a formula that prioritizes schools that enroll large numbers of disadvantaged students. School systems are supposed to spend a fifth of the money to address pandemic learning losses using strategies backed by hard evidence.

Nearly 80 percent of respondents surveyed by the parents union said their top priorities for the funds include computers, high-speed internet access, services for students with disabilities — who were particularly impacted by COVID-related school shutdowns — face masks, hand sanitizer and free food. Three-fourths would prioritize counselors, social workers and psychologists, career and college prep programs, staff training on creating inclusive environments and individual learning plans for each student.

Schools that fail to solicit community input, parents union leaders say, are missing an opportunity to seek guidance from families who have gained a much keener sense of their children’s interests and struggles since the pandemic forced them to supervise distance learning.

“Black and brown families throughout the pandemic have been more engaged than ever,” says Rodrigues. “To now turn your back on them and say, ‘We’ve got it from here’ really underestimates these families.”

The poll diverged on one major point from another recent survey by the journal Education Next, which found diminished appetite for change among a weary public. The parents union’s monthly polls continue to find a strong desire for schools to come out of the pandemic with better instruction and climate.

Sixty percent of respondents told parent union pollsters they want schools to find new ways to teach children as a result of the pandemic, while 57 percent said education leaders should use the infusion of funds to make “bold changes.” A third (34 percent) want the money to be used to return to the status quo.

Both the Education Next and parents union polls found strong support for continued annual testing of students, with the new survey finding 55 percent of parents want exams to continue and 39 percent thinking tests should be skipped this year.

The poll’s results are available on the parents union website.

Disclosure: The Walton Family Foundation, the City Fund, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, the Charles and Lynn Schusterman Family Foundation and the Carnegie Corporation of New York provide financial support to the National Parents Union and The 74.

In the COVID-19 Data Dispatch’s “Opening” series, we profiled five school communities that successfully reopened during the 2020-2021 school year. In each one, the majority of the district’s or school’s students returned to in-person learning by the end of the spring semester — and officials identified COVID-19 cases in under 5% of the student population.

Through exploring these success stories, we found that the schools used many similar strategies to build trust with their communities and keep COVID-19 case numbers down.

These are the five communities we profiled:

• Scott County School District 1 in Austin, Indiana: This small district faced a major HIV/AIDS outbreak in 2015, leading to an open line of communication between Austin’s county public health agency, school administrators, and other local leaders fostering an environment of collaboration and trust during the COVID-19 pandemic.
• Garrett County Public Schools in Maryland: In a rural, geographically spaced-out county, this district built trust with its community by utilizing local partnerships, providing families with crucial supplies, setting up task forces to plan reopening, and communicating extensively with parents.
• Andrews Independent School District in Texas: This West Texas district prioritized personal responsibility, giving families information to make individual choices about their children’s safety. Outdoor classes and other measures also helped keep cases down.
• Port Orford-Langlois School District 2CJ in Oregon: In two tiny towns on the coast of Oregon, this district built up community trust and used a cautious, step-by-step reopening strategy to make it through the 2020-2021 school year with zero cases identified in school buildings.
• P.S. 705 in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, New York: This elementary school brought 55% of students back to in-person class, well above the New York City average (40%), by utilizing comprehensive parent communication and surveillance testing of students and staff.

Here are 11 major lessons we identified from the districts that kept their communities safe.

1. Collaboration with the public health department is key.

In Austin, Indiana, an existing relationship between the local school district and local public health department, built during the town’s HIV/AIDS outbreak in 2015, streamlined COVID-19 communication. The district and public health department worked together to plan school reopening, while district residents — already familiar with the health department’s HIV prevention efforts — quickly got on board with COVID-19 safety protocols.

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Garrett County’s school district, in Maryland, worked with their local public health department on making tests available to students and staff. The Andrews County district, in Texas, also collaborated with the county health agency on testing and on identifying student cases in fall 2020 — though the relationship fractured later in the school year due to differing opinions on the level of safety measures required in schools.

“What the CDC basically said is that each school has to become a little health department in its own right,” said Katelyn Jetelina, epidemiologist at the University of Texas and author of the Your Local Epidemiologist newsletter; but “schools don’t have the expertise to do that,” she said. As a result, public health departments themselves may be valuable sources of scientific knowledge for school leaders.

“What’s ideal — and I’ve only seen this happen a few times — is, if there is literally someone from the health department embedded in the school district,” added Robin Cogan, legislative co-chair for the New Jersey State School Nurses Association and author of the Relentless School Nurse blog.

2. Community partnerships can fill gaps in school services.

In addition to public health departments, there are other areas where partnerships outside a school may be beneficial; partnering up to address technology and space needs was a particular theme in this project. In Oregon, the Port Orford-Langlois school district relied on the local public library to provide technology services, space for after-school homework help, wifi outside school hours, and even extracurricular activities. Meanwhile, in Garrett County, Maryland, the school district worked with churches, community centers, and other centrally-located institutions to provide both wifi and food to district families.

Both of these rural districts faced challenges with online learning, as many families did not have wifi at home. By expanding internet access through community partnerships, the districts enabled families to keep up kids’ online learning — while showing parents that school staff were capable of meeting their needs, building trust for future in-person semesters.

3. Communication with parents should be preemptive and constant.

Strong communication was one theme that resonated across all five profiles. In a tumultuous pandemic school year, parents wanted to know exactly what their schools were doing and why; the districts we profiled offered ample opportunities for parents to quickly get updates and ask questions.

For example, at Brooklyn’s P.S. 705, administrators held weekly town hall meetings — segmented by grade level — and staffed a “virtual open office,” available on a daily basis for parents to log on and ask questions. Jetelina said that such forums are an ideal opportunity for “two-way communication,” in which administrators could both talk to parents and listen to feedback.

Andrews County also held a town hall for parent questions prior to the start of the 2020 school year. In Garrett County, administrators updated a massive FAQ document (currently 22 pages) whenever a parent reached out with a question. This district, P.S. 705, and Port Orford-Langlois all gave parents the opportunity to talk to school staff in one-on-one phone calls.

Cogan pointed out that parents like to be reached on different platforms, such as text messages, Facebook, and Google classroom; by giving parents multiple options, districts may ensure that all parent questions are asked and answered.

4. Require masks, and model good masking for kids.

Mask requirements in schools have become highly controversial in fall 2021, with some parents enthusiastically supporting them while others refuse to send their children to school with any face covering. But widespread masking remains one of the best protections against COVID-19 spread, especially for children who are too young to be vaccinated.

And yes, evidence shows that young children can get used to wearing a mask all day. In the Port Orford-Langlois school district, Principal Krista Nieraeth credits responsible masking among students to their parents. Though the community leans conservative, she said, parents modeled mask-wearing for their kids, understanding the importance of masking up to prevent the coronavirus from spreading at school. Some parents even donated homemade masks to the district for students and teachers.

As Delta spreads, Cogan said, it’s important that districts require “properly fitting masks that are worn correctly” to ensure that students are fully protected.

5. Regular testing can prevent cases from turning into outbreaks.

Brooklyn’s P.S. 705 leaned into the surveillance COVID-19 testing program organized by the New York City Department of Education. The city required schools to test 20% of on-site students and staff once a week, from December 2020 through the end of the spring semester; P.S. 705 tested far above this requirement during the winter months, when cases were high in Brooklyn. The testing allowed this school to identify cases among asymptomatic students, quarantine classes, and stop those isolated cases from turning into outbreaks.

School COVID-19 testing programs should test students frequently, Jetelina said. “But what’s even more important than regular testing is it’s not biased testing,” meaning the tests are required for all in-person students. Voluntary testing, she said, would be more likely to include only the families who are also more likely to follow other safety protocols.

More districts are now working to set up regular testing programs for fall 2021, using funding from the American Rescue Plan, Cogan said. If regular testing isn’t possible, it’s still crucial for a district to make tests easily available — with timely results, in under 24 hours — to a student’s close contacts when a case is identified at school. Both the Garrett County and Andrews County school districts worked with their local public health departments to make such testing possible.

6. Improve ventilation and hold classes outside where possible.

In addition to funding for COVID-19 testing, the American Rescue Plan made billions of dollars available for improvements to school ventilation systems. The Garrett County and Austin, Indiana school districts both took advantage of this funding to upgrade HVAC systems in their buildings and buy portable air filtration units.

In Andrews County — where the West Texas weather stays warm through much of the year — the school district opted for more natural ventilation: opening doors and windows, and holding class outside whenever possible. The extra time outdoors was also beneficial to the mental health of students who had been cooped up indoors in spring 2020, administrators said.

Still, outdoor class may not be possible for districts in urban areas, Cogan said. In these schools, windows and doors may be locked down to protect against a different public health crisis: the threat of gun violence.

7. Schools may still be focusing too much on cleaning.

In July 2020, Derek Thompson, staff writer at The Atlantic, coined the term “hygiene theater”: many businesses and public institutions were devoting time and resources to deep-cleaning — even though numerous scientific studies had demonstrated that the virus primarily spreads through the air, not through surface contact.

More than a year later, hygiene theater is alive and well in many school districts, COVID-19 Data Dispatch interviews with school administrators revealed. When we asked in interviews, “What were your safety protocols?”, administrators often jumped to deep-cleaning and bulk hand sanitizers. Ventilation would come up later, after additional questioning. At the Andrews County district, for example, custodians would clean a classroom once a case was identified — but close contacts of the infected student were not required to quarantine.

“Cleaning high-touch areas is very important in schools,” Cogan said. But mask-wearing, physical distancing, vaccinations, and other measures are “higher protective factors.”

8. Give agency to parents and teachers in protecting their kids.

Last school year, many districts used temperature checks and symptom screenings as an attempt to catch infected students before they gave the coronavirus to others. But in Austin, Indiana, such formalized screenings proved less useful than teachers’ and parents’ intuition. Instructors could identify when a student wasn’t feeling well and ask them to go see the nurse, even if that student passed a temperature check.

Jetelina said that teachers and parents can both act as a layer of protection, stopping a sick child from entering the classroom. “Parents are pretty good at understanding the symptoms of their kids and the health of their kids,” she said.

In Andrews, Texas, district administrators provided parents with information on COVID-19 symptoms and entrusted those parents to determine when a child may need to stay home from school. The Texas district may have “gone way overboard with giving parents agency,” though, Cogan said, in allowing students to opt out of quarantines and mask-wearing — echoing concerns from the Andrews County public health department.

9. We need more granular data to drive school policies.

The COVID-19 Data Dispatch has consistently called out a lack of detailed public data on COVID-19 cases in schools. The federal government still does not provide such data, and most states offer scattered numbers that don’t provide crucial context for cases (such as in-person enrollment or testing figures). Without these numbers, it is difficult to compare school districts and identify success stories.

The “Opening” project also illuminated another data issue: Most states are not providing any COVID-19 metrics down to the individual district, making it hard for school leaders to know when they must tighten down on or loosen safety protocols. At the tiny Port Orford-Langlois district in Oregon, for example, administrators had to rely on COVID-19 numbers for their overall county. Even though the district had zero cases in fall 2020, it wasn’t able to bring older students back in person until the spring because outbreaks in another part of the county drove up case numbers. Cogan has observed similar issues in New Jersey.

At a local level, school districts may work with their local public health departments to get the data they need for more informed decision-making, Jetelina said. But at a larger, systemic level, getting granular COVID-19 data is more difficult — a job for the federal government.

10. Invest in school staff and invite their contributions to safety strategies.

School staff who spoke to the COVID-19 Data Dispatch for this project described working long hours, familiarizing themselves with the science of COVID-19, and exercising immense determination and creativity to provide their students with a decent school experience. Teaching is typically a challenging job, but in the last eighteen months, it has become heroic — even though many people outside school environments take this work for granted, Jetelina said.

Districts can thank their staff by giving them a say in school safety decisions, Cogan recommended. “Educators, they’ve had a God-awful time and had a lot more put on them,” she said. But “every single person that works in a school has as well.” That includes custodians, cafeteria workers, and — crucially — school nurses, who Cogan calls the “chief wellness officer” of the school.

11. Allow students and staff the space to process pandemic hardship.

About 117,000 children in the U.S. have lost one or both parents during the pandemic, according to research from Imperial College London. Thousands more have lost other relatives, mentors, and friends — while millions of children have faced job loss in their families, food and housing insecurity, and other hardships. Even if a school district has all the right safety logistics, school staff cannot truly support students unless they allow time and space to process the trauma that they’ve faced.

P.S. 705 in Brooklyn may serve as a model for this practice. School staff preemptively reached out to families when a student missed class, offering support. “705 is just the kind-of place where it is a ‘wrap your arms around the whole family’ kind-of a school,” one parent said.

On the first day of school in September 2021 — when many students returned in-person for the first time since spring 2020 — the school held a moment of silence for loved ones that the school community has lost.

Betsy Ladyzhets is the founder and editor-in-chief of the COVID-19 Data Dispatch, a publication exploring the state of COVID-19 data in the United States.

Whether schools can roll tests out effectively — and get cooperation from those who screen positive for the virus — remains to be seen.

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The promise of quicker, more accurate results could bring a welcome reprieve for school districts across the country that are sending large groups of students home with suspected COVID exposure. Last month, six days into the school year in Florida’s Palm Beach County, one in 50 students was forced to quarantine. In California, state guidelines call for unvaccinated students who are “close contacts” of a person with a positive COVID test to stay home for 10 days, forcing thousands of students too young to get a vaccine to miss critical days of in-person instruction.

While the tests’ use in schools has only recently begun to rise, the technology has been in development, in many cases, for more than a year. One of the new tests, developed by Yale University, is available through a network of about 85 labs nationwide and counts the National Basketball Association among its users. Another test, developed at Rutgers University, has been championed by New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy, who last year called it a potential “game-changer.”

In the K-12 world, the saliva test with arguably the most traction is one developed by the University of Illinois — it is in use by about 45 percent of the state’s 3,859 K-12 schools, covering more than 877,000 students, the university said. School health officials elsewhere, including Baltimore and Washington, D.C., are also piloting it, with more districts likely to follow.

The field will likely get a huge boost after President Biden last week committed to offering nearly $2 billion for schools, community health centers, and food banks to buy about 300 million rapid tests. Biden said he’d use the Defense Production Act to increase the manufacturing of rapid tests, including those that families can use at home.

‘A very promising platform’

Researchers developed the Illinois test in June 2020, and the U.S. Food and Drug Administration granted emergency use authorization for the so-called covidSHIELD test in February. One reason researchers say saliva tests work better is that virus found in the saliva is more likely to have passed into patients’ lungs, where it can do serious damage. Viral load in saliva, they say, is also significantly higher in patients with known COVID-19 risk factors, such as obesity or diabetes.

Because the new saliva tests are polymerase chain reaction or PCR tests, they can detect both the presence of the SARS-CoV-2 virus, which causes COVID-19, as well as fragments of the virus after a test subject is no longer infected.

Dr. Rebecca Lee Smith, a University of Illinois infectious disease epidemiologist, developed the studies that earned their test its emergency authorization. She said PCR tests are not only reliable, but very sensitive. And they’re better early-warning indicators of infection.

“Our data show that saliva is one of the best ways to find people early because the virus replicates in saliva before it moves to the nasal tissues,” she said.

But saliva tests aren’t without controversy. In one case earlier this year, the FDA warned that a saliva swab test developed by the California startup ​​Curative risked missing some later-stage infections. It said Curative’s tests should only be used on people who showed COVID symptoms within the prior two weeks.

In January, health agencies in Colorado, citing concerns over false negatives, said they planned to phase out the Curative tests. Other purveyors have tried to distance themselves from these results.

Dr. Tim Lahey, an infectious diseases physician and head of ethics at the University of Vermont Medical Center, said he’d reviewed research with a small sample of patients on the Yale test, as well as a meta-analysis for other saliva tests. Research on the Yale test, he said, found that saliva in the samples was as accurate as nasal swabs. And the meta-analysis, he said, “showed basically the same thing for various saliva testing approaches including the one developed at Yale.”

But he cautioned that he hadn’t seen detailed analyses of “how well the saliva technology performs in people with mild symptoms, or no symptoms at all.”

And the Yale sample was small — just nine patients. How well the test performs in larger groups “is still an open question.” But he said it’s “a very promising platform” and he’s looking forward to seeing more data.

Lower cost, faster turnaround

Pinpointing exactly how many K-12 schools regularly test students for COVID-19 is difficult, but a few indicators suggest that testing isn’t widespread. A recent RAND study found that the largest group of schools implementing testing last fall were using rapid tests mostly for symptomatic students and staff, “since they often lacked enough tests to conduct screening testing.” Private schools were more likely to be conducting routine screenings, they found. One survey noted that about 20 percent of private K-12 schools conducted regular screenings at school.

The Illinois test costs just $20 to $30 per dose, a fraction of the typical $100 cost for a standard nasal swab test, according to SHIELD Illinois, the nonprofit that manages testing in the state. The organization is making it available for free to districts across the state, mostly thanks to $10 billion in federal COVID test funding for schools.

Beth Heller, a spokesperson for SHIELD Illinois, said the organization operates seven labs statewide, which cuts test turnaround time from as much as three days to less than one, on average.

A shorter turnaround time matters, especially now: With the earlier COVID-19 variants, Smith said, about 30 percent of infections happened before subjects showed symptoms. “With Delta, it’s more like 75 percent.”

In Baltimore, where school health officials have been using the Illinois-developed test since March, weekly saliva testing has “made parents feel comfortable sending their children back” to school, said James Dendinger, interim director of COVID testing.

