Learning Erosion, the Pandemic and the Long-Term Trajectory: How Representative is the Downward Spiral in Nova Scotia?

The worst kept educational secret is leaking out: most Canadian K-12 students in all provinces suffered setbacks during the Pandemic.  The latest province to report on the decline in student test scores is Nova Scotia, a middling Canadian province widely considered a bell weather for national trends. Right on forecast, that province’s students performed dismally on the latest 2021-22 battery of results.  Alarming student test score numbers in reading, writing and mathematics generated considerable media attention, but it remains to be seen whether they will light a fire under the gatekeepers of the provincial schoolhouse.

One in three Grade 3 students (32 per cent) cannot read with comprehension, and half of those students cannot write properly. It doesn’t get better by Grade 6 in reading or mathematics.  Two out of five in Grade 10 fail to meet acceptable standards in mathematics. This is not new at all, just worse because of school shutdowns, periodic interruptions, and absenteeism.

Signs of flagging student progress are everywhere in that province’s classrooms. Students are still guessing at words while reading in the early grades. Most elementary kids are rarely asked to write more than a sentence or two. Left on their own to master mathematics, students’ skills have eroded to an alarming degree. Getting kids to turn off their cellphones saps a lot of energy.

Confronting the hard data on the downward spiral, Education Minister Becky Druhan and the Department were quick to blame the pandemic.  Abysmal post-COVID student test scores were posted, the pandemic was offered up as the explanation, and –two days later — a reactive plan materialized out of thin air.

The “education crisis” escape plan was thrown-together in reaction mode. Provincial education officials must have been banking on no one bothering to look any deeper, track student data trends, or question why the department is still entrusted with evaluating its own effectiveness in teaching, learning and curriculum

Reading and writing skills have actually been in steady decline for a decade or more. Some 68 per cent of Grade 3 students in 2021-22 met minimum standards in Reading, down 8 points from 76 per cent in 2012-13. Student writing standards in Grade 3 have deteriorated significantly in all aspects of writing proficiency (Ideas – from 88% to 50%; Organization -from 80% to 38%; Language Use – from 83% to 43%; and Conventions – from 71% to 32%). Two out of three Grade 3s are familiar with Snapchat but exhibit little proficiency in  grammar or spelling and most can barely write a complete sentence.

Student proficiency by Grade 6 is critical because, as the recent October 2022 World Bank report on Pandemic Global Learning Loss claimed, students unable to read by 10 years-of-age are considered to be living in “learning poverty.” Until recently, that problem seemed far removed from the lives of Nova Scotian and Canadian children.

Six out of 10 kids in the world’s low-income and middle-income countries are now classified as “learning poor” putting their future in jeopardy and their lives at risk. In Canada, the World Bank estimates that from 4.3 to 8.3 per cent of 10 year olds in Canada qualify as “learning poor.” It’s much higher in Nova Scotia, where 29 per cent of our 10-year-olds (in Grade 6) lack basic proficiency in reading.

Math standards tend to fly below the radar in Nova Scotia, and the Education Department is culpable. Thirty per cent of Grade 3s lack proficiency in math skills, but it’s impossible to track past trends.  Shifting the tests from Grade 3 to Grade 4 and back again since 2011-12 deprived us of comparable data. It’s not as concealed in Grade 6 where student scores have dropped from 73 per cent (2012-13) to 64 per cent a year ago. One third of Grade 6s fall below provincial math standards.

Buried in the latest batch of published results are “disaggregated” student test results for two groups of students, those of African heritage and Indigenous ancestry.  That reflects the department’s recent focus on supporting students and improving results among those in racialized and marginalized communities.

While it’s been a major priority, the pandemic disruption has wiped out previous gains. Grade 3 Reading scores for African students held firm at 57 per cent meeting standards, some 12 per cent below the provincial average score. Writing remains a serious problem with fewer than half of the cohort of 695 students meeting expectations. A similar sized cohort of Mi’kmaw/Indigenous students in Grade 3 suffered similar setbacks during the pandemic.  In high school, African and Indigenous students at Grade 10 level performed far better in Reading than in Mathematics, where both cohorts of students have lost significant ground in comparison with their peers.

So far, Druhan and her Department have fumbled the ball during the pandemic disruption.  Cancelling school for 22 weeks between March 2020 and June 2021 put students and teachers in a much-weakened position. Since then, provincial authorities have been essentially asleep, waiting – it now appears – for hard evidence that students, at every grade level, are far behind in their progress and poorly prepared to progress to the next level.

