South Bend Tribune
In a pandemic year marked by shuttered schools, technology barriers and staggered reopenings, failing grades and student absences have grown across Michiana.
Course failures have more than doubled in the South Bend Community School Corp. this year and chronic absenteeism has “skyrocketed,” one administrator said.
With in-person instruction increasing this month and the state’s spring testing window around the corner, educators are using what they’ve learned over the last year to better understand learning loss and prepare for an eventual return to a more normal school year next fall.
Still, challenges remain, such as shortages of teachers and reliable data.
More than 35% of grades assigned to South Bend students this school year were Fs or Ns — a grade assignment created during the pandemic to show a student’s failure to master course requirements without penalizing their overall GPA. Last year, fewer than 15% of grades assigned in South Bend schools were Fs.
In Penn-Harris-Madison, failing grades have increased among high school students from less than 4% of grades assigned in the second half of the 2018-19 school year to nearly 8% in the fall 2020 semester.
And, in School City of Mishawaka, which declined to provide letter grades, only 18% of students in grades K-8 entered the school year on pace with their grade level in mathematics. About 46% of students in grades 3-6 entered the year on grade level for English and language arts studies.
Administrators across the three districts say they adopted early remediation efforts and saw significant signs of improvement over the fall semester as students eased back into in-person instruction through hybrid learning.
Unlike last school year, however, statewide testing has not been waived and, administrators say, chipping away at the long-term effects of pandemic-related learning loss will take time, especially among students who struggled to keep up with learning from home.
“The gap has gotten larger,” said Brandon White, chief academic officer for South Bend schools. “We still struggle with students regularly attending and e-learning, so that’s why it was vital for us to get back students face-to-face when we can do it safely.”
Gaps less than anticipated
Though course failures are up, educators say students entered this school year more on target academically than forecasts had predicted.
A report last April from the Northwest Evaluation Association, a nationally recognized education assessment organization, predicted students in grades 3 through 8 would see a 30% loss in reading and a 50% loss in math learning gains last summer.
Those losses wound up being closer to 10% to 15% in P-H-M and Mishawaka districts, school officials said.
Middle and high schoolers, who have spent more time learning remotely this school year, have “taken the brunt of the struggle,” said Sarah Hickle, Mishawaka’s assistant superintendent for curriculum and instruction.
And, transition grades, like the sixth and ninth grade, have been “consistent points of concern,” said Rafi Nolan-Abrahamian, South Bend’s assistant superintendent of accountability.
In Mishawaka, Hickle said, a little over 80% of high-schoolers are on track for graduation compared to the district’s average graduation rate of 91% to 93% over the last three years.
At Penn High School, failing grades more than doubled this year from 2018-19, the school year before the pandemic struck. In the spring 2019 semester, 1,050 total failing grades were given to students compared to 2,111 in fall 2020.
P-H-M middle-schoolers received fewer failing grades this spring compared to 2018-19. Teachers assigned 689 Fs in the third quarter of this school year compared to 967 in the fourth quarter of 2018-19, according to district data.
Gaining a true sense for where students are performing academically, however, has been difficult this school year.
With some grading practices changed in the pandemic and standardized testing suspended last year, educators haven’t been able to work with the same baseline data they are used to using to compare students’ performance over time.
Some course exams were taken from home or in a different testing environment, so reliability is a concern, and even attendance data can be deceiving with the potential for remote learners to log into class and disengage or walk away from their computer.
“We’re not necessarily sure what the learning loss is, but it’s more of a lack of exposure to instruction,” said David Marcotte, executive director of the Indiana Urban Schools Association. “When you don’t have teachers and students meeting daily in a space, it’s hard to see if the children are where they need to be.”
Educators say students who were chronically absent before the pandemic remain most at risk today, and getting technology into the hands of those who still lack access remains a priority.
But Michiana schools are at a turning point. South Bend, P-H-M and Mishawaka have all incrementally increased density over the last several weeks and plan for students of all grades to attend four or five days a week in person after spring break, with virtual options still available for students not yet ready to return in person.
“Hybrid made a huge difference, but the game changer was going four days a week,” said Amy Troyer, principal of Swanson Traditional School, a South Bend pilot school for increased in-person learning. “It allowed us to get the work done that we really needed to get done.”
Focus on recovery
Educators across Michiana say they didn’t wait for in-person returns to begin chipping away at learning gaps. Their work began when schools closed their doors last March and continued through virtual and hybrid transitions this school year.
At Swanson, Troyer said, everyone from paraprofessionals to art and P.E. teachers pitched in to help students with math and reading skills in virtual small groups.
Penn-Harris-Madison teachers launched virtual office hours, added tutoring opportunities and sought health department approval to invite struggling students back early for in-person learning.
Hickle, of Mishawaka, said teachers in her district found success prioritizing course content in a way that combined both review and the introduction of new concepts students need to stay on pace with the material they should be learning at this point in the school year.
By December, she said, the district saw a 25% growth in students learning at grade level.
“When we went into remote learning, we weren’t fully one-to-one and we had never had an e-learning day,” Hickle said. “I think about where we’re at now and how much we’ve grown, and it’s absolutely phenomenal.”
All three districts are now planning for extended summer school opportunities with an emphasis on credit recovery for high-schoolers. All expect to invite more students this year.
In Mishawaka, educators saw an eight-point growth in math and reading skills among those who joined last summer’s three-week virtual program. Nearly 500 credits were awarded to high-schoolers.
P-H-M Assistant Superintendent Heather Short said her district is planning 20 additional hours of summer remediation this year.
“We increased the percentage of students that we recommended for summer school by about 25%,” Short said. “We know that some of the long-term aspects are going to take a while for us to come full-circle with, but we’re excited to be able to expand our remediation offerings to get students back into that small-group intensive scenario.”
Despite a state and federal push for schools to reopen in full this fall, Marcotte said, many districts will still likely include virtual alternatives to in-person instruction next school year.
The key to addressing long-term learning gaps, he said, lies in districts’ ability to hire more staff to provide individualized learning support.
Federal pandemic relief funding should be able to help with this, he said, but with Indiana experiencing a statewide teachers shortage, simply finding the additional help could be a challenge.
“Schools are working on some really, really good plans,” Marcotte said. “We have some children that haven’t shown a learning loss, so we need to be strategic with how we work with students and place students in our classes. More so than ever before, we need to provide children what they need individually. The only way we can do that is have more adults working with children.”