In most of the district’s middle and high schools, students now submit to weekly saliva tests. In most elementary schools, health officials test classroom groups with nasal swabs. If any group of swabs delivers a positive result, they test each student again. Only those who test positive or who had close contact with those who test positive must quarantine.

These protocols kept Baltimore’s positivity rate extremely low last spring: from March 1 to June 15, it was 0.6 percent in middle schools and high schools, and less than 0.3 percent in pre-K-8 schools.

The new tests also bring a certain comfort factor, Illinois’ Smith said. “It’s a lot easier to drool into a tube than to have a swab stuck up your nose, especially if you’re going to be testing regularly.”

Laura Wand, an advisor for SHIELD T3, the for-profit that administers the tests outside of Illinois, said that ease allows users to make testing part of their routine. “The key to containing the virus is to be able to test often, isolate, and track,” she said. “And the gold standard for testing often is everybody, twice a week. Now, people are not going to do a nasal swab twice a week.”

For the SHIELD test, subjects let saliva pool in their mouth and simply raise a small funnel to their lips, then “let the saliva fall out, push it out with your tongue,” Smith said. “Once people get the hang of it, most people can complete the process in one to two minutes.”

One drawback: Test subjects can’t have anything in their mouth for at least an hour before the test, “which requires planning and logistics,” especially in K-12 schools. Students can’t eat or drink, chew gum, use mouthwash, or brush their teeth for at least an hour prior to the test. For adults, that means no smoking or chewing tobacco either.

Smith said the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, the system’s flagship campus, relied on the test for the entire academic year, at least for the more than 35,000 students attending class in person. “We did have some outbreaks, but they came in back under control,” she said.

The biggest one came early, between Aug. 15 and Sept. 15, 2020, as students returned to campus. In early September, the university even imposed a brief lockdown, The New York Times reported, after an unexpectedly high number of students with positive results continued to socialize and attend parties. One official called the phenomenon “willful noncompliance by a small group of people,” and top officials circulated a stern warning, saying the irresponsible students “have created the very real possibility of ending an in-person semester for all of us.”

The letter concluded, “We stay together. Or we go home.”

Behind the scenes, though, the university was testing so often, Smith said, that “we didn’t have to have a long-term lockdown” like other universities.

Willful noncompliance notwithstanding, the university’s seven-day average positivity rate never rose above 1.21 percent, according to data on its COVID testing website.

Once the twice-weekly testing got underway, Smith said, this “just brought everything back under control. We saw outbreaks within dorms or within apartment buildings, and we would increase the frequency of testing to every other day. And within a week we would bring the case numbers in that location down to zero.”

SHIELD Illinois’ Heller said the testing regimen has allowed Champaign County, where the flagship campus is located, to keep its COVID positivity rate under 1 percent since September 2020. Elsewhere in Illinois, she said, positivity rates jumped as high as 12 percent last fall. Nationwide, positivity rates climbed to about 13 percent last winter.

The state health department in August said it would offer the test for free to any school district outside of Chicago that wanted it (The city receives a separate federal funding stream that other districts don’t.) The department also said schools could use it to take advantage of a so-called “Test-to-Stay” protocol, rather than quarantine.

Under the protocol, students and teachers who have close contact with someone who tests positive can stay in school if they agree to be tested four times: one, three, five, and seven days after exposure. If their tests remain negative, they don’t have to quarantine.

Quick results bring ‘an extra layer of comfort’

One of the first public school systems to take up the SHIELD tests was the tiny Hillside District 93, a pre-K-through-8 district in Cook County, about 20 minutes west of Chicago.

Superintendent Kevin Suchinski said the quick test “allowed us to make sure that we kept our doors open” and avoid shutting down, even as other districts took drastic steps to control outbreaks.

And as in many areas, COVID cases there are rising — last week, the average daily new case count hovered around 1,000 per 100,000 people, but the county’s infection rate remains among the lowest statewide.

The ease of testing students’ saliva, he said, meant “we were testing early-childhood kids all the way up to 8th grade,” ages 3 to 13. The quick results, even with asymptomatic students, “gave us an extra layer of comfort to say, ‘Is it spreading within our community? Is it spreading within our school?’ And we could then react.”

Suchinski made the tests voluntary for students and staff, but the ease of testing and the district’s 0.5 percent positivity rate encouraged more people, including students’ family members, to submit to it. In August, the district was testing 55 to 60 percent of families.

“Nothing’s 100 percent,” he said. “We cannot guarantee that we’re going to stop [COVID]. We’re not going to stop cases. What we’re going to do is prevent the spread.”

“We’re definitely seeing pent up demand,” said Perot Museum CEO Dr. Linda Silver.

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Schools are feeling the pressure, she said. Fifth grade science scores dropped precipitously last year. Not only was science on the back burner as schools doubled down to salvage reading and math, what science instruction did happen lacked stickiness.

“Science is best taught in a hands-on, experimental, participatory way,” Silver said. That simply couldn’t happen with half the class in remote learning, as was the case in many schools.

Teachers will be under immense pressure to help kids gain ground, and fast. With that in mind, Texas museums are presenting themselves as assets for classroom teachers by offering lesson plans and guides to help visiting classes make the most of exhibits. But with the pandemic and the more contagious Delta variant as unpredictable as ever, museums are also providing videos and other tools when field trips aren’t possible.

However they can, museum officials plan to continue promoting curiosity—an attribute they say will help kids make the most of classroom STEM instruction.

At The DoSeum, a children’s art and science museum in San Antonio, vice president of education Dr. Richard Kissel and his team are preparing a series of lesson plans based on the Texas curriculum standards.

The online lesson plans help teachers prepare for upcoming field trips, so the various exhibits can be used as, essentially, lab equipment designed to efficiently teach concepts, but also to enhance curiosity and wonder that will propel further learning.

Even as news broke of the Delta variant, Silver and her colleagues remained committed to getting kids’ hands onto STEM experiences this year. Unlike the chaotic cancellations and unknowns of spring 2020, Silver said, the museum has contingency plans ready to go, and they are good ones.

In fact, some of the tools they developed specifically for the pandemic will continue no matter what Delta has in store. “We’re planning for multiple scenarios,” she said.

If schools don’t conduct field trips this year, the Perot Museum will still reach around 300,000 students through its outreach programs. Hands-on STEM projects often require more materials and staff than low-cost afterschool programs can afford, so the museum sends TECH Trucks (Tinker, Engineer, Create, and Hack) to providers around the Dallas area. During the pandemic the TECH Trucks also distributed Wonderkits, take-home boxes with projects and experiments the kids could do at home.

It’s okay if some science education happens outside the classroom, Silver said. That’s been the case since long before the pandemic. She cited several studies on the role of informal education in giving kids the kind of positive science experience that leads to a lifelong love, even a career, in STEM fields. Elementary school seems to be the prime time for those experiences, Harvard researcher Philip Sadler found.

Of course, this begs the question of equity, and who does and does not have access to these informal positive experiences, especially if field trips go away again.

With reduced capacity and safety protocols, the Perot Museum plans to stay open for now, and even if field trips cannot happen safely, family visits have been operating safely since last summer.

The Perot Museum wants more families to take advantage of the experience, especially those who might not see themselves as the museum’s target audience.

Working with 16 community partners like the North Texas Food Bank and neighborhood groups, the museum has given free memberships to 5,000 Dallas-area families. The partners usually organize the first group trip to the Perot Museum, and Silver said, many come back again, and bring their kids.

That first trip is key, she explained, because it breaks down the non-financial barriers around culture and education level that might be keeping families away.

Right now participants in the community partner program make up about 10 percent of the museum’s daily attendance, along with those who qualify for $1 admission anyone who can show proof that they are enrolled in a public assistance program.

Whether or not informal visits and field trips can happen during the surge in Delta variant cases, Texas students are learning in person, and museums are prepared to help teachers cultivate curiosity and wonder in the classroom.

The Perot Museum has produced a bilingual science show, the Whynauts. Each episode covers topics required by Texas curriculum standards for a given grade range, and is available for free on the museum’s website. So far the program has around 60,000 subscribers.

Silver said, and the museum is offering it to schools across the state. Even though a show is not necessarily hands-on, the Whynauts episodes create whimsical narratives with real world uses for things kids will learn in the classroom.

Since it opened in 2015, The DoSeum has provided professional learning opportunities for teachers to cultivate curiosity and excitement in their classrooms. In addition to numerous single day programs, this year The DoSeum joined with several other local museums to form the Museo Institute, where 40 teachers per year will learn the various tools and techniques used in informal learning environments.

The teachers learn not only how to make the most of a field trip, but also how to translate the methods back to the classroom.

With a “slight flip” in how it’s taught, Kissel said, so much is possible in STEM education.

“If you don’t have (curiosity and wonder) you’re not going to get as far as you’d like,” Kissel said. It can be difficult, he knows, because the content and history of science — definitions, names of scientists, etc. — is only the beginning.

Even more critical is the ongoing process of understanding, he said. The more interested students are, the more of that content they will appreciate and absorb.

Even though these open-ended, inquiry based experiences are important, Kissel said, teachers need not feel the same pressure they feel with regard to getting grade-level content in front of kids. Kids aren’t “falling behind” in wonder and curiosity. In his experience as a researcher and educator, he said, “Scientists are simply those kids who never stopped asking, ‘why?’”

The scientific process can come alive for any kid at any time, he said, and museums will be there to light the fire.

This July, the site coordinator with America Scores Los Angeles was back at Palms Elementary School, helping to lead one-on-one matches on the blacktop and reminding participants to keep their heads up as they chase the ball.

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He knows the value of the program, which combines the world’s most popular sport with literacy and cultural activities for children whose families can’t afford to play in a competitive league. He used to be one of those students.

“Some of the coaches I had were huge role models,” said Aquino, 28, now earning a degree in child psychology while working as a shift supervisor for In-N-Out, California’s iconic burger chain.

The program has many of the elements that experts look for in a high-quality summer experience — a blend of enrichment and academic support, a focus on relationships and a dedicated staff. Aquino isn’t America Scores L.A.’s only long-time staff member. A Palms Elementary special education assistant has been leading the academic side of the program for almost 20 years. That stability was especially important this year after months of missed in-person learning, said Brodrick Clarke, vice president of programs for the National Summer Learning Association.

“Programs that have long-standing relationships with families and are embedded in communities are thriving,” he said.

But in a year when parents and educators are looking to summer school to fill some of the gaps students have experienced because of the pandemic, some districts have struggled to find enough teachers to meet the demand. Districts are doing their best to hit moving targets around COVID safety, parent demand and the Delta variant, Clarke said. But even with dedicated federal funding for summer learning, newer programs have a “growth curve,” he said.

A survey released July 29 from the Afterschool Alliance showed that more than half of programs have waitlists this summer, and 57 percent of the responding providers said they had concerns about their ability to hire enough staff members.

‘A pivotal year’

That means some students have been shut out of learning recovery efforts this summer.

Bryan Walsh, whose son Leo will be a third grader this fall in the Arlington Public Schools in Virginia, is among the parents who counted on their children participating in a summer program only to have it cancelled due to a lack of teachers.

In April, Walsh received notice that his son, who receives special education services, was automatically eligible for summer school. So he unenrolled Leo from camps offered by the local parks and recreation department, where he had already paid deposits.

But in mid-May, another email from the district stated that Leo’s program, which targeted students with special needs, had been cancelled. District spokesman Andrew Robinson said the district offered incentives— $1,000 for teachers and $500 for assistants — but still wasn’t able to recruit enough teachers.In the meantime, other camps had filled up and Walsh scrambled to find open slots. (He found space in cooking and musical theater camps, but said, “these aren’t academically oriented.”)

After a year in which Leo never had more than two shortened days of in-person learning a week, Walsh said he can’t imagine his son hasn’t fallen behind. But for a child who “couldn’t get out of the car fast enough” when schools reopened in March, he said was more concerned about him missing the “social-emotional interactions that are part and parcel of an 8-year-old’s existence in such a pivotal year.”

Robinson said 850 teachers and staff are still serving more than 4,600 students this summer and that the district will make “necessary and informed decisions as next summer approaches to further strengthen our program.”

‘Take out the friction’

Aaron Dworkin, CEO of the National Summer Learning Association, understands why districts have experienced challenges.

“Teachers are so exhausted, and they deserve to be,” he said. Districts have faced the opposite problem as well — parents registered their children, but then didn’t show up. The good news, he said, is that states and districts have three more summers to use the $30 billion set aside in the American Rescue Plan for summer and afterschool programs.

“We don’t need to try and make up for everything in six weeks,” he said.

Even so, there’s a sense of urgency about this summer. Recent data from nonprofit assessment provider NWEA shows students, on average, made much less progress in the 2020-21 school year than their peers did before the pandemic. Additionally, the U.S. Department of Education and Dworkin’s association have launched efforts to support states and districts in ramping up summer programs.

Dworkin said there are ways to make summer learning enticing for both teachers and students.

Setting up under a shady tree is one way.

That’s what Matthew Hathaway, a fourth-grade teacher at Owatin Creek Elementary School in Reading, Pennsylvania, has been doing since 2004. He began offering six students some extra help over the summer from his parents’ back porch, combining math and reading lessons with science activities in a nearby park.

Other teachers asked if they could join him with their students, and prior to the pandemic, his “passion project” had grown to include 120 teachers from 12 schools serving 1,500 students. While his nonprofit is called Teachers in the Parks, the off-site locations include libraries and YMCAs. This year, with help from federal relief funds, the district has added breakfast, lunch and field trips.

Hathaway agreed with Dworkin that teachers especially needed time to recuperate this year. That’s why his part-time model, outside of the classroom, is attractive to teachers, he said. “Kids don’t want to be there all day either.”

Michele Stratton signed up her 9-year-old son Keegan for the program this year so he could get used to socializing with peers again and get some extra help on reading.

“It’s just a different atmosphere when you’re at a park with your friends, rather than sitting on the couch being forced to read by mom,” she said. She recently dropped by to see her son’s small group using different units of measurement to estimate the length of a slide. “In the classroom, you’re limited. Outside, the world is just open to these kids.”

During the school year, some nonprofits revamped their programs to create pods so students — especially those whose parents were essential workers — could have a safe place for remote learning. In San Francisco, the same community-based organizations that provided those “hubs” are now helping to meet the demand for summer learning, despite many obstacles those efforts faced during the school year.

A recent report on the hubs described the political tensions between the school district, the city, the teachers union and community organizations that complicated the push to give the most vulnerable students a place to learn while schools were closed. The fact that non-union staff at the hubs provided in-person services to students was one point of contention for union supporters. “Finding ways around the union, in their view, amounted to carrying water for anti-union politicians,” the report said.

But now, new relationships between principals and afterschool providers have “transformed the conversation” about how they can work together, said Stacey Wang, CEO of the San Francisco Education Fund, which funded the report.

The partnerships have continued, with the school district providing about 10,000 slots for Summer Together and the organizations that ran the hubs serving another 15,000 students.

Another challenge for districts — especially this year — is ensuring students who need support the most are the ones signing up for programs. Technology can help.

“The funding is there, but you have to take out the friction for districts,” said Rod Hsiao, who launched InPlay, a nonprofit that uses text alerts in multiple language to inform parents about free summer and afterschool opportunities and then simplifies the registration process. The program ensured “that our highest priority students were effectively recruited during our challenging pandemic year,” said Julie McCalmont, coordinator of expanded learning for the Oakland Unified School District.

But it’s what takes place when students arrive at those programs that Clarke, with the National Summer Learning Program, was evaluating when he recently visited Palms Elementary to see America Scores L.A. — one of six finalists for a national Excellence in Summer Learning award. The honor recognizes providers that reach underserved students and make extra efforts to involve parents.

“I was blown away,” Clarke said. He was impressed by how active the students were in drills, despite wearing masks in the heat, and how they pitched in to gather equipment and hand out water and snacks.

But he was more taken with what was happening inside the classroom, where teaching assistant and history aficionado Oscar Gonzalez, posed “masterful” open-ended questions to students about what they think the White House looks like, why we shoot off fireworks on the 4th of July and why George Washington became the first president instead of a king.

As students began sketching and writing about their interpretations of the White House, Gonzalez gavea rising first-grader some extra help with letters and counting to 20. L.A. ‘s program, Clarke said, demonstrates that establishing connections between staff and students are essential before focusing on content.

“These are things I train practitioners to do all the time,” he said. He got the sense the soccer program’s staff members knew intuitively how to engage the students because they’ve known them for years. “It felt very authentic.”

From the very beginning of the pandemic, the economy responded to COVID-19 in a way that defied conventional wisdom. Many markers typically used to predict how severe a recession will be, and how to confront it, were completely out of whack.

Unemployment immediately shot up to levels far higher than those seen in the worst of the Great Recession of 2008. Small businesses closed at a precipitous rate, with little certainty about whether they would reopen. Many low-income workers were laid off, while others, forced to keep reporting to work despite spiking rates of viral transmission, lost child care as schools shuttered. But at the same time, stock portfolios swelled and affluent consumers flooded delivery services with orders for luxury goods to make homes that now doubled as offices ever more comfortable. For the well-off, the recession was over within weeks — if it was even felt at all.

Even small changes in the way money circulates within a city or neighborhood ripple through the local economy. This one was a shockwave. Wealthy Americans ordered fancy meal kits online and signed up for wine tastings on Zoom rather than spending at the neighborhood restaurants, nail salons, yoga studios and dry cleaners that had kept their less affluent neighbors employed.

John Friedman and Raj Chetty realized they were seeing something unusual. Co-founders of Opportunity Insights, a team at Harvard University that researches education’s potential to lift children out of poverty, they feared the pandemic had worsened already long odds.