Nowhere is the Education department’s ‘muddle-through’ mentality better exemplified than in in its slow-footed, ad hoc response to the deepening literacy crisis. After ignoring the Ontario Human Rights Commission Right to Read report upon its release, Druhan and her officials finally – six months later– produced a “Six Pillars” framework for discussion in June of last school year. The document endorsing ‘structured literacy’ was issued, but implementation was voluntary and earmarked for a number of “pilot schools.”

Provincial literacy experts were taken-aback when the “Six Pillars” framework surfaced again, in the immediate aftermath of the disastrous scores. Conventional reading and writing strategies, including “balanced or levelled literacy” and “Reading Recovery” remain in place, even though they were rejected months ago in Ontario and other provinces. The just-announced “new plan” for Grade 2 literacy is nothing of the sort. After keeping the “Six Pillars” under wraps, it’s just now being introduced to teachers, delaying implementation for another full year.

Establishing a Nova Scotia Student Progress Assessment agency is now mission-critical in Primary to Grade 12 education. Learning erosion has worsened since January 2018 when Dr. Avis Glaze recommended creating such an agency reporting to the public, not the department. Delaying the release of student test data, resisting evidence-based policy making, and denying the pandemic’s impact may be the last straw. The department should not be entrusted with evaluating the success of its own policies, curriculum and practices. It’s high time for more public accountability and action plans informed by the best evidence gathered through student assessment.

Why are education authorities blaming the “learning erosion” on the Pandemic disruption and treating it as an aberration? How representative is Nova Scotia, where literacy and mathematics skills have been in decline for a decade or more?  What is the point of establishing ‘learning outcomes’ without implementing changes which might enable teachers to come closer to meeting those student achievement benchmarks? Is the irregular and uneven response to the Ontario Right to Read inquiry findings symptomatic of broader concerns?

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Pandemic Achievement Slide: Is the Learning Loss worse than has been reported?

School’s out and the first reliable reports on pandemic learning loss are appearing in the United States and, far more slowly, from province-to-province across Canada. In some school systems, education leaders and regional superintendents are breathing a sigh of relief and far too many are acting like the disruptions of two-and-a-half years of pandemic learning are over. But the first wave of student assessment scores reveals many students — especially from kindergarten to Grade 6, but all the way to Grade 12 — are behind with school closures, remote learning, and irregular school schedules to blame.

During the COVID-19 pandemic America’s schoolchildren lost out on from 16 to 70 weeks in the classroom. Most pupils received some form of virtual schooling which varied greatly in quality and quantity. While many parents recognized the risk to health posed by keeping schools open, they—and teachers—were concerned that lessons taken at the kitchen table were less effective than those in a classroom. Weathering one wave after another of the pandemic, and particularly Omicron, led to repeated schedule disruptions and reversions to remote/home learning. Early student test results show just how much childrens’ education has suffered during the pandemic.

            Standardized student assessment tracking in the U.S. was far more extensive during the pandemic and the Brookings Institution has reported lower levels of achievement, with younger children hit the hardest. Graduation rates dropped and fewer kids were pursuing post-secondary studies. It’s doubly difficult to identify and assess learning loss in Canada because our education authorities simply suspended provincial testing and, in many cases, final examinations.

Wilfrid Laurier University professor and researcher Kelly Gallagher-Mackay pinpointed the nub of the problem in Ontario and elsewhere: “we don’t have public data on how Ontario students are doing, so we are a lot more in the dark.” That’s problematic because “the risk with educational issues is that they can multiply if they’re not addressed,” she told The Toronto Star. It also has compounded effects: if students’ confidence or sense of preparedness have taken a hit, they may be more inclined to opt for programs they feel are easier, rather than more challenging ones that down the line provide more post-secondary opportunities.

Canada’s largest school district, Toronto District School Board (TDSB), produced Grade 1 Reading data that raised some alarms. TDSB data from 2020-21 for in-person schooling compared with 2018-19, reported students were 3 percentage points behind, while those in virtual schooling were 9 percentage points behind. The board is tracking student well-being and achievement, as part of its COVID-19 Pandemic Recovery Plan, to identify groups most impacted and where interventions are needed

An authoritative November 2021 American study of pandemic education impact, produced by Clare Halloran and a research team for the National Bureau of Educational Research, demonstrated how the shift in schooling mode to home learning adversely affected test scores tracked over 2020-21 across 12 different U.S. states. Student pass rates declined compared to prior years and that these declines were larger in districts with less in-person instruction. Passing rates in math declined by 14.2 percentage points on average, but somewhat less (10.1 percentage points smaller) for districts fully in-person. Reported losses in English language arts scores were smaller, but were significantly larger in districts with larger populations of disadvantaged students who were Black, Hispanic or eligible for free and reduced-price lunch programs.

