Rising to the Challenge

Music is pumping in the Hines Middle School gym as Tyrell Shelton’s drone rises and drops, then flips in the air. The rising ninth grader breaks out a big smile when fellow Camp EAGER participants cheer as the diminutive aircraft lands in time with the beat. Even though it’s summertime, he’s happy to be at school learning about aerodynamics. He’s thinking about a future as an engineer or video game programmer.

Learning looked a lot different three years ago for Tyrell and students across the country who were attending school virtually because of the COVID-19 pandemic. The loss of in-person instruction during that time wreaked havoc on public education, co-authors from the William & Mary School of Education wrote in a 2023 article for the Middle School Journal about Camp EAGER.

“Nearly 40% of the nation’s students were unable to experience face-to-face learning for over a year,” wrote professors Lindy Johnson, Meredith Weaver Kier and Janise Parker and doctoral candidate Evan Gallagher. Through their research and observations, they concluded that the closing of schools resulted in “a decline in students’ mental health, academic learning loss and missed milestones that were essential to students’ social-emotional development.”

Alarm bells sounded last spring amid reports that National Assessment of Educational Progress long-term trend scores for 13-year-olds in reading and math had fallen to the lowest levels in decades. U.S. Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona issued a statement in June saying the decline in NAEP scores aligned with expectations that “the pandemic would have a devastating impact on students’ learning across the country and that it would take years of effort and investment to reverse the damage.”

As school officials, teachers and parents look for ways to help students make up lost ground, William & Mary experts and alumni educators say initiatives such as Camp EAGER that emphasize applied learning are part of the solution, along with efforts to recruit and retain teachers, building community partnerships, addressing social and emotional needs, increasing family engagement and providing more individual attention to ensure students are on track.

CRISIS CONDITIONS

Camp EAGER — the acronym stands for Elevate engineering, Advance innovation, Guide learning, Effect change, and Remove barriers for all — started in 2021 as an initiative by Johnson, Kier and Parker to reimagine summer school not primarily as a vehicle for remediation, but as a creative, interdisciplinary and hands-on enrichment experience that encourages students’ interaction with peers, mentors and teachers. Johnson says the partnership with the Newport News, Virginia, school system grew out of a National Science Foundation grant to pair undergraduate mentors of color with STEM teachers.

“One of the things we found while working in schools was that coming out of pandemic and lockdown, kids were isolated,” says Johnson, associate professor and chair of the School of Education’s Curriculum & Instruction program. “They were anxious and depressed. And so we wanted to create this joyful learning experience. That was the impetus of it — let’s bring kids together and do something special for them after COVID.”

When students finally returned to school after the pandemic, it became clear that many were not performing at grade level.

An analysis of data from 8,000 communities conducted by The Education Recovery Scorecard, a collaboration of researchers from Harvard and Stanford universities, found that the average public school student in grades 3-8 nationally lost the equivalent of a half year of learning in math and a quarter of a year in reading.

“It’s kind of remarkable,” says John Barclay ’13, M.A.Ed. ’14, a teacher at Franklin Military Academy in Richmond, Virginia, who is the 2023 Virginia Math Educator of the Year for middle school math. Franklin, he notes, is a Title I school, meaning it receives federal funds supporting low-income students. “We typically have students who are one to three years behind in math, but now the depth of it is much more intense, much more palpable.” (Read more about Barclay and additional alumni teacher perspectives in our online exclusive "Views From the Classroom.")

Researchers found that losses were larger in school districts such as Richmond with higher rates of poverty and underrepresented populations and in districts that remained remote or hybrid for longer periods. In some of the most affected communities, students fell behind in math by more than a year and a half, the researchers found. Statewide, students in Virginia lost the equivalent of eight months in math learning between 2019 and 2022 and over five months in reading.

In addition to the lower test scores, Patrick Rooney ’98 is concerned about teacher shortages and a continued drop in student attendance.

“You need a teacher in the classroom, and you need the kids there to be learning with them and learning from one another,” says Rooney, who oversees federal programs at the U.S. Department of Education, including Title I, that provide funding to schools across the country based on a formula that uses census poverty data.

Compared with pre-pandemic figures, the percentage of chronically absent public school students almost doubled, from 14.8% in 2018-2019 to 28.3% in 2020-2021, according to a Stanford University analysis.

The number of teachers leaving their jobs peaked nationally in 2020, but has been rising again and fewer are entering the profession. Last fall, researchers at Brown University and the University of Albany published a report showing that interest in the teaching profession among high school seniors and college freshmen has dropped 50% since the 1990s and the number of newly licensed teachers decreased from 320,000 in 2006 to 215,000 in 2020.

While the American Rescue Plan provided billions of additional federal funds to help schools recover from the pandemic, that money will run out next September. That means programs started with relief funds — such as training for school staff or addressing students’ mental health issues — will have to find support elsewhere if they are to continue, Rooney says. “One of the things people around the country are worried about is what happens when that big pot of money disappears?”

Assisting students with diverse language backgrounds has been especially challenging, says Leticia Braga ’01. A native of Brazil who moved to the United States as a young child, she brings her own experience as an immigrant to her work in education policy at the U.S. Department of Education. There, she leads a team for a program that provides funds to serve students who are English learners or immigrants.

Some school districts that are home to large populations of such students have used American Rescue Plan funds to provide extra after-school instruction to help students catch up, Braga says. “The hope is that if states find these to be promising practices, they could think about the longstanding streams of funding, as well as their own state and local funds, for how to best implement those types of solutions to support their students.”

COMMUNITY PARTNERSHIPS

Andrew D. Martin ’94, chancellor of Washington University in St. Louis, is also seeing the effects of the pandemic in higher education.

“Our students are arriving on campus not as prepared as they were,” says Martin, who is also a professor of political science, law, statistics and data science. “Students are not as comfortable and not as experienced interacting with each other in interpersonal settings. We have to be more intentional in helping students build those skills, which they didn’t have an opportunity to build during high school.”

In response, Washington University introduced an eight-week course called Dialogue Across Difference, which trains students to talk to their peers about controversial issues such as religion, politics and identity. William & Mary began a similar program for incoming students in the fall of 2022, in partnership with the Constructive Dialogue Institute, as part of the Vision 2026 strategic plan’s democracy initiative.

Although WashU does not have an education school, it plays an important part in the K-12 infrastructure in the St. Louis region, including Missouri and Southern Illinois, Martin says. Through its Institute for School Partnership, the university has worked with all of the region’s school districts and 60 independent schools to help build curriculum and to provide professional development for teachers, especially in math and science.

St. Louis schools experienced some of the greatest learning losses during the pandemic, according to the Education Recovery Scorecard. Still, there are signs of hope. At two of the city’s lowest performing elementary schools, math scores more than doubled and science scores increased five-fold in a state assessment, compared to three years ago.

“Every one of the kids growing up in this region, and for that matter around the country, is entitled to have the very best education,” Martin says.