The economists took the unprecedented step of asking credit card companies, payroll processors and other businesses that track money as it moves through the economy in real time to turn over what are essentially trade secrets. Using that information, the researchers built a nationwide online pandemic tracker capable of providing a down-to-the-day snapshot of who is spending and who is struggling, by income level, city, state and county and, in some instances, by zip code.

The data quickly revealed stunning implications on virtually every front.

In place of a typical recession’s V shape, in which people across the socioeconomic spectrum experience both the downturn and the subsequent recovery together, the economists saw a K. Affluent Americans at the top of the K bounced back right away — much more quickly than in a typical recession. Low-income families on the bottom, by contrast, were disproportionately impacted: more likely to be unemployed, quarantined in overcrowded multi-generational housing and experiencing higher rates of infection and death.

The inequities on display were not new, but for many people, the awareness of how profound and widespread they are is. Over the last year and a half, prosperous Americans who can afford iPads, reliable internet and tutors have woken up to headlines showing children forced to log into virtual classes from parking lots — or wherever they could find a Wi-Fi signal — skipping school to work at their own jobs and isolated, alone in COVID’s mental health crisis.

The Opportunity Insights tracker contains one academic dataset: student participation and progress on the math app Zearn, which one-fourth of the nation’s K-5 students have access to. Immediately after schools closed, use of the app among low-income students “completely dropped off,” notes Zearn CEO Shalinee Sharma. As they started logging on again, a yawning gap became apparent. A year into the pandemic, these students’ progress was behind where it should have been, while their wealthier peers were ahead 28 percent.

Because it is widely understood that economic disadvantages show up in schools, The 74 saw an opportunity in Friedman and Chetty’s work. Could their data predict long-lasting effects in the classroom years after COVID-19 has passed? And were there clues as to how educators could address them?

Just as Friedman’s and Chetty’s research holds key insights as to how policymakers could target relief, we knew their economic recovery tracker offered valuable information as schools seek to help the most disadvantaged children recover.

“We already had this deep inequality in American education. And the pandemic has just made it so much worse,” Friedman, a professor of economics at Brown University and a research associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research, noted in an interview with The 74. “The pandemic has taken children and set them even further back. Without some really dedicated effort to get these students caught up, what we’ve seen from broader data is that the types of educational gaps that arise in childhood can persist, they create lower college enrollment rates, lower college graduation rates, students earn less when they get out in the labor market. These things can have really large effects down the line.”

Using Opportunity Insights’ data as a starting point, “COVID’s K-Shaped Recession and the Looming Classroom Crisis” is a series of stories probing how the pandemic’s impact on income inequality has shown up in schools in five communities — Delaware; Washington, D.C.; Austin, Texas; Reno, Nevada; and Colorado Springs. Each demonstrates a different aspect of how the K-shaped recession has played out in neighborhoods and schools; and several offer hints as to how educators and policymakers can help students recover lost learning and regain the opportunity to secure a prosperous future.

This article is part of a series examining COVID’s K-shaped recession and what it means for America’s schools. Read the full series here.

Disclosure: The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and Chan Zuckerberg Initiative provide financial support to Opportunity Insights and The 74.

On Nov. 28, 2020, the COVID-19 infection rate in Washoe County, Nevada, crested at 113 new cases per 100,000 residents. What that grim statistic meant to residents of Reno, Tahoe and the county’s other small cities depended greatly on their socioeconomic status. 

Employment on that day, for instance, was down 1 percent over January 2020 — low, but also deceptive. Employment among middle-income workers, those making $27,000 to $60,000 a year, was flat.

But among those making less than $27,000, it fell 22 percent. Meanwhile, for residents earning more than the area’s median income, employment actually rose an astonishing 19 percent.

That disparity is a glaring illustration of the so-called K-shaped economic recovery — one of the features of the pandemic recession that most troubles economists.

Past economic slumps have had more of a V-shape: an across-the-board dip followed by a relatively uniform and quick return to pre-recession conditions.

This time is different. For many high earners, those at the top of the K, COVID’s roiling effect on the economy was a blip. They may be working remotely, but they’re working. They are not, however, spending money the way they did before COVID-19, on restaurant meals, growlers, travel, mani-pedis, Uber rides — services their lower-income neighbors provide as they eke out a living.

The week that Reno’s case count peaked, small-business revenue in the area was down as much as 31 percent. But overall, consumer spending dropped as little as 8 percent. The money was still flowing — just not to the folks at the bottom of the K. 

It’s a problem nationwide, and likely to worsen in coming years, because many of the low-wage jobs lost since the start of the pandemic won’t be replaced, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. Jobs that will require a college or graduate degree, such as health care and technology occupations, are expected to grow. But those requiring a high school diploma or less — chief among them the restaurant, hotel and customer service jobs whose workers who have long been the spine of Reno’s economy — will continue to contract. Early indicators show COVID has accelerated this shift, which has broad implications for K-12 education. 

When the pandemic recession struck, economists John Friedman and Raj Chetty realized it looked different from previous downturns. While even small changes in the way money changes hands create ripples, COVID was a shockwave. Co-founders of Opportunity Insights — a team at Harvard University that researches income inequality and education’s potential to lift children out of poverty — they persuaded credit card companies, payroll processors and other businesses that track money as it moves through the economy in real time to turn over what are essentially trade secrets. Using that information, the researchers built a nationwide online pandemic tracker capable of providing a down-to-the-day snapshot of who is spending and who is struggling, by income level, city, state and county and, in some instances, by zip code.

The data quickly revealed stunning implications on virtually every front.

In Reno, as in many places, affluent residents at the top of the recession’s K shape bounced back right away — much more quickly than in a typical downturn. But their new spending patterns crippled the businesses that supported their lower-income neighbors; those impoverished families on the bottom continue to struggle disproportionately on every front, beset by challenges long proven to be detrimental to children’s ability to learn in school.

Researchers, Friedman told The 74, fear the resulting losses — of jobs, of loved ones to COVID, of mental health supports and reliable food supplies — may have even more devastating impacts for children that schools were already failing to serve, with education’s potential for lifting a family out of poverty moving further out of reach. 

(Friedman and Chetty update the tracker as the underlying information changes. The data in this story was downloaded June 29, 2021.)

The Opportunity Insights tracker contains one academic dataset: student participation and progress on the math app Zearn, which one-fourth of the nation’s K-5 students have access to. Immediately after schools closed, use of the app among low-income students “completely dropped off,” notes Zearn CEO Shalinee Sharma. As they started logging on again, a yawning gap became apparent. A year into the pandemic, these students’ progress was behind where it should have been, while their wealthier peers were ahead 28 percent.

WATCH: Beth Hawkins details her latest investigation into COVID’s K-shaped recession and how the fallout will challenge America’s schools

New studies by McKinsey & Co. and the nonprofit assessment concern NWEA found wide disparities between white/affluent students and their low-income peers/children of color. Depending on grade and subject, low-income students ended the 2020-21 school year with up to seven months of unfinished learning.

In many ways, because Reno’s economic development officials took steps after the Great Recession to address major shifts in the economy, the city is better positioned than most places to weather COVID’s economic shocks. In particular, the community’s leaders tapped the local school district to help train the workforce needed to fuel a clean energy hub, with its thousands of good jobs. 

The resulting ripples from that prescient decision are being felt as early as kindergarten. 

Gambling and quickie divorces

When Tesla announced it was to break ground in 2014 on a much-anticipated Gigafactory, where it would develop a new class of batteries that could free consumers from fossil fuels, the headlines wrote themselves.

“Reno, Nevada, may have just won one of the most coveted economic prizes in America,” declared the San Francisco Chronicle’s “Fossils & Photons” blog. 

“Tesla Motors’ $5 billion Gigafactory may be the best thing to happen to northern Nevada since the silver rush of the 1850s,” gushed a Bloomberg piece. 

The $1.2 billion state incentive package that sealed the deal was a “bold gamble” on lessening Nevada’s dependence on casinos, according to the magazine Area Development Site and Facility Planning. 

The anticipated jackpot — $100 billion in economic growth over the next two decades — “keeps supercharging Reno,” quipped the news site Teslarati.

The city, the stories noted, beat out glitzier locations because of its easy freeway and rail access to Tesla’s flagship Bay Area facilities, its lack of corporate income taxes and even its status as the jumping-off spot for the futuristic desert festival Burning Man. The pundits weren’t kidding about this last selling point: Like lots of Silicon Valley technocrati, Tesla founder Elon Musk himself is a “Burner” — a moniker analysts explained earnestly in auto industry publications. 

But in the same breath where they mentioned the good jobs the tech boom would create, the pundits decried the poor state of Nevada’s education systems. The deal the state and Musk eventually arrived at would require that half the jobs under Tesla’s control — 6,500 permanent positions and thousands more to build the Gigafactory — be filled by Nevada residents. But the state’s schools were not graduating students with the necessary skills. 

Nevada has the smallest higher education system in the nation, with a correspondingly low rate of postsecondary enrollment. Last year, Nevada students posted the nation’s lowest average score on the ACT college entrance exam, at 17.9. On the most recent National Assessment of Educational Progress, often referred to as the nation’s report card, Nevada students outperformed only their peers in Louisiana, New Mexico, Alaska and Washington, D.C. 

Historically, state leaders felt little urgency to confront the problem. An economy centered on gambling and quickie divorces put no pressure on public education institutions at any level to graduate students with skills beyond those needed to work in the gaming and hospitality industries. 

“There was … a demand side to the problem,” Elliot Parker, then the head of the Department of Economics at the University of Nevada, Reno, wrote in the journal Nevada Review in the wake of the Great Recession of 2008. “Since before the crash, many young people without a degree could earn above-average wages working in casinos or construction, at least for a while.”

For 50 years, a near-monopoly on legal gambling helped the state weather economic swings. Even after the number of Native American casinos began to rise elsewhere, Las Vegas continued to appeal to tourists. But not Reno. 

In 2000, Californians voted to allow tribal casinos to offer slot machines and card games, paving the way for them to build resorts. No longer was there a compelling reason for northern Californians, Reno’s chief visitors, to make the trip across the state line. The region’s gambling revenue fell by two-thirds, a big drop at any time but especially hard to overcome once the Great Recession struck in 2008. Unemployment soared to 14 percent in 2010 — the worst in the country. By 2011, home values had fallen by 58 percent, leaving 70 percent of mortgage holders underwater and devastating construction, until then the metro area’s other major source of jobs.

In 2012, then-Gov. Brian Sandoval released a plan for diversifying the state’s economy. He proposed investments in higher education but said that wouldn’t be enough. Apprenticeships and other programs to provide job skills certification to students not necessarily seeking a college degree would be an important part of broadening the state’s employment base. 

To that end, he asked the state’s underperforming K-12 schools to work with regional economic development agencies to bolster career and technical education, or CTE, and make sure the training programs actually taught the skills needed by the employers that regional officials were trying to entice.

As an example of the kind of strategy needed, Sandoval singled out Washoe County Public Schools’ Signature Academies, then a relatively new initiative to offer four-year high school programs with specific career focuses. Students who choose one of the themed courses of study can earn college credit and industry-approved job credentials in fields such as agriculture, engineering, information technology and health sciences.

In creating CTE programs, districts and states face several pitfalls, says Anthony Carnevale, director of the Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce. The first is ensuring that offerings both engage students and are aligned to employers’ needs — an effort that is now required under the federal Carl D. Perkins Act. Programs that achieve this, he says, are relatively rare. The second is avoiding the biased tracking of generations past, when schools placed disproportionate numbers of economically disadvantaged students and youth of color in vocational training programs to prepare them for low-wage jobs, rather than advanced academics that led to higher education. 

In Washoe County Public Schools, the district that includes Reno, mandatory federal reporting by race and gender shows that boys make up 52 percent of enrollment and 56 percent of CTE participants. Some 44 percent of students are white, as are 48 percent of program participants, while Latino students are 37 percent of CTE enrollment and 43 percent of the overall student body.

The district offers 36 CTE programs in 12 high schools, falling into six broad groupings: agriculture and natural resources; information technology and media; health science and public safety; business and marketing; education, hospitality and human services; and skilled and technical sciences. In many of the programs, seniors have the opportunity to earn an industry certification or other job credential, or complete an internship. Nearly one-fourth of 2020 12th-graders — 1,229 graduates — finished the three or more years of study in a particular field needed to be considered a “CTE completer.”

Washoe’s arts and communications programs are still its most popular CTE tracks, with more than 1,500 students participating in the 2019-20 school year. Information technology is a close second. While the number of students enrolled in traditional career programs such as education and hospitality remains high, interest in more cutting-edge offerings is growing. Programs geared toward the region’s economic development efforts include manufacturing, with 800 participants; transportation and logistics, with 575; science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) with 550, and 900 in health sciences.

High school offerings are planned using economic development data that in most states guides decisions about whom public colleges and universities should train, and for what jobs. The Economic Development Agency of Western Nevada provides the district with weekly reports on job openings, the wages those jobs are likely to pay and which fields are poised to grow or shrink. 

The nearly 8,000 students in Washoe’s CTE programs can study clean energy technologies like wind, solar, geothermal and hydropower, automation, greenhouse management, environmental engineering, manufacturing and, of course, automotive technology. Opened in 2002, the Academy of Arts, Careers and Technologies is entirely career-focused and enrolls students from anywhere in the county. A second all-CTE high school is scheduled to open in fall 2023. 

Before the pandemic, two-thirds of district elementary schools had robotics clubs, with offerings ranging from simple computer coding games to First Lego League and First Robotics, a competition in which students have a short time to build an industrial-size robot that will compete against other teams in a field game.

Incorporating economic forecasting into school planning has been a game-changer, says Josh Hartzog, the director of the department in charge of the programs: “Where do our schools need to be positioned 10, 20, 30 years from now, given that we have no idea what the economy will look like?”

Equipping today’s students with career credentials is terrific, he says. But the real key to future prosperity is to make sure they graduate with skills like critical-thinking, problem-solving, entrepreneurial drive and ability to refine ideas that will increase the odds they will create their own high-tech innovation or start their own businesses.

The robotics club effect

As the Gigafactory began to rise from the desert, Tesla founder Musk was vocal about whom he wanted working in it. A track record of “exceptional achievement” was his chief qualification. “There’s no need even to have a college degree at all, or even high school,” Musk — a college dropout himself — told the German publication Auto Bild. “If somebody graduated from a great university, that may be an indication that they will be capable of great things, but it’s not necessarily the case.”

Still under construction, the plant may, at 10 million square feet, eventually be the world’s largest building. Right now, the facility is about 30 percent complete, with the remainder to be designed around innovations gleaned from the work taking place inside now. Musk hopes his exceptional achievers can conjure the Holy Grail of clean, renewable energy: batteries that are greener, cheaper, smaller and capable of powering everything from cell phones to cars to homes.

When Tesla’s first electric cars were introduced in 2008, their price tags — often six figures — put them out of reach of most customers. One reason the cars were so expensive was the cost of producing the lithium-ion batteries they run on. If the company could reduce the cost of the batteries by 30 percent by bringing research and production under one roof, Tesla could produce cars for middle-class drivers. Indeed, the first $35,000 Model 3 rolled off the assembly line in 2017.

The batteries are cheaper, but inside the Gigafactory, the quest for better ones not reliant on cobalt — expensive and problematic to mine — continues, with the first production lines running around the clock. A host of high-tech employers including Google, Apple, Panasonic and Intuit have set up shop in the Gigafactory’s shadow, hoping to capitalize on similar innovations and creating fierce competition for skilled labor. 

The feedback loop created by the new employers, the region’s economic development officials and the K-12 school system could be a positive departure from past CTE practices, which too often result in re-creating the low-skill vo-tech programming of the post-World War II era, says Carnevale. 

“Employer involvement is great, but it’s kind of like love,” he says. “Everyone wants it and there is never enough. They’re very fickle. They don’t work for you.” 

One reason he’s optimistic about Washoe’s programs is that instead of focusing on job training per se, the partnership is capitalizing on hands-on experiences to motivate students to develop the traits and intellectual abilities that will ensure they leave high school ready for college or a skilled career.

As part of its agreement with the state, Tesla agreed to spend $37.5 million on K-12 education. As people started working in the Gigafactory, the company analyzed the performance evaluations of its most effective workers. What it found was that many had participated in robotics clubs as kids. 

Reno is awash in robots, says Amy Fleming, until recently the economic development agency’s director of workforce development and now with the Governor’s Office of Workforce Innovation. Visitors to Tesla’s campus encounter self-driving vehicles, which stop to let them pass. One of the area’s employers makes robots that make other robots. Students who learn robotics and other high-tech manufacturing skills in high school will have no problem finding a good job. 

But as Tesla’s executives probed further into its high-performers’ experiences with the clubs, they found something else. The clubs’ competitive aspect teaches students to solve problems on the fly. They’re fun for kids of any age and draw a diverse array of participants, including girls. Students compete, but they work together to do so. 

Accordingly, one of the things Tesla has funded is a robotics coordinator for Washoe schools.

In 2019, students at Reed High School won a $10,000 grant from the Lemelson-MIT Program, which rewards student inventors. Their proposal: use a 3D printer to create a flywheel that would extract cigarette butts from storm sewers, preventing toxins within from poisoning fish in a nearby lake.

The senior who conceived of the idea went to the school’s energy technology classes to recruit volunteers. Many of those who joined the effort had participated in robotics clubs since middle school. The students used the grant money to test and refine the idea. 

