(Newswire.net — January 5, 2021) — In this article, Ben Corpus, a higher education executive with more than 24 years of proven enrollment management, strategic planning, diversity, and student affairs experience in several unique colleges and universities, discusses five ways to address the Covid-19 slide (learning loss patterns similar to those documented over summer vacations or extended closures).
Understanding the Impact
Last spring, the COVID-19 pandemic led to an unprecedented and dramatic shutdown of the educational landscape. Elementary, secondary, and post-secondary schools across the globe closed their doors and struggled to switch to distance learning on the fly.
This wasn’t a temporary closing from a weather disaster or a power outage; the pandemic shut us down completely. It ripped away the operational machinery necessary for teaching and learning and the cognitive engagement and cyclic flow of information and structured practice to develop conceptual alacrity at almost every grade level.
Students’ time on task fell into the abyss as remote life at home was replete with evil distractions; we all fight, no matter the age, like the kitchen. The children’s safety gate guarding my kitchen with Dante’s sign “Abandon all hope, ye who enter here” couldn’t help me.
And while we all joked about the weight we were putting on in our remote worlds, children across America suffered weight gain from lack of exercise to nutritional pandemonium. For example, children in Massachusetts added 9.8 pounds in the spring, 10.2 pounds in New Jersey, and 6 additional pounds on average in Maine.
While technology pulled us into online learning and out of the academic malaise, it was also a road to disruption. Instagram, Facebook, Snapchat, and YouTube often won the battle of our attention from active attention to academic or professional tasks. TikTok exploded in 2020 as downloads dwarfed Instagram and Facebook in the first quarter of 2020. Of course, the app’s eruption during 2020’s pandemic, social movements, and political insanity could not have been more fitting for a year we all want to see in the rearview mirror.
There were plenty of other tech distractions that yanked students’ educational focus, including Netflix/Hulu, Spotify, Twitch, and video games where multiplayer engagement burst past 130% increases in March of 2020 when online game sales surpassed $1.6 billion as the spring academic term was failing to get off the ground.
This was a worldwide phenomenon. A study in Germany found that regular, expected school activities were cut in half through the pandemic in the spring’s school-closure period, dropping from 7.4 to 3.6 hours a day. What were they doing all day?
The study found a significant increase in time spent on passive activity such as streaming, computer games, and mobile phones. Time spent on these activities was a whopping 5.2 hours per day during the pandemic. Do we really think it was any different in America during this period?
It was not, and the proof is in the outcomes.
The projections and results have been dramatic in the United States. In the fall of 2020, K-12 students returned with only 50% of the learning gains in Math relative to a typical school year on average. By the fall of 2021, students will have lost three months to a year of learning, depending on their remote instruction quality. One estimate surmised nationally that the average student lost 136 to 232 days of learning in math, depending on their state.
As we march into the spring of 2021, we cannot believe we are out of the woods. Parents, teachers, and administrators must organize innovative approaches to fill the learning gaps beyond what was an average school day.
So what can we do?
1. Collect the Facts
Each school, district, or university maintains standards for assessment that include metrics on learning. While access to academic success rates (i.e., grades, withdrawals, retention, and grade progress) may not be easily available, they are in existence. How have certain benchmarks compared from one year to the next, or from one term to the next? What are the rates of absenteeism for a county or district? How does that compare to previous years or similar counties in other states during the pandemic? There are many points of data, and many ways learning outcomes are assessed. Tapping into those data points may develop an understanding that will generate awareness, if not urgency.
2. Build a new network
Networks were decimated during the pandemic’s height; however, they are the fabric for well-designed academic progress for students. Developing cross-functional teams from people in different educational ecology corners will generate ideas and momentum.
3. Find a local corporate and political champion
One projection maintained that overall learning loss might lead to annual earnings deficits of $110 billion across today’s K-12 student cohort. Business and industry know their talent must continue to evolve if they are to be viable well into the future. Without a pipeline of talent, their earnings prospects dim. More so than corporations, policymakers obviously carry a social mission and commitment to the communities in which they serve or where they reside. Making a case for their participation to raise awareness to examine the problem’s depth can often lead to a conversation for partnership and sponsorship.
4. Engage teachers
Teachers are the champions and cornerstone of any supplemental movement to fill gaps. Not only are they trained, dedicated, and passionate about student learning, they are embedded in the developmental and socio-emotional aspects of student academic momentum. Their input, ideas, and insights will build upon alternative strategies that can identify the types of gaps in varying subjects but recognize how such efforts complement the work they are doing in the classroom for maximum returns.
5. Design a collaborative campaign
While developing additional learning initiatives around existing school days will take time and patience, not to mention the buy-in of crucial people mentioned earlier, it will need innovative new structures that re-think time, place, delivery, assessment, and the parameters that slow the involvement of capable partners. Should we re-consider the gateway of credentials and embrace assessment and effectiveness as a standard? Are weekends truly sacrosanct? Should we still be concluding school at 3 pm? An innovative approach can only succeed if the design accounts for true partners in collaboration. Diverse professionals that are inspired to help students reach learning goals that will place them at or beyond the level they would have been prior to the pandemic will carry this momentum.
We have all learned to re-build education to manage through the pandemic. But replacement efforts are not enough given the Covid slide. Teachers, parents, and school leaders must partner with non-profits and industry to deliberately create aggressive new learning initiatives on top of a regular school day. There are many of us who are concerned. Many of us believe we can achieve. We simply need to find each other and organize for success with what we have and where we are. Without our collective efforts, we will suffer greater losses well beyond a pandemic vaccine.
About Ben Corpus
Dr. Ben Corpus is currently Vice Provost for Enrollment Management at Florida Polytechnic University, a selective, public university in the state university system of Florida. He has served as Vice Provost for Enrollment Management at the University of Texas at Austin, Vice President for Enrollment Management & Student Affairs at Baruch College, Vice President for Enrollment and Student Affairs at Hostos Community College, and Chief of Staff to the President at Plattsburgh State University, in addition to administrative positions at NYU and the University at Albany.