Interesting analysis of states with largest decline in pandemic performance of students. What happened in Delaware??
It will be interesting to see the responses here 
. Personally, I am awaiting some additional data from my own state to see how different areas fared in the past year (as the results through spring of 2021 were known, but this past year’s results still haven’t been fully released).
To prevent the thread from being entirely doom and gloom, some states had some good news or, at least, better news than everywhere else.
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4th Grade Math: Alabama’s scores increased 0.39, and Illinois came in second best, with a decline of “only” -0.32.
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4th Grade Reading: Louisiana’s scores increased 2.47, Alabama increased by 1.57, South Carolina increased by 0.41, and Florida by 0.03. Arizona and Illinois “only” went down by -0.36 and -0.39, respectively.
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8th Grade Math: Utah “only” went down by -2.72. That, sadly, is the best news from that grade/subject combo.
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8th Grade Reading: Nevada increased by 0.81. The states with lesser amounts of declines were: California (-0.04) and New York (-0.09).
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Interesting to me here that it wasn’t “just” blue states or states that took precaution - but also states like Florida, who and I was going for work - they were in many ways not acknowledging covid existed, were hit hard.
As one of my clients said when I was offered a cup of water, maybe we can put it in a sippy cup for him…they were teasing that I was wearing a mask (this was in Ft. Myers). Nowhere I went - hotels, restaurants - masks were few the tnrei time, maybe after the initial covid months.
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I was struck by this, as well. Our district in Tennessee had in person options for the 2020/21 school year and the 2021/22 school year ran completely as normal with no distance learning options and no mask requirements. However, at one point during the 2021-22 school year, Tennessee had the largest number of cases per capita and learning just was not happening between so many teachers and students being out sick with no subs available. One high school in our district had students packed together in a gym for a full month with no one teaching them because they couldn’t find subs and most of their teachers were quarantined. There were weeks when the number of teachers and students absent were jaw-dropping. So, even though they tried to get back to “normal” learning still greatly suffered.
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Yes, remote learning was not the only way covid was a barrier to learning. Being sick with covid, or having your teacher be sick with covid, was also a barrier to learning.
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Were a lot more people sick in Delaware and Virginia, for example, than elsewhere? It seems unlikely.
I wonder if the income levels of families impacted educational supports, such as whether or not the stimulus and increased unemployment benefits were such that families earned more as unemployed people than employed people. By that I mean, perhaps those families were then able to spend more time with their kids who were getting sub-optimal learning (whether remote learning or minimal learning due to quarantines and lack of available teachers/subs), and thus their kids did not have as big of a drop educationally as parents who were trying to work full-time while still supporting their kids. I’d be interested to see an overlay of states with large numbers of lower-income families and how the states’ unemployment benefits correspond to the map of declining student performance.
I do know that had I lost my job during Covid, that I would have had extra bandwidth for improving my kid’s educational outcomes, rather than trying to juggle working full-time with supporting the remote learning experience. I suspect that people who lost their jobs, and who had kids, may have had this unexpected benefit of less educational loss since there was less financial stress due to the improved unemployment benefits. Higher-income families for whom living off of unemployment benefits that were significantly lower than their regular incomes may have had more stress and not benefitted as much from the situation. Of course, this is just a theory.
Ok, working to find some data to back up (or reject) my theory about pandemic unemployment assistance and the effect on educational outcomes. I know that the data has shown that students from lower-income families have been hit the hardest academically by the pandemic, but I wonder if it has to do with the fact that many lower income individuals were deemed essential workers and were not able to use unemployment benefits that could have improved their economic situation and were living in the more densely populated areas, which generally relates to more expensive areas.
I guess, I’m wondering whether people in states with low median incomes who received unemployment benefits better than their incomes and lived in areas with a lower cost of living (i.e., not most metropolitan areas) were able to see improved educational outcomes.
This map from Zippia (source) shows what income was needed to be earned in each state in order to be greater than the unemployment benefits.
This map shows the median household income from 2017 by state (source). Note that this is households, so if there is a dual-income family, their median salaries may only be HALF of the household income.
[Source: U.S. Census Bureau]
By each state listed, I will indicate the income threshold for being better off on unemployment, as computed by the Zippia report.
States with median HOUSEHOLD incomes below $45k:
- Mississippi: $43k
- West Virginia: $53k
States with median HOUSEHOLD income between $45,000-$49,999
- New Mexico: $58k
- Arkansas: $55k
- Louisiana: $44k
- Alabama: $46k
- Kentucky: $60k
States with median HOUSEHOLD income between $50,000-$59,999: at least a plurality, nearly half of states.