“Once you identify that thread and start pulling on it, it’s like, ‘Oh, of course, this makes sense,” says Fleming. “It’s that engineer’s curiosity.” Students taught to continuously test and refine their creations, whether an invention or a process, she points out, are going to drive the innovations that will shape the economy in the years to come — and in the process, secure jobs that will place them firmly at the top of the K.

Reno’s success in reinventing itself as a high-tech hub and attracting associated growing industries is great, she says. But looking further out, the key to true long-term economic health is whether regional officials — and the school system — can nourish Reno’s blossoming startup sector. The same problem-solving and collaboration skills that make robotics club participants prized members of Tesla’s current workforce, Fleming says, will make today’s high school graduates the entrepreneurs whose innovations will keep the local economy nimble.

“Northern Nevada has made progress transitioning from service to production,” says Fleming. “As your community transitions from production to a knowledge-based economy, that’s crucial.” 

This article is part of a series examining COVID’s K-shaped recession and what it means for America’s schools. Read the full series here.

Disclosure: The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and Chan Zuckerberg Initiative provide financial support to Opportunity Insights and The 74.

Lead images: Getty Images

Just your typical summer vacation shenanigans, but with a twist: It’s all at school.

This July, over 11,000 students in Tulsa, Oklahoma — about a third of the district’s total enrollment — have returned to academic buildings for fun-filled programming that explodes the typical conception of summer school.

“I did summer school before and it was really boring,” said Tulsa rising sophomore Jesse Skocny. “This one isn’t. It’s a lot of fun.”

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At his North Star Academy, students tend to an organic garden every morning complete with cucumbers, peppers and tomatoes. Twice a week they take field trips, including a recent visit to a local Mexican restaurant where, in addition to sampling the tacos, students learned what it takes to run a small business.

“It’s a different animal, it’s not all academic,” Mike Easley, assistant principal at North Star, told The 74.

That shift in emphasis is by design, says Tulsa Deputy Superintendent Paula Shannon. After a year that’s been challenging for everyone, the district’s top priority this summer is to help reignite students’ enthusiasm for learning.

“Academics are important. We want to help kids with unfinished learning, but that’s not what we’re leading with,” she told The 74. “We’re leading with fun.”

As national leaders including U.S. Education Secretary Miguel Cardona underscore the importance of re-engaging young people this summer on the heels of a year marred by the pandemic, and with billions in federal relief dollars earmarked for summer enrichment activities, Tulsa Public Schools has seized the moment, delivering learning opportunities to students in tandem with community building and joy.

Its “Ready. Set. Summer!” initiative includes programs at nearly every campus in the city, available at no cost to families, with meals and transportation provided. Over 4 in 5 students served by the school system are economically disadvantaged, and 37 percent of all students are Hispanic, while 23 percent are Black, another 23 percent are white and 17 percent are Asian, Indigenous or multiracial. Enrollment has more than doubled the 5,000-student total from 2019 when the district last held in-person summer school, with a focus on remediation.

‘Connection before content’

With the district’s all-new summer camp-style approach, the goal is to “develop relationships and help [students] ease back to in-person learning in the fall,” Twanna Johnson, a social worker at Memorial High School, told The 74.

At her site, activities range from strength training and yoga to leadership development and writing rap music, on top of opportunities for students to make up credits. One particularly unusual offering, however, stands out: medieval fight club.

With rules similar to tag, students dart after one another bellowing battle cries and chopping with padded swords in a semi-controlled chaos — delighting youth who initially doubted whether they would actually be allowed to joust on school grounds.

“My expectation was to sit down in front of a whiteboard and just learn about history on medieval sword fighting,” rising sophomore Trevor Wilhite told The 74, breathing heavily after coming off the battlefield. “I didn’t know we would actually grab swords and go out.”

With about two weeks under his belt, his feelings toward the activity are not ambiguous. “If you ever have heard the expression of a child in a candy store, it’s basically that times 1,000,” Wilhite said.

In the midst of the melee there’s room for learning, says Heath Miller, band director and fight club faculty lead. Every so often, he pauses the combat to offer a fact for context on the activity and “trick them into learning something about medieval history,” he said.

As unconventional as the approach may seem, it actually aligns with best practices for summer learning. A 2018 study from the RAND Corporation recommends districts blend academic learning with enrichment activities to make sure, first and foremost, that students are engaged and enjoying themselves.

That also reflects the needs expressed by families, says Jennifer Peck, chief executive of the Partnership for Children & Youth.

“It’s been loud and clear from parents,” she told The 74. “They want their kids to have fun.”

Especially coming off a year that took an unprecedented toll on teens’ mental health, schools should work to meet students where they’re at, says National Summer Learning Association CEO Aaron Dworkin. His mantra, he told The 74, is “connection before content.”

Tulsa, it seems, has done well on that front — even among its teenage “knights” and sworn enemies.

Coming in after a session of spirited combat, “we’re still all like a giant dysfunctional family,” Wilhite said.

‘This summer is part one’

The focus on connection with students was enough to entice Branden Grimes, science teacher at Booker T. Washington High School to come back for the summer.

“It’s for the kids,” he told The 74. “I didn’t have to think twice.”

But another key incentive certainly didn’t hurt, added his colleague, English teacher Tametra Jamison: extra pay.

She’s making twice as much as she does during the school year, the educator said. Even after Oklahoma teacher walkouts in 2018 protesting the state’s low wages and poor working conditions — part of the nationwide “Red For Ed” movement — resulted in modest pay increases, Jamison normally has to pick up a second job during the summer to make ends meet. But funding from the CARES Act changes that, allowing the district to boost teachers’ summer stipend rate from about $30 to $40 per hour, Dept. Superintendent Shannon told The 74.

Many teachers volunteered to staff the summer program, says Jamison, but because the school got a late start on promoting the offerings to students, their enrollment did not reach full capacity and they ultimately cut back on certain planned activities.

“It would be really awesome if we’re able to do this again next year, but also kick start the promotion of it earlier so that we have more kids who are signed up,” said Alison Campbell, math teacher at Booker T.

Fortunately for the team of high school instructors, some key players think similarly.

“We will continue to apply the lessons we learned this summer through our afterschool component as we enter the school year and then that will set us up for next summer,” said Shannon, noting that relief funding is designed to last three years. “This summer is part one.”

Into the future, the district is investing in partnerships with community groups, all through a “quarterback organization” called the Opportunity Project that serves as a liaison, so that it can deepen afterschool and summer options for its student body, she said.

In Tulsa and beyond, Peck, of the Partnership for Children & Youth, advocates for the fun-first summer learning model to stick around.

“This shouldn’t be a one-time thing how we’re doing things this summer,” she said. “This should be here to stay.”

The National Inventors Hall of Fame’s Camp Invention program has gotten pretty, well, inventive with the way it delivers content during the pandemic. And that includes offering both in-person and virtual camps, connecting not only to K-8 students, but to entire families through the Camp Invention at Home program.

The hall of fame began in 1973 with a Virginia museum and has a strong emphasis on STEM-focused youth education, leveraging the insights of its annual honorees to create curriculum for in-classroom courses, after-school programs and summer camps in all 50 states. When the pandemic hit in spring 2020, the hall wanted to create online options for its 30-year-old Camp Invention, encouraging students to collaborate with other virtual campers or work with their own families.

“I think sometimes, with our parents with virtual school scenarios, it can be kind of stressful and intimidating when you’re trying to support your child with various subjects and homework and expectations,” says Jayme Cellitioci, creativity and innovation strategist for the hall of fame. “I think these out-of-school-time STEM experiences, like Camp Invention, give you more of the positive side of the experience where you can take more risks and engage with your child in a more playful way where everyone is learning and building their confidence.”

Over 132,000 students have participated in Camp Invention this summer, with the majority selecting an in-person camp and others opting for a $235 week-long virtual experience. At-home students, grouped by region and age, receive kits with all necessary materials for building a series of inventions. Daily activities include a live kickoff with an instructor leading the day’s module and collaboration with other students as they socialize and experiment with their inventions, such as a device to explore trajectory and velocity; a vehicle that can “submerge, soar or sprint”; or a solar-powered robotic cricket. If families can’t make the live feed, they can watch step-by-step instructional videos. Staff also designed an unplugged version that doesn’t require a computer.

Nayana Mallikarjuna, a Dallas parent whose son Rohan attended Camp Invention at Home, says there weren’t a lot of online options that could engage her son for more than four hours. “In a virtual setting, it was nice to see kids have an opportunity to interact with each other and share what they’ve built,” she says. “It was a great way to help him socialize virtually while learning and being engaged virtually.”

The hall creates camps completely new each year, using inductees both as inspiration and part of the curriculum. For example, a recent program called Open Mic, run both in person and virtually, includes a Zoom lesson with Jim West, inventor of the electric microphone. In the Open Mic program, kids use materials in the provided kit to explore the inside of a microphone, then create their own hands-on invention and end up with a wireless microphone with a recorded message from West. “Not only are we taking some of their inspiration and insight,” Cellitioci says of the inductees, “sometimes we are drilling into the details of programs with them.”

Another popular at-home offering is a line-tracing robot, allowing students to turn their entire home into a robot laboratory with an Optibot that uses sensors to travel on lines that the kids draw on paper.

The hall wanted the At Home version to feel like an immersive camp-like environment, so the kit that participants receive includes a maker mat, a blanket-like work surface; a toolbelt with equipment, from markers to screwdrivers, for creating their inventions; a pegboard for hanging extra parts and materials; and inventor logs, a workbook and journal where kids can track their ideas and progress.

With the hands-on aspect of activities such a critical part of a camp experience, Cellitioci says, the hall of fame needed to rethink the way the camps were packaged to keep the focus on real-life inventing, with the computer used only as a communication tool.

The goal was to give kids a successful camp experience without parental involvement, but also welcome families. “We saw this as a really nice chance to hold our parents’ hands in empowering them to join the learning process as they are able to and potentially build some of their own STEM confidence,” Cellitioci says. “We have gotten really wonderful feedback from our families and we have seen that parents have loved getting a behind-the-scenes look at this. It encourages them to feel more confident regardless of their knowledge and experience of STEM so they can become facilitators of these learning experiences.”

Jessica Stephenson, a parent in Wadsworth, Ohio, says Camp Invention At Home provided a collaborative, high-energy opportunity for her children, Lauren and Zander, to immerse themselves in a STEM experience when fun was otherwise canceled.

“Both of my kids have extra needs that would normally be a challenge during an in-person camp,” she says. “Being able to log in from the comfort of our home allowed us to have a little more control of different sensory issues that might pop up during an in-person program.” The setting gave her kids confidence to interact with other students and the instructor while sharing their inventions.

“Lauren and Zander loved hands-on activities that stretched their thinking far beyond their normal limits,” she says. “Lauren … was so proud that she created inventions, and Zander loved that he was able to use his hands — and items from his toolbelt — to build projects to help the environment.”

Mallikarjuna says her son had been to the in-person Camp Invention in the past, so the virtual option helped him “unleash his imagination and creativity” while experiencing a sense of achievement. “Being a working mom, I wanted my son to be engaged and, at the same time, enjoy learning and interacting with other kids, virtually,” she says. “It was fun and innovative.”

The at-home program continues through August, with week-long virtual camps still open the weeks of Aug. 9, 16 and 23. Parents can search for in-person camps or connect with their kids for a virtual experience, as seats are still open those final three weeks of the schedule.

Going forward, virtual experiences “will in some fashion likely stay as part of our mix,” Cellitioci says. “I would say it has forever expanded our capacity and opened our eyes to new opportunities.”

The state was fortunate to receive an offer of help from a partner early on. Superintendent of Public Instruction Jhone Ebert and I had existing relationships with Renaissance’s myON, an online literacy platform, from previous positions we’d held. In April 2020, we were still trying to decide how to move forward for our students when Renaissance reached how they could help. With relief funding having not yet made it to schools, the company committed to temporarily providing myON at no cost; by June 2020, students and educators throughout Nevada had access to thousands of online books and news articles.

Part of the reason this happened so fast is that the governor issued an executive order streamlining the adoption process. Instead of going through several layers of review, we were able to flag the rollout as an emergency response to the pandemic, drastically shortening the process from several weeks to just days.

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Part of the challenge the state faced, even with a generous partner, was that we knew the federal government was likely to provide emergency funds, but we didn’t know how much, when or what restrictions there would be on spending the money. In short, we knew we could launch the program, but we weren’t sure how we could sustain it beyond that. So we looked for partners to bring on board to expand this initiative beyond the Department of Education.

We began by reaching out to the Nevada State Library and Archives because it was already providing support and services to students and families throughout the state, from putting together packages of books and offering various mobile technologies so families could access the internet. It was a natural fit, so we asked them to start sharing information about myON along with their other offerings.

Next, we began working with our regional professional development program. We needed teachers to understand that myON was more than just a reading tool or online books, and to consider how they could leverage it for teaching and learning, given that the shift to remote classes was so abrupt and totally new to most of our teachers.

Finally, to inspire more excitement, we encouraged each school district and student to read as many minutes as possible through the READ Nevada partnership. To date, students have accessed more than 6 million digital books and read more than 58 million minutes. Meanwhile, my team and I began to address another statewide challenge: internet access.

Before the pandemic, about three of every four students in the state had a mobile device and access to home internet. But many were sharing a single device among multiple siblings or with parents. And entire communities didn’t have broadband internet at all.

A first step in improving access was to have districts identify the technology they already had that could be distributed to students. We knew that federal funding was coming through the Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief Fund that would allow us to buy the additional devices we needed. However, 49 other states were also looking to provide devices and connectivity for their students, and placing orders that wouldn’t arrive until the fall wasn’t going to help students who needed to learn now.

Fortunately, Gov. Steve Sisolak allowed Ebert to reorient the Nevada COVID-19 Response, Relief & Recovery Task Force to include Connecting Kids, an initiative to solve the issue of providing students with devices and access. The head of the task force, Jim Murren, and Elaine Wynn, former CEO of MGM Resorts and former president of the State Board of Education, really stepped up for our kids. They went so far as to use their private planes to transport devices from countries where they were manufactured to Nevada to skip the fraying supply lines and get devices into students’ hands.

Some students still lacked access to the internet, though. My department partnered with the Governor’s Office of Science Innovation and Technology to help districts distribute hotspots throughout the state, but there were still some students and communities we weren’t able to reach. Fortunately, people and organizations from all over the state stepped up to offer community access at schools, at local businesses or via school buses with wireless access. Only four months after the launch of Connecting Kids, 100 percent of Nevada students who were learning remotely had connectivity and access to a device.

The circumstances around our transformation from 75 percent to 100 percent connectivity were extraordinary, but the process is applicable beyond any crisis.

Begin with an inventory of what you already have and, crucially, what you need. Find partners with a genuine concern for kids and start a conversation about what you need and how they’re prepared to help. Partnerships with philanthropic organizations and businesses are important not just for what they can give students and teachers, but for how they can help leverage resources or provide access to powerful people or systems. Then, think about how to communicate with your stakeholders in a way that will get them invested, such as a contest to generate excitement. Next, measure the effectiveness of your implementation.

Finally, make sure to celebrate, because this is difficult work. It takes time, and celebrating those who’ve contributed as you reach milestones or achieve your ultimate goal will keep them engaged for the next push.

Dr. Jonathan Moore is deputy superintendent of student achievement at the Nevada Department of Education. He can be reached at jpmoore@doe.nv.gov.

The staff and board of University Prep Charter Schools stepped up this spring, recognizing an urgent need to develop an ambitious vision and catch-up plan that would support all children in getting back on track following more than a year of disruptions and struggles. Our objective: To ensure that, despite the significant challenges brought on by the pandemic, all our scholars will remain on track with grade-level performance, while receiving any and all supports they may need (academically, socially, emotionally and beyond).

At U Prep, we are unwavering in our belief that all children, from all backgrounds, can learn at the highest levels. They are brilliant, beautiful people and absolutely capable. Eighty-five percent of our students qualify for free and reduced-price lunches and 94 percent are students of color. In 2017, scholars at our Steele Street campus in Denver had the highest math growth in the state (out of all public elementary schools) and the eighth highest English Language Arts (ELA) growth, after a single year.

We take great pride that U Prep increased academic proficiency by more than 30 percent during that year while educating an equivalent student population to who we serve today, with more than 70 percent of our seats serving English Language Learners. You can read about that success in detail here.

As we now turn our focus to catch-up efforts in the wake of COVID, we’re leaning on that past experience along with our core values to drive our strategy.

Over the next two years, we are leveraging American Rescue Plan – ESSER dollars to ensure that children who’ve fallen the furthest behind during remote learning will now make the most rapid growth. And, while we drive that academic work forward, which we believe is critical in fulfilling our mission of providing every child with a life of opportunity, we are also expanding our partnership with the Mental Health Center of Denver to ensure children and families alike receive any and all additional mental health support they may need.

Our learning recovery approach is being guided by three key pillars:

— Grade Level is Grade Level: All scholars will be given access to grade-level content regardless of their level of current performance.

— Rapid Acceleration: We deliver moderate to significant interventions through additional staffing and a variety of targeted supports so that children get what they need when they need it.

— Family Partnerships: Every family deserves to know exactly where their child is, in relation to grade-level expectations. Built on a foundation of trust and honesty, educators engage with families as genuine partners who play an active role in their child’s “catch-up.”

Grade Level is Grade Level

No matter what you’re doing to catch kids up, you cannot stop putting grade-level content and work in front of them.

A fifth-grader who might be reading at a third-grade level must still be exposed to fifth-grade text and curriculum. We firmly believe that the more time a child is immersed in grade-level content alongside effective supports, the more growth they’re able to make.

