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Dive Brief:
- The drop in academic achievement experienced by districts in wake of COVID-19 was part of a decline that began in 2013 — predating the pandemic and coinciding with a dismantling of test-based accountability and a rise in social media use, according to researchers at Harvard, Standard and Dartmouth universities.
- The phasing out of test-based accountability made the pre-pandemic losses harder to recognize, a report released this week found. Achievement gains made in high-poverty districts since the pandemic can be largely attributed to federal COVID-19 relief funds, without which the average such district would have remained at 2022 achievement levels.
- Middle-income districts have seen the least post-pandemic academic improvement on average since 2022 compared to higher- and lower-income school districts, where improvements are more drastic.
Dive Insight:
According to the report — published by the Center for Education Policy Research at Harvard University and The Educational Opportunity Project at Stanford University — improvements in achievement began in the 1990s and continued into the No Child Left Behind Act era under the George W. Bush administration. NCLB extended test-based accountability nationally when it was signed in 2002.
Test-based accountability is when schools and districts are held accountable for test score results. Those who oppose standardized testing say it leads teachers to “teach to the test,” limits curriculum, and doesn’t always accurately capture students’ skills.
Many instead prefer performance-based or interim assessments.
“It eats up classroom time, narrows curriculum and drives many students out of school,” FairTest said in a 2018 critique of standardized testing. “It perpetuates a false narrative of failure and puts schools in low-income communities at risk of closure or privatization.”
The organization ramped up calls to opt out of standardized testing during the pandemic.
Under the Obama administration, and beginning the 2012-13 school year, states began receiving accountability waivers, allowing them flexibility from NCLB accountability requirements in exchange for state adoption of approved reform plans.
Waivers were not official until 2012-13, but many states stopped identifying schools not making adequate yearly progress — as required under NCLB — by 2012, in anticipation of the waivers kicking in. Ultimately, 38 states received accountability waivers for the 2012-13 school year, with six more states receiving waivers in the following two years — or almost the entire nation.
“However, it is difficult to establish a direct connection between the decline in achievement and the de-emphasis of test-based accountability,” the report said. The decline in achievement after 2013 was similar in both states that did and didn’t have waivers from NCLB.
“While the waivers may have reduced pressure on schools to raise student achievement, accountability was also breaking down in the states where NCLB remained in place,” researchers said. “One reason for the breakdown was that under NCLB, schools were expected to have 100 percent of students proficient in math and reading by 2013-14. When nearly every school would be designated a failing school, failure had lost its stigma.”
This breakdown of accountability made pre-pandemic declines in achievement more difficult to decipher, the researchers found.
However, Harry Feder, executive director of FairTest, doesn’t attribute lower achievement to a breakdown in testing accountability.
“Lets be clear, test-based accountability still exists,” Feder said. “So to argue because it is because we took the foot off the gas, I don’t think is accurate.”
Rather, Feder points to a rise in technology in the classroom and elsewhere.
“The true temporal correlation is the iPhone. And the tablets in the schools. And the young kids learning on Google Chromebooks,” Feder said. “We have to stop weighing the pig and start actually feeding the pig,” he added about testing.
“The pandemic accelerated what had already become a deeply concerning trend,” said Dale Chu, assessment expert and an independent education policy consultant. “Much of this decline was foreseen and foreseeable.”
“The pandemic was the mudslide that followed seven years of erosion in student achievement,” said Professor Tom Kane, faculty director of the Center for Education Policy Research and a lead author of the report, in a May 13 statement. “The ‘learning recession’ started a decade ago.”
Because of that, a return to pre-pandemic — or 2019 — levels of achievement shouldn’t be the goal, Kane and his colleagues said.
Instead, they recommend that state education leaders:
- Consider schools’ achievement losses since 2019 when identifying schools for comprehensive support and improvement.
- Continue prioritizing lowering student absences.
- Pair improving districts to compare what’s working.
“The last few decades have shown that academic outcomes do respond to sustained focus and pressure,” Chu said. “But when that focus dissipates — whether because of political fatigue, shifting priorities, or skepticism toward accountability itself — gains can erode more quickly than many people realize.
