{"id":697654,"date":"2022-10-06T10:01:00","date_gmt":"2022-10-06T14:01:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.the74million.org\/?post_type=article&p=697654"},"modified":"2022-10-07T15:10:33","modified_gmt":"2022-10-07T19:10:33","slug":"pandemic-widened-ohio-achievement-gaps-leaving-vulnerable-students-further-behind","status":"publish","type":"article","link":"https:\/\/www.the74million.org\/article\/pandemic-widened-ohio-achievement-gaps-leaving-vulnerable-students-further-behind\/","title":{"rendered":"Pandemic Widened Ohio Achievement Gaps, Leaving ‘Vulnerable’ Students Further Behind"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

White, affluent and suburban students escaped serious learning damage from the pandemic, but low income, Black, Hispanic and special education students fell even further behind, new Ohio test scores show.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Though test scores in 2022 improved statewide compared to those from a chaotic 2020-21 year of shuttered schools, online classes and scarce vaccines, those historically struggling groups had taken too much of a hit to catch up.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Test scores fell twice as much since 2019 for \u201cvulnerable\u201d students than their white peers, one analysis shows. That meant urban, high poverty schools districts had four times the score decline as affluent suburban ones.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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\u201cWe saw improvement across the board. That\u2019s the good news,\u201d said Chris Woolard, Chief Program Director of the Ohio Department of Education, adding a \u201csobering\u201d caution: \u201cThe vulnerable students are the most impacted. We had achievement gaps before the pandemic. The achievement gaps are worse.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Ohio\u2019s annual report cards for schools and districts released last month mirror many of the findings of the National Assessment of Education Progress (NAEP) this month that student reading skills had their biggest drop in 30 years<\/a> and that math scores, after years of incremental increases, fell for the first time.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Scores from Ohio, with the sixth-most students of any state, offer more detail than NAEP and other large states are currently providing. The NAEP data released so far only covers nine-year-old students. NAEP scores for individual states and cities won\u2019t be out until late October. And while large states like California<\/a> and New York<\/a> are allowing individual districts to release scores if they want, they are not releasing statewide data to offer any comparisons.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In Ohio, gaps were also apparent between younger students and those in high school; and between math scores and English scores. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The greatest recovery came in English in early grades, while math scores lagged and some high school students made little recovery, or even regressed, an analysis by Ohio State University Vladimir Kogan found.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The net effect, Kogan said, is that students remain a third of a year to a half year behind in English, but full recovery could come soon.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cIf the pace of recovery observed between the 2021 and 2022 school years can be sustained, ELA achievement could return to pre-pandemic levels within the next two to three years in most grades,\u201d he wrote in his analysis. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

But the drop in math is between a half year and a year\u2019s worth of learning, which will take longer to recover.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cThe students learned more (in English) last year than students prior to the pandemic, particularly in the younger grades, but we don’t see really any acceleration in math in any of the grades,\u201d Kogan said. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Michael Casserly, former executive director of the Council of the Great City Schools, a national association of big city districts, called the results out of Ohio and other states \u201cactually pretty encouraging.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cIt’s just preliminary, but it looks like a combination of just getting kids back in the classroom, the summer school, the emphasis on staying on grade level in the regular classroom instruction is starting to move the needle,\u201d Casserly said. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The good news:<\/p>\n\n\n\n