Teachers regularly run critical grade-level assessments to gauge where children are, and create a game plan for aligning supports that will increase access to that grade-level work. Simultaneously, our school leaders have made significant investments in data analysis and are able to swiftly develop action plans that can support effective instruction with meaningful and rigorous grade-level curriculum.

Rapid Acceleration

This coming year, we will operate our K-5 campuses as if there were three small school models within them (while all staff, children and families remain deeply connected to the larger school).

Grades K-1 will operate as normal as possible (close to our ideal state), while we implement moderate interventions in grades 2-3. For our fourth and fifth graders, we will be committing to significant interventions; their needs in catching up and preparing for middle school (and beyond) is very different from our first graders’s needs, and we know that our remaining time with this oldest cohort is short.

With Rescue Plan dollars, we’re hiring an additional teacher at each campus to support grades 2-3, and two extra teachers to support grades 4-5 at each campus – one for each grade level. This means far more direct support and targeted individual and small group interventions for the children who are furthest behind and most need it. We will use assessments to further gauge unfinished learning and will then adjust instruction as needed with extra staff ready to play their part.

Beyond the school day, we have nearly 60 children (rising fourth and fifth-graders) in intensive tutoring this summer through a partnership with Impact Tutors. This multi-week support provides scholars who are the furthest behind with a chance to begin their catch-up efforts now and build momentum heading into the school year ahead. In a bid to remove as many barriers as possible, all costs associated with the tutoring, as well as transportation, are covered by U Prep.

Tutoring will not conclude with summer’s end. Both U Prep campuses in Denver will provide afterschool tutoring Monday through Thursday throughout the school year, building on the knowledge and skills being acquired during core content instruction. Like the work over the summer, this tutoring opportunity will target upper elementary aged scholars and all costs will be covered.

Family Relationships

Strong home-to-school and school-to-home relationships must remain central in our efforts to catch kids up. This requires ongoing, honest conversations. Families deserve to know where their child actually is in relation to grade-level standards, and to understand the impact that this highly disrupted 15 months of school has had on learning.

One example of this belief being put into practice: Last December, U Prep had all students come to school in person during the height of remote learning to take part in literacy assessments, our “Literacy-palooza”. Parents reserved a time slot that worked for them, drove up to the buildings, were greeted with a hot cup of coffee and pastry, and waited while each child entered the school for a one-on-one test (with full health and safety guidelines in place). After their tests, kids selected brand new books to take home and add to their personal libraries.

Even during the most challenging of times this past year we found a way to communicate directly and honestly with families about where their child stands. They always deserve to know, and from that position of shared knowledge, we can build a shared plan. (What are we doing at school? What can you be doing at home? How can we do this together?).

Continuing to invest in relationship building, this summer we are making home visits to not only all of our new U Prep families, which we do each year, but to all of our returning fourth and fifth-grade families too. Through the year, every family will participate in four parent-teacher conferences, one each quarter, to make sure families have a crystal-clear view of how their student is progressing academically, socially and emotionally, and to ensure our partnership is strong and healthy. Every one of these moments, whether in conferences or home visits, is another chance to also learn from our parents’ expertise about their child – they are their first and primary educator and we have to be constantly learning from their expert knowledge.

A Challenge — and Opportunity

The three pillars of our catch-up plan, combined with our core values and historic success at targeting support, position us to do right by all children and families we serve. The U Prep board, together with the school teams, makes a promise to every child that they will be educated on the path to a four-year college degree and a genuine life of opportunity.

While the last year plus was an absolute test in maintaining our mission, the years ahead will be an even greater test of our level of care and commitment. We are ready and beyond excited to lean in to the opportunity ahead — to do anything and everything possible to ensure every student catches up.

That is our responsibility and one we take extremely seriously.

Recardo Brooks is a member of the board of University Prep and the parent of an alum. The tuition free public charter schools serve 727 children in Kindergarten through 5th grades at two campuses in Denver.

Ashley Crandall’s second grade students didn’t like remote learning during the pandemic, and they hated wearing masks.

But they did like keeping their friends and family safe, and, as Crandall told them, the best way to do that was to keep masks up and to social distance.

“It’s bigger than just us,” Crandall reminded the kids when they would complain about the masks. “We have to really think ‘big picture’ about what’s happening in our community.”

Crandall did her best, largely successfully, to keep the scariest parts of the pandemic at bay in her classroom of 19 seven- to nine-year-olds at Democracy Prep at the Stewart Campus on the southeast side of San Antonio ISD which was hit particularly hard by COVID-19.

“They’ve all been impacted in some way,” Crandall said, referring to lost jobs, family members who fell ill or died, and the general anxiety swirling through the community. “School provided a place for students to disconnect from fears that might have been placed on them.”

Because she could provide that safe place, fear, happiness, and relief showed up in artwork the students created for The 74, when they were asked to illustrate the “best” and “most challenging” parts of the year. The drawings conveyed two distinct messages:

First, the kids loved their friends, teacher, and community, and had suffered during remote learning.

Second, the kids saw the value in safety protocols even though they hated the masks.

One girl even added a little second-grader shade to her response, “I like how people couldn’t get in my fase [sic] because of Covid.”

The mental health effects of the pandemic went beyond fear, grief, and loss related to the virus, and even the additional economic strain placed on families. Experts say the disruption and discomfort of safety protocols were stressful for kids.

“Kids are more sensitive, they’re not all rolling with the punches,” said school counselor Phyllis Fagell, author of the book Middle School Matters. It’s the job of the adults in their lives to keep stress from turning into anxiety by giving them tools to cope, she said.

Powerlessness — feeling that the pandemic and all of its protocols have been forced upon them — was part of the stress, Fagell said.

Having the power to help protect their loved ones and friends could actually help, if framed correctly, Fagell said. “We want them to focus on what they can control and what they care about.”

That’s a lesson that extends beyond the pandemic. Mask-wearing isn’t the last opportunity kids will have to embrace an inconvenience or disruption by seeing it as a contribution to their community.

Crandall’s success in helping alleviate her students’ anxiety meant that the kids didn’t feel the urgency of mask wearing out of fear. She instead had to appeal to their shared values as a class — empathy for those who might have been fearful, civic duty to “slow the spread”, and care for the health of others.

So instead of “the school is making me wear this uncomfortable mask,” Crandall would emphasize that choosing to wear a mask is a way to strengthen the community bond, because they knew they were sacrificing some comfort to keep each other safe.

The mind-shift worked: “keeping our community safe” was the best part of the year, student David Sutton said.

Lead photos by Bekah McNeel, design by Cheryn Hong

Updated 

For years, kids in Veronica Salgado’s “transition camps” have enrolled because they are anxious about making the challenging leap from elementary to middle school, or from middle to high school.

But this summer, after more than a year of isolation, the struggle to keep up with online learning and little contact with friends, Salgado, Youth Development Manager for Family Service Association, and her team are seeing bigger problems than just helping kids figure out how to find their lockers or make new friends.

Anxiety levels are skyrocketing as kids worry about their ability to keep up with school work, focus in a room full of peers, and navigate social situations with peers they have not seen face-to-face in more than a year. The need is so great that some of the kids in the camp are in non-transitioning grades.

“It’s all hands on deck, for sure,” said Salgado of the camps, hosted in coordination with school districts, and now connected to a hub of mental health services, many established just months before the pandemic hit in March 2020 in what was once a mental health desert on San Antonio’s South Side.

Counselors say it was just in time too: The six organizations at the hub were inundated with requests for services during the pandemic. Now, with the pandemic waning and re-entry weighing on the minds of anxious students and families, they are going full steam to prevent disaster.

At the transition camp, Salgado and her colleagues are on alert for signs of what educators and healthcare providers are calling a “second pandemic” of mental health issues in young people.

“We want to keep them as motivated as possible,” Salgado said. Without someone making a deliberate effort to draw them out, she said, many remote learners will not simply bounce back into the social rhythms of school. “They just go back into their shell.”

While students are participating in transition camps, other family members can access counseling, addiction support, and parenting classes.

The pandemic itself originally accelerated the demand for mental healthcare. Where they had expected to provide about 300 people with counseling and related services in their first few months with the collaborative, said Talli Dolge, CEO of Jewish Family Service, which provides counseling services at the hub, by May 2020 her organization saw over 1,600.

Demand stayed strong in the next school year: From August 1, 2020 to May 27, 2021, the collaborative served 4,619 people.

Most of the counseling during the pandemic had to do with grief and fear as jobs disappeared, loved ones fell ill, and domestic violence increased.

The collaborative weathered the pandemic with telehealth, including donating burner phones to families who didn’t have access to the necessary technology. Family Services continued seeing clients in person, and Communities in Schools, another collaborative partner, made house calls.

But now there is a new issue: re-entry.

Kids started going back to school mid-year, Dolge said, and instantly the mental health crises exploded — the hazards of being isolated at home gave way to all out panic over returning to school.

“The crisis rates are up tremendously,” Dolge said. “Social anxiety is huge and across the board.”

It’s a daunting forecast, but two years ago it would have been devastating.

In 2018 student advocates in South San Antonio ISD hadn’t begun speaking out on the mental health challenges they faced, and the extraordinary lengths they had to go to in order to get help. Texas ranks 50h out of 51 states (and the District of Columbia) in access to mental healthcare for children and adults, and the situation is far worse for lower income communities like the South Side of San Antonio.

The first Mobile Mental Wellness hub opened at a building on the campus of a South San Antonio ISD elementary school in November 2019, not knowing then that a once-in-a-lifetime crisis would soon begin on the other side of the globe.

Going forward, experts say organizations like Rise Recovery, a hub partner, will have their work cut out for them. Alcohol, marijuana, and prescription drug abuse rose during the pandemic as teens self-medicated in isolation.

Experts say they won’t really know how much until students return to school, where the eyes of teachers, coaches, and counselors can spot the warning signs.

What worries Rise Recovery CEO Evita Morin and others are the new cases, the ones that have been hidden behind screens during remote learning.

“The lack of data (during the pandemic was) disturbing,” said Morin said, “I’m not a fan of disciplining kids with addiction, but at least before COVID schools were catching drug use and they could report it to us.”

Because Texas schools started bringing a percentage of students back in the fall of 2020, educators got early glimpses of the coming mental health crisis. So, even with the pandemic still raging in San Antonio, other school districts asked the collaborative to set up shop in their district.

Neighboring school district Harlandale ISD launched their hub in November 2020, and Edgewood ISD, where the pandemic was falling heavily on working class and impoverished neighborhoods on the city’s West Side opened a hub in January 2021.

Altogether the three hubs have created mental healthcare access for 23,535 students from pre-k to twelfth grade.

For many, Dolge knows, the suffering is only getting deeper as the world moves forward, and traumas, anxieties, and grief goes unaddressed. She’s trying to raise more awareness in the community that help is within reach.

“If you didn’t know where to get help before,” Dolge said, “It’s so much more important to get help now.”

For mental health support related to COVID-19, call Texas’s 24/7 toll-free support line at 833-986-1919. You can also call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 800-273-8255 or text 741741 from anywhere in the country to text with a trained crisis counselor. 

A group of 14 Columbus high school students and their teachers walk behind the Columbus NBC TV-4 station, headquarters past a drainage pond and satellite dishes aimed at the sky.

They follow Ken Freedman, general manager of the station, to a chain link fence that surrounds a field – 2 ½ acres of dirt, debris and tree stumps- that the station owns but has never used.

Freedman has a task for the students as part of that district’s COVID-sparked summer learning program.

“What,” he asks the students, as he points to the field, “do we do with this?”

Researching and proposing a use for this all-but-ignored land will dominate summer learning for these students, with each given tasks depending on their strengths and weaknesses, requiring them to use math, public speaking, writing, art and even biology skills.

But there’s a lot more going on here than just going on here than just a summer project.

With many students needing academic intervention after the pandemic, school district officials in Columbus and Cleveland, are turning to “mastery” learning as a strategy to catch them up.

The mastery, or “competency” approach lets students learn at their own pace, making sure they fully understand key skills before moving on.

That could be a good fit when students return to school in the fall after making drastically different progress online or in very limited in-person classes.

The Columbus school district has built mastery concepts into its summer program to let teachers, students and the district test-drive them. The Cleveland school district, which uses it in a few schools already, hopes to expand its use quickly. District CEO Eric Gordon, long a fan of mastery, has named using more in schools as one of his top four priorities in the district’s post-COVID academic plan.

“Over time, [it] will actually close achievement gaps more quickly and effectively,” Gordon said.

Kenton Lee, head of secondary curriculum for the Columbus schools, said that mastery concepts have been a major topic in planning COVID recovery. Administrators, he said, are bothered by an increase in F grades in a difficult year when students may have learned material partially from home and can learn the rest now that they are back in classrooms.

“Mastery was brought up a lot,” he said. “The question is how do you operationalize it in a district that is as large as ours and to scale it.”

And leading the charge in Ohio and nationally, is the Cleveland-area Hawken School, a private school that opened a new mastery-based high school last fall to test and showcase the model, and is now partnering with Columbus as it explores mastery.

The Mastery School of Hawken had to adapt during the pandemic and couldn’t bring visitors in to demonstrate the highly-individualized model, but it hopes to promote it to private and public schools alike this fall as educators look at new ways to run schools after COVID.

“COVID really called for an attempt to try to personalize the school experience for kids in the face of de- personalizing of a deadly virus,” said Hawken Head of School C. Scott Looney, who dismisses traditional classrooms as too cookie-cutter and industrialized. “We were separated by masks and plexiglass and by technology and the industrial production model does that too. The combination made it really clear for people that we can’t go back.”

The mastery approach throws out standard expectations that students learn certain skills in a given grade or semester. It instead recognizes that students learn at different paces and may start a school year at very different learning stages. Schools give students time to learn at their own pace, repeating and reinforcing skills until they “master” them.

If students haven’t learned something by the end of a school year or grading period, they don’t get a D or F. That would be imposing a schedule on learning, instead of recognizing students might just be still learning the material. So schools give them an “incomplete” or “developing” or something similar, instead. In some cases, schools don’t even advance students a grade level each year, but whenever they show they are ready to move ahead, even mid-year.

Looney, one of the strongest backers of the approach nationally, said the upheaval of the pandemic calls out for schools to use mastery, instead of what he calls the industrialized approach of expecting students to all learn on a fixed and standardized timetable.

“The pandemic didn’t do anything but expose… the flaws of teaching the same kids the same thing at the same time with the same deadlines,” Looney said. “It’s not a good idea to begin with, but during a pandemic when some kids are home in Zoom and some kids aren’t, and some teachers are teaching with kids, it really got exposed for what it is, which is a machine.”

Teachers at the Mastery School of Hawken say the approach, which expects students to be at many different stages of learning any given skill, is perfect for a post-COVID world where students have missed varying amounts of classes and learning,

“Each student is just progressing along at their own pace and wherever they get to, they get to,” said teacher Nick Cheadle. “There’s much less pressure to get through any set of material than there is at a traditional school.”

Columbus has already shifted away from standard grading for elementary school students toward one more focused on progress that’sa key part of a mastery system. The district skips traditional A-F grades and instead rates student progress on multiple skills – for grades 1 through 5.

Students receive a 1 if they are doing work below state standards for a skill, 2 for progressing toward the standard, 3 for meeting it and 4 for exceeding it.

Parents, Lee said, still see a 1 on a report card and think their child is failing. But Lee said the district teaches parents that score is evolving and not a “permanent snapshot” of a child’s performance for a quarter. Ratings that low are normal early in a year and students can progress to meet standards over time.

Students already meeting state standards will receive other academic enrichment to learn beyond.

“Even that report card is a pretty big paradigm shift,” Lee said.

For high school students, the district has not made any broad changes yet, Lee said. But it hired Doris Korda, a former Hawken administrator who helped design the mastery school there, to train teachers for its summer program that federal COVID-recovery dollars are paying for. Mastery School of Hawken teachers will also support Columbus teachers over the summer.

Korda helped teachers plan several projects for students designed to grab student attention and have them learn academic and social skills by trying to solve real world problems. Teachers will target academic needs of students or help them learn beyond standards as they work on projects.

And students will demonstrate their mastery of the topic by giving presentations at the end.

In the case of the TV station project, students will visit urban farms to learn about using the land as a garden.They will look at using the pond to water plants. They will talk to neighbors, many of whom are immigrants, as well as to a neighborhood mosque and other civic groups. They will then present options to Freedman.

Taylor Rush, one of the teachers leading the project, said she hopes students will take ownership of the project and what they need to learn to solve it.

“The students are really going to get a chance to get hands-on and get more engaged through the excitement of creating a solution for a real world problem,” Rush said.

The Cleveland school district has used the mastery approach at several schools in recent years, including at MC2STEM High School, which grades students as A, B or incomplete to let them keep working to fully learn academic, as well as social and emotional, skills.

Gordon has encouraged other schools to use mastery concepts over time, even saying last spring he had hoped to use more last fall – a hope that COVID and the district’s shift to online classes made impossible. He has repeatedly said that traditional grade levels and learning schedules force structure onto students that hurt learning.

In the district’s three-year recovery plan, which will be released in the next few weeks, Gordon plans to help schools already using mastery expand its use. But he wants to give other schools a year of staff training and planning time before expanding it further. Some district teachers are already teaching other teachers some mastery concepts this summer.

That’s important, say national experts on the model, who say it can take a few years to really learn and use well.

Both Cleveland and Columbus, however, are struggling with how mastery grading systems will affect high school students as they apply to colleges. Columbus hasn’t changed high school grades out of concerns that colleges won’t accept them.