States with median HOUSEHOLD income above $60k:
- Alaska: $50k
- Washington: $72k
- Oregon: $65k
- California: $55k
- Utah: $61k
- Wyoming: $58k
- Colorado: $63k
- North Dakota: $63k
- Minnesota: $64k
- Illinois: $56k
- Virginia: $51k
- Maryland: $54k
- Washington, D.C.: I can’t tell
- Delaware: $52k
- New Jersey: $68k
- New York: $57k
- Connecticut: $65k
- Rhode Island: $62k
- Massachusetts: $74k
- New Hampshire: $53k
- Hawaii: $65k
But, states aren’t big monoliths and there are definite divides within each state in terms of income. This Census map indicates the median household income level by county between 2013-2017, which was the most recent set of years for which I found this data (and the data is unlikely to have changed significantly in a 5 year period).
[Source: U.S. Census Bureau]
People can look at their own states to see the income levels of see if there is a similar trend with respect to academic impacts (whether positive or negative). I’d love any feedback if you see this theory holding water or falling flat for your own respective state.
Also, I think some of these census maps are very helpful for perspective on what incomes are like in the U.S. and, perhaps, why certain segments of our country feel the way they do.
Anyway, looking at these maps, places like Virginia and Delaware have high median incomes, much higher than the unemployment benefits. So there may have been a greater percentage of people trying to do the pandemic-juggle (i.e. full-time employment while supporting their kids’ suboptimal educational situations) which then led to greater academic declines.
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An intriguing result I heard was that the Department of Defense schools did not show any loss of learning despite being remote for just as long as many states were. My hypothesis is that it has to do with stability. To be a student at a military base school means you have at least 1 parent with a stable job, and also have stable housing, food, healthcare and internet. Even if your parent moves to a new post, your situation as a child is still more stable than that of a typical child who moves, because schools in the Department of Defense are extremely standardized (compared to regular public schools where, for example, “8th grade math” might be pre-algebra in some districts but might be geometry in some other district.)
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Yeah - we live in Williamson - it was handled poorly.
In some ways, in my opinion, the government screwed up by forcing kids into school - because it led to this.
Everyone wants to take credit for pushing kids back - but what’s the point if you have no one to teach them?
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Sounds like we should all take lessons from the DoD schools.
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Yes, I imagine that guaranteed healthcare, housing, food, and internet along with a standardized curriculum across districts (as well as standardized funding across districts) would result in greatly improved educational outcomes in the US. I don’t see our country having the political will for this, though.
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I haven’t looked at the data very closely but I have an interesting anecdote for you. Our school district’s reading/language arts scores went up a little bit during the pandemic. Pretty affluent community and many parents quit their jobs during the upside-down schooling of Covid times to help their younger kids (elementary grades) keep up with their learning. Our schools were completely remote for approximately two semesters and had a third semester of reduced/staggered schedule that was a mess. I was talking to a neighbor that has three elementary school kids (and a high schooler). One of her children was just starting elementary school when the pandemic hit and she was in our district’s Spanish immersion program. After about a month she switched her daughter to the English only program because she could not support her kid in the specific program. The program has a 50-50 mix of native Spanish speakers and English speakers and starts out 100% in Spanish and evolves to 50-50 Spanish-English by 5th grade. This is obviously a unique situation but it illustrates the fact that some parents became teachers during the pandemic. Most parents have a facility for reading that they don’t have for math (our math scores declined a little). There were families that could not support their youngest learners due to work, non-fluent in English etc. and I’m sure these kids saw the steepest declines in their learning. It takes a village to educate our children and during Covid the village became too remote.
A side note: I remember seeing that Louisiana’s reading scores improved recently. I think that has a lot to do with the methodology they use to teach reading, phonics based rather than whole language, and a friend who is a researcher in learning differences (dyslexia in particular) is studying what Louisiana did.
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Would fonix versus hole language ideology really matter in terms of COVID-19-related disruptions? Also, Louisiana was historically below average in NAEP reading scores to begin with, according to NAEP Reading: State Average Scores .
Would fonix versus hole language ideology really matter in terms of COVID-19-related disruptions?
It might if it was easier for parents to help teach. Sounding things out might be easier than some other curriculum that non-teachers can’t do as easily.
One thing to consider is the number of immigrant families where English is not their primary language. It’s hard to help with your kids’ education when you were educated in another system, or perhaps not at all. For example MN has always had a huge gulf between white and POC test scores, but with our low overall POC population combined with a large number of Somali immigrants there were a disproportionate number of ESL kids that had the extra burden of picking up English while covering the usual material. (It’s not a full explanation, of course, because MN still has a large deficit in non-immigrant POC test achievement to work on, but most answers aren’t simple and this could be a part of the entire picture.)
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