While Massachusetts remains top in the nation in education, the COVID generation of students still in school remain behind in math and reading skills.
Boston Globe education data reporter Christopher Huffaker recently surveyed dozens of school superintendents for his article “’The pandemic broke us’: Mass. Superintendents see long road to recovery for students.”
In his reporting, Huffaker used data from the Education Recovery Scorecard and from the Nation's Report Card.
NEPM's Jill Kaufman asked him about the obstacles mentioned by educators. Topping the list he said, increased student needs.
Christopher Huffaker: That can mean more students with disabilities and special needs; that can mean more English learners that need extra support.
To many of [the superintendents] it meant the behavioral socio-emotional needs. Teachers are spending much more time teaching basic social skills than they would have had to five years ago, because of the missed socialization time during school shutdowns.
And then there are always staffing and budget needs. The pandemic, again, seems to have made those things harder. Inflation made budgets very difficult to balance because Massachusetts municipalities can't raise funds much.
Many, many superintendents also talked about absenteeism, and that means a huge portion of kids, something like 1 in 5 kids are missing 10% of school. That's a day of school every two weeks. So addressing absenteeism is a precondition for anything else.
Jill Kaufman, NEPM: You broke the article into several categories in terms of what superintendents were concerned about and what those challenges were. The overall takeaway from these dozens of superintendents, on student achievement now five years post Covid?
Of course, student achievement is more complicated than just test scores. But to get a basic picture of the situation, I asked them, have your students already recovered to pre-pandemic levels in test scores, or if not, when do you expect them to do so? And I gave them a set of options. They could say next year, within five years or longer than that. Or they could say never and none of the superintendents said their students will never respond or will never recover.
But the bulk of the superintendents said it'll take more than another year.
But within five years, meaning relative to the pandemic, it'll be 6 to 10 years for full recovery.
To address the hurdles, to get students back to levels of learning, what did educators tell you they're trying to do?
A lot of the strategies that districts were eager to try, and maybe we're starting to have some impact, were things that are pretty expensive.
That might be tutoring, that might be vacation academies, that might be having reading or math interventionists in school. Also, teacher training, oriented interventions like coaches to help your teachers address these high needs better.
So all of these strategies are seriously jeopardized by these budgetary problems. The cost of transportation is going up. The cost of out-of-district placements for students with disabilities is going up, the cost of facilities maintenance is going up — and the revenue is not going up.
One superintendent said, we have the ingredients, we have the formula to recover, but we can't afford to do it.
That's a really amazing statement. 'We have the ingredients, we have the formula but we can't afford to do it.' Well, it's good to know.
Obviously, you know, it's complicated.
But the district in the state that spends the most money per student among large districts, Cambridge Public Schools, spends more than almost any district in size in the country $36,000 per student and they have seen academic recovery.
They're basically back to where they were.
Obviously, their superintendent, he spoke to me [for the article], he still thinks that there are problems. But that kind of money can make a difference.
I think what Cambridge shows potentially is what that superintendent said about the formula being there, but not the money.
I know you had at least one western Mass. district, in your article.
Let me talk a little bit maybe about North Adams Superintendent Barbara Malkas.
She said if you don't address social emotional health and well-being first, you don't get to close the academic gaps because the student who isn't happy at school will just avoid your efforts. They just won't come to school.
So she really views it that schools are still reeling because of that. The community maybe doesn't recognize how severe things are and how much effort is needed to address these things.
The other thing that really stands out about the rural districts is how acute their budgetary problems are. The big issue they have is that their enrollments are mostly on the decline, and so they are getting minimum state aid increases. They do not have commercial tax bases they can lean on instead.
So [rural superintendents] said things like, ‘we're going to have to be closing schools if we don't get more support from the state.’ And that makes every part of their jobs difficult.
I found it interesting, and also good in the way I think about things, that you ended this article on a very positive note.
The last subhead is ‘Hope for young people’ and [underneath] the Stoughton Mass. Superintendent said ‘Our kids are going to be okay. My students are smarter today than I was. Unfortunately, some of them have to grow up really quickly.’
I have spent a lot of time reporting on Covid recovery efforts and how largely unsuccessful they have been, and so it struck me that every superintendent said, ‘our kids are going to catch up.’ That ‘people are working hard. It's going to be okay.’
Maybe some of them, in their heart of hearts, do think their kids will never recover. But you know, are they going to admit that even to themselves necessarily? Maybe not [because] why do the job if you think that you can't make a difference?