Gordon this month is joining the governing board of the Mastery Transcript Consortium, a national panel of about 400 schools founded by Hawken’s Looney, to develop a common grading system and transcript for students using the approach.

That transcript, now in use at 14 schools, tosses aside traditional grades and grade point averages for an interactive and online report that shows where students stand in specialized skills that are normally just part of a grade in a traditional subject.

Math, for example, now includes whether a student is competent in things like statistical reasoning and scientific experimental design. And English is broken into things like language analysis and analyzing claims. Students are also rated on social and emotional skills like entrepreneurship, collaboration and self-direction.

Started in 2016, the consortium is already seeing successes. Twelve schools used the transcripts this past school year and had students accepted into 166 colleges using them, including Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

To date, most have been private schools that have reputations and relationships with colleges. Gordon, who has been frustrated by not being able to use a full mastery grading plan at his high schools, hopes to change that – and to help convince more colleges to accept new transcripts.

“They (the board) believe that part of the case to be made for a mastery transcript is that it is not exclusive to elite, private schools but that it can be an outstanding demonstration of a student’s content and skills in the public K-12 sector as well.” Gordon said. “That traditional transcript has been a limiter in moving to a more full competency-based model.”

Looney is also glad to have him and to share ideas right in the same city.

“We can talk about ways we can reinforce each other’s work,” Looney said.

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Updated July 28

The D.C. Public Charter School Board voted Monday to approve KIPP DC’s virtual program proposal for grades K-12. It held off, however, on approving its request for creating an all-virtual campus in SY 2022-23, wanting to see how the virtual option works in the next school year. The two other charter networks that submitted all-virtual proposals did not get greenlighted: The board denied Howard University PCS’ request to continue its simulcasting model, determining the network had not shown its virtual program will result in improved performance or that there would be demand after the  pandemic ends. AppleTree withdrew its application.  

With school districts around the country increasingly adding virtual learning for the fall, three D.C. charter networks are seeking approval for their own all-virtual options, citing parent demand amid pandemic safety concerns.

KIPP DC, Howard University PCS and AppleTree Early Learning PCS are asking the D.C. Public Charter School Board, the city’s charter authorizer, to allow them to permanently offer all-virtual learning to a limited number of students.

“We know in-person is ideal,” said Andhra Lutz, KIPP DC’s managing director of secondary schools. But “we [also] have so much respect and so much love for our families. And our families have asked us for this.”

The plans range from launching all-new programming with virtual staff to sticking to last year’s learning models. Officials say there would be various safeguards — such as mentorship programs, attendance eligibility requirements and parent check-ins— to assure a high-quality experience rivaling in-person learning.

Projected capacity ranges from 20 students at AppleTree to nearly 300 students at KIPP DC, or about 4 percent of its student population. KIPP DC is also requesting approval to transition its virtual program into what would be the city’s second free, all-virtual public school in SY 2022-23.

A fourth school, Maya Angelou PCS, is requesting to permanently offer hybrid learning.

Without the PCSB’s approval, these schools could only offer all-virtual learning starting next year to students with documented medical conditions such as severe asthma, in line with guidance from the Office of the State Superintendent of Education.

A virtual hearing and vote are scheduled for Monday.

“Khamal won’t even go to the grocery store with me,” KIPP DC mom KyShawn Route-Crowder said of her seventh grade son, who’s stressed about returning to school and wants to stay virtual. His father had a heart attack in 2016, is immunocompromised and can’t get a COVID vaccine.

Route-Crowder added that her son, who attends KIPP DC’s KEY Academy, has flourished in virtual learning without classroom distractions. “You have to know what type of student you have. And I know my child specifically, and I know he can excel online right now.”

While most students nationwide are expected to head back to the classroom full-time this fall, virtual learning is sticking around. A recent Education Week survey of districts estimated 56 percent of schools will offer a remote learning option this fall, including in Houston, Los Angeles, Miami and Cleveland. Another report found nearly two-thirds of the country’s largest school systems will provide students an option to learn in stand-alone, remote academies.

Currently, D.C. Public Schools — which serves about 53 percent of the city’s public school kids — is only allowing those with a “documented medical condition” to learn virtually next year. New York City, Newark and Chicago have made similar calls.

This wouldn’t be the first time the PCSB considered changes that ran counter to local guidance, experts noted. It broadly dismissed a 2019 analysis by the Deputy Mayor for Education cautioning against adding more charter high schools, for example. Any backlash to these plans, they surmised, would be less about regulations and more about concerns with program quality.

For most, distance learning last year was an inadequate substitute for in-person class. Slow Internet, digital literacy challenges, competing family obligations and distracting home environments upended many students’ progress — especially students of color from under-resourced neighborhoods. Numerous reports point to months of learning loss that districts now flush with recent federal stimulus aid are rushing to address.

For some families in D.C., though, online school has been working. In a sample parent survey Howard University PCS conducted last month, about 94 percent said it was “extremely” or “very” important that they at least had the option of all-virtual schooling this fall.

Ward 4 mom Keisha, whose eighth grade son attends Howard University PCS, hopes her son goes back to in-person class — just not next year. She’s holding off on vaccinating him — the vaccine for kids is still new, she said — and developments like the Delta variant have her wary of him resuming his Metrobus commutes to school.

“Keeping him safe and healthy is my main priority,” she said. “I’m not rushing him back.”

A PCSB spokesperson said while the “goal is for schools to return to in-person learning as the primary mode of instruction,” the board is open to the conversation, wanting “to be responsive to the questions and concerns that we have heard from schools and students.”

KIPP DC: A new model in the making

Virtual programming this fall would look “vastly different” from last year, said Caitlin Maxwell, KIPP DC’s director of virtual learning programs.

On a typical day, kids would log on to Canvas in the morning, watch a seven-to 10-minute video for each of their class subjects and complete class work testing comprehension of the material.

KIPP DC’s “learning coordinators,” who are certified teachers, would then take about two hours to review students’ submissions, crafting their lesson plan for small group instruction that afternoon based on the concepts students struggled with most that morning.

During that two-hour period, students would have a break to eat lunch and take an “enrichment” class — like a foreign language or cooking — via a partnership with OutSchool.

Spokesman Adam Rupe confirmed KIPP DC is poised to hire 20 to 25 all-virtual staff members using recent federal stimulus funding. If the all-virtual campus is approved, “we’d use our per-pupil dollars” to pay for the program long-term, he added.

So far, KIPP DC has identified 66 medically eligible students for this program. Broader polling of the school community informed the estimate that around 280 students in total may opt-in if able.

Not every student would be eligible to participate, though, Lutz clarified. A student would need to have had at least 90 percent daily attendance in remote learning last year. Staff would also review the student’s academic records and have a conversation with the parents “where we’re really upfront about what’s different [from last year],” she said.

If a family changed their mind after the school year began, KIPP DC would allow that student to return to in-person during one of its quarter breaks.

Lutz and Maxwell feel confident in students’ ability to succeed virtually; recently compiled data shows 76 percent of KIPP DC middle schoolers saw growth in math over the 2020-21 school year. (The 74 asked for that same data pre-pandemic, but comparable data wasn’t available). They confirmed virtual learners would take “the same assessments” as students learning in-person.

While these students wouldn’t be working alongside their peers, Maxwell said KIPP DC’s virtual student clubs and monthly outdoor field trips would provide opportunities to socialize.

“That creates a sense of belonging for kids, and that’s often what they look forward to the most,” Maxwell said.

Howard University PCS: Sticking to what it knows

As of last week, there were about 18 Howard University PCS families with some 25 students interested in staying virtual, Principal Kathryn Procope said.

If approved, the school would stick to the model it’s used since late January: Simulcasting, where the teacher is physically in the classroom with some students and streaming the lesson live via Microsoft Teams for others tuning in virtually.

All classrooms are already equipped with “Owls” — 360° camera, mic and speaker devices — for an immersive virtual experience, Procope said. Students at home could use the platform’s raised hand function to ask their teacher a question in the middle of the lesson.

No new staff hires would be needed under this model, Procope said. If a student decided to come back in-person during the school year, they wouldn’t need to change teachers.

Procope acknowledged the network overall saw “some slight dips in math and reading” performance last year, “but they weren’t significant.” Virtual students’ academic growth, she added, would be monitored with fidelity: The network’s learning platform, Summit Learning, is full of practice assignments to gauge students’ mastery of the content.And online quizzes and tests would only be released at specific times when a teacher is available to monitor the students on camera.

The school’s existing mentoring program is another safeguard to ensure students would have what they need to succeed, Procope said. Every student has an established relationship with a mentor who checks in at least weekly.

“It gives us an opportunity to know, ‘Hey, Mary’s family is experiencing homelessness, they may need X,'” she explained. “It allows us several touch points.”

“If we’ve learned anything from the pandemic,” Procope said, “it’s that we’re going to adjust and shift the way we educate them to make sure we reach them.”

The virtual public hearing and vote will be on Monday starting at 6:30 p.m. Information on registering to attend will be posted on www.dcpcsb.org.

As in most pre-K classrooms, Geneva Gadsden’s students — known as the All Stars — rotate through different stations, from dress-up corners to building block areas.

But the All Stars, the Happy Owls and other groups of preschoolers at the Whitted School in Durham, North Carolina, also take turns with Chromebooks, spending 15 minutes a day clicking through early literacy activities from Waterford.org, a nonprofit software provider.

When COVID-19 shut down schools, many pre-K programs across the country saw participation drop or sent home paper materials for at-home learning. Not so at Whitted, where students kept rolling along with the Waterford Reading Academy at home.

“It really was a lifesaver,” said Suzanne Cotterman, early education director for the Durham Public Schools. The district adopted the program three years ago as a pilot, but expanded access to all pre-K families when schools closed. Some families, Cotterman said, couldn’t participate in scheduled Zoom classes, but “the bonus with Waterford is that it allows you to do it any time.”

More than a year after COVID-19 forced preschool programs to shift online, Waterford hopes schools continue to employ virtual models like theirs to help young children prepare for kindergarten. Waterford designed its program to work in classrooms like Gadsden’s or to be used directly by families at home. Waterford Upstart, the organization’s signature early learning program, can reach children in rural areas and other communities that don’t have access to pre-K, said spokeswoman Kim Fischer. But many early education experts oppose spending public funds on computer-based models, saying they can’t match the experience children get in a high-quality classroom. And they interpret the huge enrollment declines in pre-K and kindergarten this year as evidence that most parents agree.

“It’s important to understand the limits of digital technology in early education,” said Aaron Loewenberg, an education policy analyst at New America, a center-left think tank. “So much of pre-K is about the social-emotional learning that happens via student interaction with peers and well-trained educators, and that sort of learning can’t be replicated by interacting with a computer program.”

While there are other widely used online early learning resources that parents can purchase or find for free, including ABCmouse and Khan Academy Kids, Waterford has been especially successful at garnering public funds for preschoolers’ at-home learning.

In 2014, the nonprofit received a $14.2 million federal grant to start pilot programs in five more states. And they view President Joe Biden’s $200 billion universal pre-K proposal as an opportunity for further expansion.

It’s been a relatively quick ascend for Upstart — an acronym, now discarded, for “Utah Preparing Students Today for a Rewarding Tomorrow” — which received its first grants from the state in 2009 to reach families in rural areas. A 2018 study from the Utah Department of Education showed 77 percent of Upstart children had average or above average literacy scores at the end of the program, compared with 71 percent of children in high-quality public preschools and 69 percent in private programs. In math, Upstart children demonstrated no advantage.

‘Children that you know are behind’

Public funds support Upstart in five states, with most targeting the program to low-income children. Wisconsin made the program available in districts with significant achievement gaps. South Carolina spends about $3 million to serve 1,400 4-year-olds in 17 high-poverty districts. As in Durham, children complete activities with parents at home in addition to attending state-funded pre-K.

“The big draw … was the family engagement piece,” said Quincie Moore, director of the state education department’s Office of Early Learning and Literacy. Upstart provides family liaisons who monitor children’s progress and answer parents’ questions.

She added if additional funds were available, she would consider expanding the program to children not enrolled in a center. “It’s additional instruction for children that you know are behind,” Moore said.

That’s precisely what worries early-childhood education advocates — that policymakers might see Upstart as a way to do pre-K on the cheap. The program costs about $2,000 per child, well under the average $5,500 per child states spend on pre-K.

“Our biggest concern is that using public [money] will interfere with efforts to provide real publicly funded preschool to children,” said Josh Golin, executive director of Fairplay, formerly the Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood. In a 2018 statement, the organization and another nonprofit, Defending the Early Years, raised concerns about Upstart, calling it part of a “larger set of trends to further digitize and privatize public services.”

Rhian Evans Allvin, CEO of the National Association for the Education of Young Children, expressed similar sentiments in 2020, and said in a recent email that regardless of the pandemic, her views haven’t changed.

But Fischer, with Waterford, described Upstart as a catalyst that has convinced Utah lawmakers of the importance of early learning. Until 2019, the state didn’t even have a public pre-K program, according to the National Institute for Early Education Research’s annual “yearbook.” But in the 2019-20 school year, the state spent almost $7 million on two grant programs supporting preschool centers.

“We do not see ourselves as competition to any other form of early learning,” said Fischer. “We try to fill the gaps wherever there are.”

In New Hampshire, young English learners often fall into those gaps. Data shows that if young children are not proficient in English by kindergarten, they can trail their peers in academic outcomes throughout elementary and middle school. That’s the population the state education department was hoping to reach when it awarded a $440,000 grant to the Greater Nashua Smart Start Coalition, an early learning initiative within the local United Way, to offer Upstart. The program was funded with a federal Preschool Development Grant aimed at better preparing children in low-income families for kindergarten.

Five-year-old Alice Wang, whose home language is Mandarin, would have attended the local Nashua school district’s pre-K if it hadn’t been for the pandemic.

“Waterford Upstart kind of became her school,” said Zixin Lou, her mother, who doesn’t think Alice is any less prepared for kindergarten this fall. “She told me, “I know how to spell ‘mom.’ I know how to spell ‘water,’ and ‘Mom, do you know chickens hatch from eggs?’”

Between the beginning of the pandemic and April of this year, the number of Upstart users quadrupled, from 20,719 to over 82,600, according to Waterford data. And now, with Biden pledging to offer universal pre-K, the organization sees the potential for Upstart to help meet demand.

“We have to focus on how we can achieve universal kindergarten readiness as quickly as possible,” Fischer said, adding that it “could take decades” to add enough classrooms to serve all 3- and 4-year-olds. Existing state-funded pre-K programs serve just over a third of the nation’s 4-year-olds and about 6 percent of the 3-year-olds, according to the National Institute for Early Education Research. “To be truly universal, the country has to meet children where they are. There are always going to be kids who don’t have access.”

The question is whether an online program is a sufficient replacement for in-person pre-K. At the start of the pandemic, preschool participation fell by half, and those children who stayed in remote programs didn’t participate consistently, according to the institute’s surveys of families.

“Parents have been frustrated and dissatisfied with remote pre-K this last year, and I think they will make that clear,” said Steve Barnett, the institute’s senior director.

‘Deepen their learning’

Much of the skepticism relates to screen time. Experts find that young children just don’t learn as well from screens as they do in a face-to-face setting, and too much screen time can interfere with development, research has shown. The American Academy of Pediatrics recommends no more than an hour of screen time for 2- to 5-year-olds, but one study from Ohio showed that during the pandemic, kindergartners’ daily average time online had reached more than six hours.

The AppleTree Institute for Education Innovation, a nonprofit that works with charter schools to implement their preschool model, ran into these concerns when it joined with Noggin, Nick Jr.’s educational streaming service, and Sparkler, an early learning app, to offer free, online content — called Ready Grow — for children in 100 classrooms. Families in the program also received iPads.

In focus groups, parents said the digital materials filled a void when they were “feeling overwhelmed and not knowing what to do,” said Chavaughn Brown, who leads Appletree’s research efforts. Some teachers worked hard to incorporate characters from Nick Jr. programs like “Blue’s Clues” and “Paw Patrol” into their lessons so children would see the connection to Ready Grow. But some parents didn’t want their children to have any more screen time beyond virtual Zoom classes.

Even so, Appletree will continue to offer a remote option for families this fall. Brown said while she sees ed tech as a supplement to high-quality preschool, there are ways “you can leverage children’s love for those characters to deepen their learning in other ways.”

Fischer, with Waterford, said there’s a false assumption that children using Upstart are spending hours in front of screens. The literacy component takes just 15 minutes, she said. Adding math and science would stretch the time to half an hour, and family liaisons are trained to intervene if they think children are spending too much time on the program.

As use of Upstart grows in other states, Waterford’s largest footprint remains in Utah. State funding for the program continues to grow, with the organization slated to receive over $24 million in 2022. Upstart is available to any preschooler in Utah.

But educators aren’t necessarily advertising that fact.

The Granite School District in Salt Lake City, for example, is focused on its own, in-person preschool classes for 3- and 4-year-olds. Spokesman Benjamin Horsley said leaders haven’t worked directly with Waterford to recruit preschoolers for Upstart.

“We do feel like there is some value in utilizing digital programming,” he said. “The concern has always been, will parents think that an online program is sufficient over in-person instruction.”

Disclosure: The Overdeck Family Foundation provides financial support to Waterford.org and The 74.

The global pandemic has laid bare the inequities in our education system. As school leaders now chart out ambitious recovery plans for the fall, we must do so with a keen awareness of what was lacking prior to the pandemic, and in particular what we have long failed to provide so many students attending our lowest-performing schools. It is through this lens that we must approach the upcoming reauthorization of the federal Every Students Succeeds Act (ESSA), which sets accountability requirements for schools.

