The pandemic was a hardship, a tragedy, and may prove to be an opportunity. Our young people have lost so much—family members, connections to friends and teachers, emotional well-being, and for many, financial stability at home. And of course, they’ve lost some of their academic progress.
Maybe it’s time to consider that the emerging science of learning and our national reckoning this past year with unfairness and inequity are pointing in the same direction. Perhaps the size of the moment requires a commensurate response. We have a better sense of the tools we need to do the job, and a clearer sense of the size and nature of the problems.
It’s perfectly sensible to worry about the obvious academic setbacks during the pandemic. Ever since the first stay-at-home orders were issued, some students have been pressed into caretaking duties or forced to get jobs. The crisis first exposed, and then cruelly amplified, the inequities bound up in issues of poverty, race, disability, and isolation. Months into the pandemic, attendance and attentiveness remained a severe challenge. There’s a broad and growing consensus that online learning, in both its hybrid and purely remote forms, has been an anemic substitute for in-person instruction.
But our need to measure academic progress and loss (and Carver takes proficiency and growth measurement to the highest levels) is not as vital as the reckoning of the social, emotional, and psychological toll of the last 12 months.
We do not see Carver kids as having to come in and get tested and triaged and sent to different areas to get fixed. Our children are resilient, not broken. As long as our students feel like their job is to come to school to be fixed, their hearts won’t be in their own work. We need to avoid anchoring kids to the self-fulfilling prophecy of lower expectations. Carver connects kids to their passions and makes learning fun and hopeful.
Over a half-million Americans have died. Some kids will see their friends or favorite teachers in person for the first time in over a year. Others will be overwhelmed by the sheer joy of recess, band practice, sporting events, and the myriad academic and social passions they’ve missed. Teachers, too are desperate to see their kids, to connect, teach, elevate and love.
The consequences of getting our priorities wrong and putting the content before the child are serious and long-term. If a kid was sick at home and missed three months of math content, but got her confidence back, it wouldn’t be a big issue in her life. But if her confidence as a mathematician is destroyed because of labels that were put on her, it’s a lifelong issue for her. She’ll never be confident in math again. The pandemic happened, but our kids are just as capable and resilient as before.
Whatever we do when we return will be historic by definition. But if all we come up with is passing out diagnostic tests to quantify learning loss and then track kids into groups for remediation, it will be a terrible failure of imagination.
Trailing down the backside of a steep mountain at long last, and picking up speed as we head into a promising new year, we will use the data wisely, not to judge and rank students. We will guide our response to individual student needs—and spend our time and resources on creating an asset-based culture where everyone belongs.
As always, Carver will be focusing on the social and emotional needs of the child first—on their sense of safety, self-worth, and academic confidence.
It’s not that learning loss isn’t real, or that social and emotional initiatives alone will solve it. We face a hard reality now. Many children lost a great deal of academic growth last year. We need to know which students need extra support, including tutoring. But we also need to assess students’ abilities in a way that motivates them to grow.
To motivate students we have to address learning gaps—they need to learn math facts and build literacy skills—but do so in service to challenging work that shows them that schools, like the athletic field or their after-school lives, are a domain where they can contribute something great and achieve whatever dreams for the future that they embrace.