Test Results After School Shutdowns Show Kids Remain Stable in Reading, Dropping off in Math

We are getting some information on how children have been faring during the pandemic amid shutdowns and remote learning. It seems that kids have been doing well and consistent when it comes to reading, but have been slowing down when it comes to math. Researchers say that parents are more comfortable helping kids with reading than math assignments. Leslie Brody, education reporter at the WSJ, joins us for how math progress has slowed.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
It's Tuesday, December two. I'm oscar A Mirrors from the
Daily Dive podcast in Los Angeles, and this is Reopening America.
We are getting some information on how children have been
faring during the pandemic amid shutdowns and remote learning. It
seems that kids have been doing well and consistent when
it comes to reading, but have been slowing down when
it comes to math. Researchers say their parents are more

(00:22):
comfortable helping kids with reading than with math assignments. Leslie Brodie,
education reporter at The Wall Street Journal, joins us for
how math progress has slowed. Thanks for joining us, Leslie,
Thanks for having me. We're starting to see how the
school shutdowns have weighed in on test results for our children.

(00:42):
There's some widely used assessment tests that showed that reading
achievement among kids has kind of stayed about the same,
but math progress has not been doing so well for
a lot of kids. So Leslie tell us a little
bit about what these assessment tests do and what they're saying.
They're called math assessments. They maybe very familiar to lots
of parents are giving in in thousands of schools across

(01:04):
the country, and they're usually given about three times a year.
So when the researchers looked at how kids fared from
last winter to this fall compared to kids in the
same grades in prior years, their achievement had slowed down
a bit in math, not all that much, but enough

(01:25):
to raise some concerns. Their reading was about the same,
and the researchers say that's likely because parents are much
more comfortable leading to their kids at night, doing word games,
helping them sound out words. A lot of parents are
not as comfortable with math problems or math games, especially
since the way that math is being taught now is
different from the way a lot of parents learn't. That's

(01:47):
exactly what I was going to say right now, you know,
I know the common core math way of teaching through
a lot of parents for a loop, and you know,
some of them were giving up at that point, saying
I don't even understand how this is done. So for
a lot of parents, obviously it's kind of this new
learning curve, having to relearn the math and then be
able to help their kids. I can see how it
poses a lot of difficulties there, but overall it's not

(02:10):
terrible news and kind of have to hand it off
to the teachers a little bit, you know, for doing
a great job. As in your article you quoted something
saying they did a good job of not getting us
to the worst case scenario. At least true, and so
did a lot of parents who were working very hard
at home when their kids schools shut down, and caregivers
and grandparents they're doing a lot of help with their
kids with remote learning. One issue with this study though,

(02:33):
is first, this is only about a very short term impact.
We don't know what the long term impacts are going
to be. But also the authors of the study note
that these results might be a little rosier than the
actual case for several reasons. One is they could only
look at schools that had given these tests both last

(02:54):
year and this year, and that pool of schools is
slightly more ut fluent and less urban than the national group. Further,
when they looked at the kids who took the test
last year and then this year, there were many kids
who were missing a high attrition rate, and many of

(03:16):
the kids who are missing are low income and from
disproportunately black and Hispanic and low achieving, So it may
be that many of the missing students are not really
engaged in school right now. Maybe they have issues getting
the technology so that if they were still remote, they

(03:36):
couldn't take the test. We don't really know what's going
on with the missing students, but that's another reason why
the set of data may be a bit rosier than
the true picture. Do they make any recommendations on what
could possibly bring those scores up? But you know, obviously
a lot of it does depend on the teachers and
the parents spending time with kids. But do they make
any type of recommendations or do they throw it all

(03:58):
on this kind of back and forth of remote learning
in person learning. Do you know, do they make any
recommendations on any of those fronts? This The report was
done by researchers, and I think it's their job to
figure out what's going on, but it's the teachers and
educator's job to figure out how to fix it. So
I talked to a superintendent of a school district in
North Carolina. She was talking about some things that she

(04:21):
was trying to do, like get local organizations to do
more tutoring partnerships, consider a longer school year, consider a
longer school day when school gets more back to normal.
She's just trying to communicate better with parents about how
they can help at home. I talked also to the
National Council Teachers of Mathematics and they're trying to do
a lot with their members to have more free resources

(04:42):
online to help teachers get more materials and have like
free professional development online to help teachers learn how to
pivot better to online instruction for those in places where
schools are still shut down, which is in many places.
And that group is also talking about how parents need
to communicate with teachers and vice versa. If either sees

(05:03):
a child struggling, they have to work together to help
a child get extra services if that's possible. The kids
shouldn't be just sort of struggling endlessly on their own.
The pandemic has put a lot of stressors on everybody, really,
but when it comes to education, everybody needs to step
it up just to make sure that the kids don't
fall back in any case, and I know that it's

(05:24):
difficult to cross the board, but these are the things.
And luckily, as you mentioned, this report could be a
rosier picture than what it actually is, but at least
it's not showing like huge, huge drop offs. In the meantime,
so we'll definitely have to keep monitoring all of this.
Leslie Brody, education reporter at the Wall Street Journal, thank
you very much for joining us, Thanks for having me
take care. I'm oscar Roo Mirrors and this has been

(05:48):
reopening America. Don't forget that. For today's big news stories,
you can check me out in the Daily Dive podcast
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Radio or wherever you get your podcast. Fact