As we look to 2022 and beyond, we must commit to funding three critical programs to better support students assigned to struggling schools:

First, we need to fully fund high quality pre-kindergarten for all low-income students. High quality pre-k has been shown to increase participants’ cognitive and social-emotional skills, health outcomes and long-term employment trajectories, while also reducing male participants’ criminal activity.

In addition, for every dollar spent on high-quality birth-to-five programs for disadvantaged children, including pre-kindergarten, taxpayers can expect a 13 percent per annum return on their investment – with, perhaps not surprisingly, the greatest returns associated with programs at the earliest stages of life. Yet only 34 percent of four-year-old and six percent of three-year-old children are enrolled in state funded pre-K. We must change that.

Second, we must ensure that every student assigned to a low-performing school can attend full-day kindergarten. Only 17 states and the District of Columbia require children to attend full-day kindergarten. Yet, study after study shows students who participate in full-day kindergarten outperform similar students in half-day programs, with both short-term and long-term gains in reading and math. In turn, these gains narrow later achievement gaps between students enrolled in low-performing school districts and those of their more advantaged peers.

Third, we should fund and implement robust after-school tutoring programs that identify children falling behind in early years and provide help via one-on-one or small group instruction so they are able to catch up and then climb up the educational ladder. A meta-analysis of 96 tutoring studies found that, on average, students participating in tutoring programs made gains consistent with moving from the 50th to the 66th percentile of student performance. Moreover, gains were largest for students in the earliest grades.

We can’t achieve these goals overnight, but we must begin pursuing them as quickly and aggressively as possible. During my time as governor of Pennsylvania, we similarly focused on this three-pronged approach to build a foundation for all students they could use as a springboard for lifelong educational success.

The good news is that the Biden administration understands the challenges we face and how this early education approach can significantly improve educational outcomes for vulnerable students. In addition, states are receiving billions of dollars in federal funding as part of COVID-related relief funding, providing an unprecedented opportunity to put new programs into place for younger students.

But those funds will eventually run out, even as the need for them continues. Hence, we must also take advantage of the moment at hand by including pre-k, full-day kindergarten, and tutoring programs as part of the ESSA reauthorization and committing ongoing federal financial support to sustain those programs long after COVID-19 has become a distant memory.

Although the investment will be significant, the benefits will more than exceed the costs over time — not just in terms of return on investment, but also in improved quality of life for both the recipients and the communities in which they live.

Hollis Irvin learned to read last year. She’s a good reader, her mother, Tiffany Burks, says. Last year, when the pandemic forced schools to close temporarily and during the early days of remote learning that followed, Burks started to worry about her Grier Elementary second grader.

Hollis was starting to read words just to say them out loud — not trying to understand what the words and passages meant. Reading felt like a chore to Hollis, Burks said.

Then they found the Reading Checkup, a mobile application that families can use to work on literacy skills at home. The app takes kids through a quiz and, based on the results, suggests activities and games for them to do on their own or work on with their parents.

“She’s making the connection when it comes to the questions [about what she read], so she’s not just reading to read,” Burks said. “If I had a question regarding one of the passages she read, she can answer the question back. There’s been a lot of growth that I’ve seen.”

The Reading Checkup is available for free in Mecklenburg County as Read Charlotte, a community-wide reading initiative, is leading a free pilot of the app for its maker, Learning Ovations. While Read Charlotte is using it to help parents work with their children, the algorithm it uses was designed to help teachers in the classroom.

Munro Richardson, executive director of Read Charlotte, believes the app can help kids address unfinished learning and combat summer slide.

“When we think about what’s happening in this COVID environment and post-COVID, our kids are going to be all over the place,” Richardson said. “So the need to have this sort of precision medicine for literacy is greater than ever.”

Richardson was learning more about the platform when the pandemic began. When he learned the Department of Education had asked Learning Ovations to investigate use of the platform at home for kids and parents to use, his ears perked up.

Richardson convinced Learning Ovations to choose Mecklenburg County. His team worked on changes to make the platform more compatible for the community. The first thing they did was change the name, which used to be Home Literacy Coach.

Next, they worked on making the interface more user-friendly. A 15-minute assessment became two short quizzes. Also, many of the activities suggested for kids required school resources, so Read Charlotte worked with nonprofit partners and came up with new activities that are easier to do at home.

Read Charlotte also partnered with Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools, which provided six teachers to record more than 100 videos explaining how caregivers can conduct adult-led activities.

To get the word out, Read Charlotte partnered with more than 80 organizations. One of them, BCDI-Charlotte, got the app into hundreds of homes. They also came up with the idea of creating literacy kits to pass out that contained resources for the app’s suggested activities.

“We’ve been excited about it and we’ve kind of picked it up and been able to run with it,” BCDI-Charlotte President Devonya Govan-Hunt said. “Because it puts such an emphasis on where we believe the majority, a lot of the power actually, lies, which is in the home and in the hands of parents.”

About 3,300 pre-K to third grade students have used the Reading Checkup at home since last summer, accessing it on smartphones, tablets, or computers. One of them was Hollis.

“We use this as a supplement,” Burks said. “And she doesn’t feel like she’s in school when she’s doing it. She feels like she’s playing a game. So it’s been really helpful to me.”

Govan-Hunt says this app allows parents to actively engage in their child’s ability to read. When parents are involved, she believes the impact on reading scores will be substantial.

“So with this Reading Checkup, we have made it a point to really lift family engagement, because we actually believe that family engagement is the cornerstone in everything that we do,” she said. “We believe that family engagement, especially with literacy, is a high-impact strategy for improving schools and increasing literacy achievement, period.

“And that’s what this Reading Checkup allows us to do. Put the control in the parents’ hands.”

The feedback Richardson has received suggests the BCDI message is resonating with the community.

“So in a time when everything was really up in the air, and people are losing jobs and there was all sorts of uncertainty, the way they frame this with parents was to talk about control,” Richardson said. “Although there’s a lot of things in your life that could be out of your control, helping your child with reading … using the Reading Checkup is one area where you can control. And they found a lot of parents really warmed to that message.”

Govan-Hunt said this is a particularly important message for Black and Brown communities. In the communities she serves, she said there is a feeling that many schools don’t do enough to engage with Black parents. She noted assumptions about family stress levels during the pandemic or bias against Black and Brown parents’ willingness and ability to get involved in their children’s schooling.

“We believe that we have a responsibility to respond to this reality that we’re existing in by transforming the approach that many people take around family engagement, moving away from a so-called random act of family engagement to one that actually has a lift by the community, or by the village,” she said.

Tiffany Burks was one of those parents. She visited the Melanated Exchange Market in Charlotte last year to buy Hollis some books. In part, she wanted to motivate her child to read during that period when reading felt like a chore.

As Burks walked through a parking lot to the market, a hub for Black-owned small businesses, her daughter veered off toward a table filled with books. She stopped and stared at one book, in particular. The cover showed a Black girl with naturally curly hair, just like Hollis’.

Burks smiled at her daughter’s reaction. She hardly noticed Govan-Hunt walk up beside her.

“She just tears up,” Govan-Hunt recalled of Burks.

Burks finally turned to Govan-Hunt and asked how she could help Hollis stay on track with reading. That’s when Govan-Hunt told her about Reading Checkup. They talked about the power of parents in helping their children read, the importance of finding rich and culturally diverse texts, and how the app could help bolster Hollis’ reading skills and love for reading.

“And she says, ‘Thank you. I’ve never had the opportunity to have this conversation with anybody before,’” Govan-Hunt said. “It was out of fear that her thoughts and her fears were irrelevant, and that people really didn’t have these conversations in the society that we live in today.”

Hollis left the market with three free books from BCDI, and she’s used the app ever since.

“I became afraid that because she was learning from home, she’d be disengaged, and she wouldn’t be as excited about learning,” Burks said. “And that’s where I feel like the app fills in that gap because it’s like, OK, if you didn’t receive this lesson in school, I know you’re receiving it on the app and you like doing the app. So it’s not like I have to force you to do it.”

This article originally appeared at EdNC.org. 

If the 2019 school year ended in a surge of shutdowns and socially-distanced chaos, the 2020 school year commenced with an unprecedented mix of innovation, improvisation and isolation, as districts rushed to rethink everything from school safety to remote instruction, student nutrition, social-emotional supports and beyond. From fall to spring — through all the spikes in COVID cases, the rolling campus closures, the approval of vaccines for adolescents and the evolving CDC guidance surrounding the spread and mitigation of the disease — school communities did their best to pivot and adapt to the twists and turns that made the past nine months an academic year unlike any other.

Now with nearly every elected official and education leader calling for a full restoration of in-person learning for the 2021 school year, there’s a feeling today, in July of 2021 as we enter the holiday weekend, that we’re taking collective stock of the fallout from the COVID school year — and laying the groundwork for the engagement and interventions that will be required to help all kids make up for lost time.

If the 2019 school year was when things derailed, and 2020 was the year we did the best we could in an impossible situation, 2021 is poised to be the moment the nation turns the page and doubles down on education as a post-COVID priority.

Here at The 74, we’ve been monitoring and covering each new chapter in the pandemic. And as a second school year draws to a close, we wanted to take a quick snapshot of this moment in time: What are our top concerns about students after 15 months of disruption? What are the top issues that need to be addressed through summer school or first thing in the fall? As we look to catch kids up, where do we start — and what solutions have the most promise?

Looking back over the past nine months, at what reporting generated the most interest and sparked the greatest impact, here are 12 important stories about the challenges currently facing students and teachers that could well define the next school year:

A Better Equation: New Pandemic Data Supports Acceleration Rather than Remediation to Make Up for COVID Learning Loss

Remedial Education? Not So Fast: Education researchers had some advice to offer school leaders in a report that was released in May: As educators decide how to spend federal stimulus dollars and address learning losses in the school year to come, they should consider the lackluster impact of remediation — the typical gap-closing practice of making up missed material before moving on — and new evidence suggesting there’s a better way. TNTP and Zearn analyzed the experiences of 2 million students during the current academic year and found that, on Zearn’s math app, classrooms featuring acceleration — a strategy in which students are challenged by grade-level lessons and instructed in specific missing skills as needed — saw dramatic growth. Students receiving this kind of support completed over 25 percent more grade-level work than they would have using remediation. By contrast, students in remediation continued to struggle. Beth Hawkins talks to the team behind the report about their findings.

—Related: Miami data could offer dire warning of ‘unfinished learning’ nationwide, with 54% of district students testing below grade level in math (Read the full report)

New Data Suggest Pandemic May Not Just Be Leaving Low-Income Students Behind; It May Be Propelling Wealthier Ones Even Further Ahead

Achievement Gaps Have Grown Wider: The pandemic may have exacerbated achievement gaps not only by leaving some students behind, but by propelling more privileged children even further ahead academically. At least that’s what data showed from the earliest months of the pandemic when we covered its release last fall. The numbers, collected and crunched by economists at Harvard University’s Opportunity Insights research group, are from Zearn Math, a free online program for kindergarten through fifth-grade students. But they were the best early measure researchers had for overall engagement with online learning. The program was being used by more than 2.5 million students in more than half the country’s school districts before the COVID-19 shutdown. Researchers used a representative national sample of about 800,000 students from district public, charter and parochial schools to track what happened after that. Read the full report from Laura Fay.

Study: Chicago Tutoring Program Delivered Huge Math Gains; Personalization May Be the Key

The Promising Power of Tutoring: An abundance of research has demonstrated the power of tutoring in boosting students’ academic performance. Now, as families and governments seek the best ways to reverse COVID-related learning loss, a working paper released in March points to some of the most impressive tutoring results yet recorded — and offers a theory about how they were achieved. In two experimental trials in Chicago, the authors find that ninth- and 10th-graders saw huge improvements both in their math test scores and their grade-point averages, with course failures reduced by as much as 49 percent. Particularly impressive, according to co-author Monica Bhatt, is that the effects were generated by a program serving older students, who often see weaker results from education interventions. “I really do think we have to stop asking ourselves, ‘Well, what really works?’ because we have more indications of what works,” Bhatt told The 74’s Kevin Mahnken. “Now we have to figure out how to actually do it in the context of U.S. public schooling.” Read our full report.

College Enrollment Continues to Plunge, Marking the Worst Single-Year Decline Since 2011

Community Colleges Are In Trouble: Hopes that college enrollment would begin to indicate some signs of resilience in the face of a waning pandemic were dashed again when the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center released more detailed numbers last month. The fuller data set for spring 2021 shows that overall college enrollment fell by 603,000 students, from 17.5 million to 16.9 million — a drop that is seven times worse than the year before, when the pandemic first hit, and marks the steepest year-over-year decline since 2011, the first year the center began keeping track. Community colleges, which enroll the greatest percentages of low-income students and students of color, were hit hardest, declining 9.5 percent, or 476,000 fewer students. More than 65 percent of all undergraduate enrollment losses this spring occurred among community colleges. Author and 74 contributor Richard Whitmire reports on the persistently bad news, wondering, “will enrollments ever recover?”

Analysis: Schools Are Facing a Surge of Failing Grades During the Pandemic — and Traditional Approaches Like Credit Recovery Will Not Be Enough to Manage

How Do We Confront the Failing Grades From the Pandemic?: As we reported in February, the number of failing grades were on the rise across the country — especially for students learning online — and the trend threatens to exacerbate existing educational inequities. The rise in failing grades appeared to be most pronounced among students from low-income households, multilingual students and students learning virtually. This could have lasting consequences: Students with failing grades tend to have less access to advanced courses in high school, and a failing grade in even one ninth-grade course can lower a student’s chances of graduating on time. Addressing the problem, though, won’t be easy. In many school systems, the rash of failed courses could overwhelm traditional approaches to helping students make up coursework they may have missed. In a fresh analysis, Betheny Gross, associate director of the Center on Reinventing Public Education, implores school and district leaders to be especially wary of one long-established but questionable practice: credit recovery. Read more about her warning — as well as her recommendations for how districts should seek to reverse this learning loss.

Politics, Not Science, is Driving School Reopening Decisions to a ‘Really Dangerous’ Degree, Research Suggests

School Safety — Science v. Politics: As we reported in October, the 2020 school year quickly exposed a national divide in America’s coronavirus response: Even as some districts were quick to welcome students back to physical classrooms, millions of their classmates were still receiving their education through a screen months later. Now, a growing number of academic and independent researchers are pointing to the influence of politics in determining which districts reopened for in-person instruction. Across several analyses, experts found little or no correlation between the severity of COVID-19 spread and districts’ plans for reopening; in contrast, reopening decisions are shown to be strongly associated with partisan considerations, including the strength of local teachers unions and support for President Donald Trump in the 2016 election. According to Jon Valant, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution’s Brown Center on Education Policy, while the question hasn’t been settled, the influx of new evidence is “strongly suggestive” that political calculations are weighing heavily on the minds of school authorities: “There’s a long list of issues associated with COVID that should not be politicized, but have been politicized, and it feels as though school reopenings are on that list.” Read Kevin Mahnken’s full report.

‘I Had No Other Option.’ Teens Balance Zoom Classes and Fast-Food Jobs — Sometimes at the Same Time — to Support Struggling Families

When Education and the Economy Collide: As we reported in January, listening to Zoom classes while blending smoothies and cramming homework into breaks between customers were among the ways teens were bending the rules of distance learning to help their families survive amid the pandemic. “It’s not just to pay their cell phone bill. For some of them, it’s like, ‘I need to help my family pay the rent,’” a college and career counselor told reporter Linda Jacobson. One Los Angeles student became the primary earner in her family when both parents contracted COVID-19 and had to quarantine. While some teens are determined to manage their added responsibilities without falling behind, others say they’re less motivated to keep up with remote classes. And counselors said they walk a fine line between being firm and showing empathy for students whose families are struggling. As one said: “I respect the hustle.” Read our full report.

New Poll Finds Parents Want Better Distance Learning Now, Online Options Even After COVID, More Family Engagement

Is Remote Learning Here to Stay?: Parents — and especially Black and Latino ones — are not as eager to send their children back to in-person classes as they are to have access to better, more innovative distance learning, according to a poll conducted last fall on behalf of the National Parents Union. Two-thirds, the survey found, want schools to focus on new ways of teaching as a result of COVID, and 58 percent want online options to continue after the pandemic. While respondents were overwhelmingly positive about their schools’ efforts to meet the moment, more than a third saying their children are learning less — a number that jumps among low-income parents and families of students with disabilities. Fifty-nine percent want less reliance on police in schools, with 75 percent of Black parents saying they favor replacing them with psychologists, counselors and social workers. Beth Hawkins breaks down the results.

—Related: Returning this fall, by popular demand — Virtual school. For communities of color, it’s largely a matter of trust (Read the full report)

Bucking the Trend: How 2 D.C. Principals Restored Black Parents’ Trust in Returning Kids to the Classroom

Restoring Trust With Families: At Garfield Prep Academy in Washington, D.C.’s majority Black Ward 8, Principal Kennard Branch was pulling out all the stops last February to make worried parents more confident about sending their children back to school: He’s posted self-produced video tours of the building online, secured plastic shields for every desk and is sending kids home with bagged dinners. Principal Katreena Shelby at nearby Kramer Middle School was providing parents with one-on-one building walkthroughs upon request and answering their questions through text messages and calls on her personal cell phone. At both schools, more students had returned for in-person learning — and the principals believe these efforts at family outreach were the reason why. “It has been a struggle districtwide to really get parents interested in sending their students back,” Shelby told The 74’s Taylor Swaak. “Our school culture plays a large role in [our momentum]. … Relationships and rapport have helped us.” Read our full report.

How New Orleans Schools Are Making Up Special Education Losses From the Spring Pandemic Shutdown — and Why the Process Could Improve Distance Learning This Fall

Ensuring Students Receive ‘Compensatory Services’: Even in normal times, families of children with disabilities must often fight to get the special education services they are entitled to. During distance learning, those services disappeared at many schools, leaving desperate parents without solid plans to stanch learning losses. But a number of New Orleans schools offered a hopeful model last school year. Prodded by Louisiana education officials not to wait to begin making up for missed therapies and interventions special education students depend on, many began providing what special educators call compensatory services during the summer of 2020. Advocates credited the state’s push for helping teachers and principals take stock of what has and hasn’t worked for children with disabilities, both in brick-and-mortar schools and in remote learning. “It made schools really think through their re-entry,” a community leader who reviewed schools’ reopening special education plans tells Beth Hawkins. “We have to reimagine instruction, because when we didn’t do it before, we saw what happened.”

Court Documents Reveal How L.A. Teachers Union Gained Upper Hand in Pandemic Negotiations, Limiting Instruction Time

District-Union Collaboration: As the Los Angeles Unified School District prepared to reopen elementary schools this past spring, recently released court documents provided a rare glimpse into negotiations between the district and United Teachers Los Angeles in the summer of 2020. The district’s labor chief pushed to improve on the four-hour schedule for teachers that was the norm in spring of 2020, telling the union’s team he wanted “to see the workday mirror or parallel a regular workday,” which had been eight hours pre-COVID, and that the district “can’t shortchange the students.” But between mid-July and December of last year, the union won on that and several more points, ultimately securing, on average, a six-hour day. The district’s relatively weak position in Los Angeles is a contrast to Chicago and New York, where mayors control the schools, the University of Nevada Las Vegas’s Bradley Marianno told reporter Linda Jacobson. Parents largely supported Los Angeles teachers two years ago when they went on strike, but “now we’re talking about actual disruption to school for a long period of time,” he said. “Parents have an ability to separate their beliefs about teachers from their beliefs about teachers unions.” Read the full report.

7 Ways American Education Could Change Forever After COVID

A New Normal For America’s Schools?: A Nation at Risk, President Ronald Reagan’s 1983 blue-ribbon panel’s review of American public education, is frequently referenced as the benchmark and starting flag of the reform movement. But in a new essay published last fall, contributor John M. McLaughlin argues that its 37-year reign as the reference point for educational progress is over. The pandemic, he writes, has now taken the pole position: “It will be the new reference point for the evolution of public schooling, and changes as a result of COVID-19 will be more rapid and far-reaching than any measures of the past 37 years.” From fiscal restructuring to reconfigured school days, millions of new homeschoolers and a renewed push for both individualized instruction and parental choice, McLaughlin says there is no going back to a pre-COVID world for public education — and that while the coming evolution will be messy and varied, the results will be a wider array of options for families and education structures that better reflect the society they serve. Read more about the seven ways education could change forever.

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Below are the prepared remarks by U.S. Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona, recorded in advance of Tuesday’s first installment of the Department of Education’s Educational Equity Summit Series. (We’ll be covering today’s event, sign up here to receive our coverage)

Remarks as prepared: 

Thank you, Melito, for the kind introduction, and more importantly, for all you do for the students we serve. You are a shining example of what it means to serve. Eres un orgullo Latino!

And thank you, Dr. Biden, our First Lady, for your inspiring words – but more importantly, for walking the walk. Despite the pandemic and the transition to the role of First Lady of the United States, you continued to teach your students. Your passion for teaching and ensuring that your students have what they need exemplify what it means to be a great teacher. Thank you for your service to our country as a teacher and for lifting the profession and purpose we have as educators focused on equity.

And to my Colleagues who’ve signed up for this important equity summit series, thank you for taking the time to join us. We hope that through your engagement, you will hear strategies that match our collective passion to make sure that we look at this reopening through a lens of equity. I don’t have to tell you that the inequities in education have been a constant since we have been collecting data. I don’t have to tell you that the pandemic exacerbated inequities, not only in education, but in other critical areas such as health and economic stability.

Well, we are here today because we plan to do something about it. This is a moment in education to boldly address the patterns of inequity that have been pervasive in our schools. This is our moment to ensure that we reopen, reinvest, and reimagine our schools differently and better than ever before. If we go back to how it was, we would be returning to a system where you can predict outcomes based on race and place, where the color of your skin and zip codes are better determinants of outcomes than the actual aptitude of our learners.

This is our moment to have the difficult conversations about how to build back better, how to lead transformatively, and how to use every penny provided by the President and Congress to ensure that those most impacted by the pandemic receive the most support. We have often heard, and maybe even exclaimed ourselves, that education is the great equalizer. Well, now is our chance to prove it. The funding is there, the urgency from the President is there. Are we going to lead through this and come out stronger? Or is the temptation of complacency going to dissipate our call to action?

I remember growing up listening to hip hop icons Public Enemy and they encouraged challenging the system and “Fighting the Power”. Well, now, we are the system. It’s on us to make the change we need in our country. In many places, small incremental change is not enough. We will need innovative and creative leadership fueled by urgency. The resources are there. At the federal, state, and local level — we must act.

These next months and years will determine the trajectory of success for millions of students in our care. This is our moment.

President Biden and Vice President Harris have made equity a core priority. It’s why the American Rescue Plan is ensuring that schools not only have the resources to re-open for in-person instruction quickly, but that they are also focused on investing in meeting the social, emotional, mental health, and academic needs of the students most impacted by COVID-19—who are often the same students who were furthest from opportunity before the pandemic.

It’s why the President’s American Jobs Plan, American Families Plan, and the rest of the fiscal year 2022 budget provide unprecedented investments in educational equity: Universal pre-K and free community college. Supporting $100 billion in investments in school infrastructure. More than doubling funding for Title I schools through new equity grants that will incentivize states to address inequitable school funding systems. Investing in our educators and building a diverse pipeline so every student from every background can be supported by teachers, mentors, and staff who share and understand their experiences. Doubling the number of school counselors, social workers, and school psychologists. Taking a huge step towards fulling funding the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act. And just last week, we affirmed that Title IX protects students from discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity, making clear that every student, no matter who they are or whom they love, have equal access to educational opportunities in our schools.

Last week I visited Harvey Milk High School in New York City. There I heard from students about what they want to see in our education system. They spoke of wanting a system that is free from discrimination for students who are LGBTQ, students who have disabilities, or students from different racial backgrounds. They spoke about a system where all students had access to tools needed for learning, like broadband and technological devices. We know that many rural communities and poorer communities still do not have that. Collectively, we own the students at Harvey Milk High, and every student across the country, exactly that – a school that promotes equity and access in its DNA.

Equity in education is about providing all students, from all backgrounds and all parts of the country, with the resources and supports that they need to succeed and thrive in our society. It’s about providing them pathways to contribute to their communities, and to make the world a better place. Equity is not a passing buzzword, but an ongoing, continuous effort to make sure that every student feels supported in their classrooms and in every educational environment. That’s why this summit isn’t a one-time event for us – but something that will be infused in all of our work at the Department and across the Administration for the next four years.

To advance equity, we must innovate, share promising practices, and work together to create the education system that all of our students deserve, a system where students are at the center – while recognizing that for far too long, we haven’t lived up to that promise.

I hope you find that spirit and unwavering support in the Department of Education’s Equity Summit series.

There’s a lot riding on this summer. Schools are reopening their doors to in-person learning in the fall, and many see this summer as a chance to address the unfinished learning the pandemic leaves in its wake. But no matter how successful summer programs are, schools can’t expect to operate business as usual this fall. Tutoring must be a part of summer learning strategies — and of plans for the 2021-22 school year.

While the U.S. Department of Education declared summer programs key in efforts to address lost instructional time, school leaders can’t stop trying to accelerate learning at the end of this summer. Research on summer school programs with intensive reading supports for kindergartners and first-graders showed substantial improvements — but these had all but dissipated by the time those students reached the spring semester. It makes good sense to build on success over the summer and replicate those efforts as traditional school begins in the fall.

The urgent need for solutions to address pandemic-related unfinished learning is clear, but students falling behind is nothing new. Prior to the pandemic, many children in the U.S. already struggled to meet grade-level expectations. The pandemic only exacerbated this issue. An analysis by McKinsey & Co. in December shows that students on average started the 2020-21 school year about three months behind grade level in mathematics. This trend didn’t play out equally across demographics, however. White students were about one to three months behind, while students of color were three to five months behind. A solution that reaches large numbers of the neediest students is critical to close these widening achievement gaps.

My colleague, the late Bob Slavin, education researcher at Johns Hopkins University and co-founder of Success For All, was a fierce advocate for one-on-one and small-group tutoring using programs that research has shown helps students improve. High-dosage tutoring — personalized tutoring provided to students at least three times a week — is proven to accelerate learning.

Bob’s latest effort, ProvenTutoring, which launched May 4, just days after his sudden passing, is a growing coalition of more than a dozen evidence-based reading and math tutoring programs, shown to be, on average, nearly seven times more effective than summer programs without a tutoring component. Bob believed the effects of these programs could translate to a gain of 20 points in reading and 15 points in math on the National Assessment of Educational Progress.

Bob’s vision was to provide a one-stop shop of tutoring programs that rigorous evaluation shows are significantly effective at improving student achievement for K-9 students in low-income schools. These programs also have the capacity and willingness to serve large numbers of low-performing students, while maintaining the quality of implementation. Through the website, school administrators can access several tutoring program options that meet the needs of their students.

After such a tumultuous year, some education and youth development experts have argued that summer school this year should focus on reengaging students rather than building academic skills. We don’t need to choose between the two. Engaging students through trusting and supportive relationships is central to effective tutoring. In addition to academic instruction, students receive personalized attention, encouragement and support. Tutors, through these caring relationships, can serve as mentors, helping students re-engage in school and improving attendance as well as social, physical and mental health.

High-dosage tutoring requires investment, yes, but the human capital is there. Well-trained college graduates are shown to be just as effective as certified teachers in one-to-one and small-group tutoring. And with millions of young people graduating into a recession, tutoring can provide meaningful, full-time work and even a pathway to teaching — and an affordable staffing solution for school districts.

But the type of tutoring districts are investing in matters too. A Harvard study on nearly 200 experiments in education improvement found that high-dosage math tutoring was 20 times more effective than low-dosage math tutoring. For reading, high-dosage tutoring was 15 times more effective than low-dosage tutoring. As for when tutoring is implemented, sessions that take place during the day have been found to be more impactful than after-school tutoring, with nearly double the effect size.

Substantial federal investment in tutoring has happened before. The Supplemental Educational Services component of No Child Left Behind invested heavily in tutoring for students but resulted in little to no benefits for students. One possible explanation is the use of unevaluated programs that had little to no evidence documenting their success in improving achievement. This is why rigorous evaluation is so important — school administrators should invest time and money in programs with a history of success.

The reality is we won’t be able to make up for a whole year in one summer. Tutoring must be part of a long-term effort to get all children on grade level in reading and math. Beyond addressing COVID’s effects on learning, tutoring provides an opportunity to fix long-standing inequities in education that existed long before the pandemic. It’s a chance for children to feel supported and encouraged after a long, difficult year of uncertainty and learning challenges. Students deserve solutions proven to work. They deserve long-term investment. Let’s start now.

Amanda Neitzel is an assistant research scientist at the Center for Research and Reform in Education at Johns Hopkins University and the spokesperson for ProvenTutoring, a coalition of organizations that provide highly effective tutoring programs to support students across the U.S. Before pursuing her Ph.D., she was a public school teacher.

The Brood X cicadas that have swarmed parts of the United States in recent weeks emerge every 17 years, which scientists believe could be a survival tactic that helps them avoid matching their predators’ life cycles.

For science teachers around the country who live and work in the regions where the periodical cicadas have come out this year, the timing is perfect: After a year of virtual lessons, flagging student engagement and ongoing stress, a real-life science lesson has crawled out of the ground — and started singing.

For Nancy Murtaugh, a fourth-grade math and science teacher at Fairfield North Elementary in Ohio, the cicada unit was a “golden moment” at the end of a long school year.

“Everything just came together and I felt like, this is our class, we’re back,” she said.

“They were engaged in learning, they were 100 percent in. And that’s when you make the brain connections,” Murtaugh said. “If you’re not actively involved in something, and you don’t care about it, you’re not going to make those brain connections, it’s not going to stay in your long-term memory. They’re going to remember this stuff forever.”

Murtaugh’s lessons on the cicadas incorporated far more than science, touching on math (Roman numerals and prime numbers), art (origami cicadas), English (writing letters to the first-graders about about what they’d learned) and geography (mapping where the different cicada broods emerge).

When they first started to see the bugs, Murtaugh’s students weren’t sure they wanted to get too close, so she tried to “ham them up,” she said. “I just kept saying, ‘Oh, they’re so silly looking. There’s nothing to be afraid of.’” While the kids came around on the cicadas and started to treat them like pets, many adults consider them pests who make too much noise and threaten their trees and gardens. (Only very young trees are at risk of being damaged by cicadas, who lay eggs in tree branches, experts say.)

For Jenn Carroll, teaching her Fairfield, Ohio, high school students about the cicadas, which appear in parts of 15 states, is personal. As a college student, she helped Gene Kritsky, a leading expert on periodical cicadas at Mount St. Joseph University in Cincinnati, with his research. At the time, he was studying what soil temperature is needed for the cicadas to come out. (They emerge when the top layer of soil reaches about 64 degrees.)

Carroll, who teaches environmental science, doesn’t mind that her students think of her as “that crazy cicada teacher,” she said. In addition to the science lessons about the insect life cycle and survival strategy, Carroll said the cicadas can teach students about the passage of time, causing them to consider where they’ll be in 17 years, and how the natural world continued to turn even as many humans spent the last year in lockdown fearing a virus.

“They’re still going to do this every 17 years, no matter what is going on in the world,” she said.

A good source of protein

A group of students in Princeton, New Jersey, have taken hands-on learning to the next level. Princeton High School’s insect-eating club has hosted cicada tastings to introduce their community to the periodical snack. Students stir fried and deep fried cicadas and mixed them into cookies, brownies and banana bread.

“We just want to spread the awareness that these are positive beneficial creatures. And instead of killing them, we should learn to like to, you know, either use them or protect them,” student Mulin Huan said.

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A post shared by PHS Insect Eating Club (@phs_insect_club)

Matthew Livingston, founder of the insect-eating club, said he hopes introducing neighbors to cicada snacks will inspire them to eat other insects, which are a more environmentally sustainable source of protein than red meat, he said. Livingston has also shared information about the bugs with younger students in the area.

“Both classes completely blew my mind about how open minded they were,” he said. “I know that when I was in fifth grade, I absolutely didn’t want to eat insects.”

Students show some of the foods they made using cicadas in Princeton, New Jersey.

In addition to being a sustainable snack for high schoolers, the swarm “helps move nutrients around the ecosystem, aerate the soil, and relieve predatory pressure on non-cicada insect populations,” expert Elizabeth Barnes told National Geographic.

Raising ‘environmental stewards’

Andrea Auerbach, an environmental educator at Belvedere Elementary School in Fairfax County, Virginia, said students have been more engaged in the cicada lessons than anything she’s ever taught. Learning about the insects has inspired a sense of wonder in the kids, she said, and they’re willing to pick up cicadas without fear now.

Students have also been asking her questions about the impact humans can have on cicadas, such as what happens when they build a house in a place where cicadas are burrowing underground.

“If we can connect students with nature, we’d be able to have a generation of environmental stewards,” she said.

The cicadas have even boosted student engagement for those learning virtually. Matt Mueller, a third-grade science and math teacher in Baltimore, has been teaching about the insects twice a day — in the morning to students who come in person and after lunch to students who are learning on Zoom.

On a recent afternoon, he logged into Zoom and then took his phone outside to show his students the cicadas climbing the trees outside the school. He picked up a few and showed the class how to tell if the cicadas were male or female: The males make the loud noise and have a rounded abdomen, while the females’ abdomens come to a point, which they use to pierce tree branches when laying their eggs.

The students learning online “come alive” during the cicada lessons, he said, and are more engaged than they are in his health and math classes. “You can see that they love it. They want to talk about it. The cameras come on, and we’re just going full [steam ahead] learning about the cicadas.”

A chance to be ‘citizen scientists’

The cicadas are also giving students a chance to engage with professional scientists and contribute to academic research.

In Carbon County, Pennsylvania, Anna Leigh Conway has found that “getting little girls really comfortable with big insects … is always really fun.”

A high school biology teacher at the Carbon Career and Technical Institute, Conway is on sabbatical this semester — she survived a bad case of COVID-19 right before giving birth earlier this year — but she isn’t letting that get in the way of educating kids in her community about the cicadas.

“I couldn’t let them miss this experience,” she said. In addition to providing lesson plans and materials to the substitute teacher in her classroom at the high school, she’s supporting a local environmental education center and her daughter’s Girl Scout Troop on cicada education.

Conway’s students and the Girl Scouts are also sending cicada shells and other specimens to DeAnna Beasley, an ecologist at the University of Tennessee Chattanooga who studies periodical cicadas.

The Girl Scouts also filled out envelopes with Beasley’s information so other visitors to the environmental center can send her anything they find — and so the girls can earn citizen scientist badges.

“It just turns into a real magical experience where there’s no fear left, when you feel comfortable with them.”