Studies in Britain also show that the longer kids were in remote learning, the worse they fared. That’s particularly worrying in Canadian provinces like Ontario, where students lost out on about 27 weeks or more of in-person learning from March 2020 to the end of June 2022. Judging from the June 2021 Ontario Science Table study, Canadian provinces lost more days, averaging about 20 weeks, than similar jurisdictions in the U.S., U.K. or the European Union.

            The Canadian province of Nova Scotia is, as usual, a reliable bell-weather for K-12 education. Province-wide assessment was suspended completely in 2020-21 and then reinstituted in 2021-22.  The latest test results were embargoed until the last week of school in June 2022, posted on an obscure Nova Scotia Education website under PLANS, then released without any notice or comment. Putting them out at the tail end of the year all but guarantees that they escape public notice.

            Studying the latest installment of Nova Scotia provincial student results, covering the 2018-19 to 2021-22 period, it is easy to see why they are buried on an obscure public website.  Nothing was reported covering Grade 3, the critical first step in monitoring the acquisition of student competencies in reading, writing and mathematics. Instead, the province released Grade 6 results showing, as predicted, a pronounced achievement decline, most acute in mathematics and writing, but also affecting reading competencies and comprehension. 

            What are education authorities attempting to hide?  Grade 6 Mathematics results (2021-22) dropped to 64% achieving expectations, down 6 % from before the pandemic. In the case of Grade 6 Reading, some 71% of students met the standard, down 4% since 2018-19. Going back ten years to 2012-13, the achievement slide is actually gradual and continuing, perhaps worsened by some 22 weeks of COVID-related school closures from March 2020 to June of 2021.

From school district to district, student achievement in 2021-22 was also highly irregular, ranging in Grade 6 Mathematics from Halifax RCE (67%, down 6%) to TriCounty RCE (50%, down 14%). In Grade 6 Reading, the comparable figures were Halifax RCE (74%, down 3%) to TriCounty RCE (61%, down 6 %).

Some marked progress has been made in addressing the problem of underperformance among marginalized and racialized students. In Grade 6 Mathematics, for example, African Nova Scotian students’ scores have risen from 36% (2013-14) to 55% (2016-17) and then held firm at 54% (2019-20) before the pandemic.  For Indigenous students, Grade 6 Reading has risen from 64% (2013-14) to 65% (2016-17) and then reached 74% (2019-20), just 2% below the provincial mean score. 

            The declines in Grade 6 Mathematics and Reading in Nova Scotia post-pandemic are perhaps predictable. What is more concerning is the longer-term trend toward an “achievement slide,’ revealed starkly on publicly- reported provincial assessment results over the past decade. Grade 6 Mathematics scores, for example, have plummeted from 73% (2012-13) to 71% (2018-19) to 64% (2021-22), a drop of 9 points.  In Grade 6 Reading, the slide is gentler from 76% (2012-13) to 74% (2018-19) to 71% (2021-22).  In short, somewhere between one-quarter to one-third of all students are not functionally literate or numerate at the end of elementary school.

One of Canada’s leading international education experts, Paul Cappon, warned ten years ago that Canada was becoming “a school that does not issue report cards.”  Suspending student assessment during the pandemic, then re-instating tests on a limited basis is bad enough.  Holding-off on releasing student results until everyone is on the way out for the summer holidays suggests that Dr. Cappon’s prophecy has come to pass, even after the biggest educational disruption in our lifetime.

What was the full extent of the learning loss experienced by K-12 students over the past two-and-a-half years? How reliable are the initial assessments coming out of the United States, the UK, and the European Union states?  Why is it next-to-impossible to assess the pandemic impact on Canadian students?  By limiting student assessment, rationing the results, then issuing partial sets of results are Canadian school authorities cushioning the blow or merely deferring the day of reckoning?  

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“Zombie Ideas” and Pandemic Education: Is ‘Learning Loss’ real or imagined?

Canada’s schools and the K-12 education system are weathering the most profound crisis and, over the past 18-months, many certainties have dissolved in the face of the seemingly never-ending succession of COVID-19 disruptions. Emerging out of the maelstrom, we are now in a better position to see, grapple with, and set aside a few “zombie ideas” in education.

Prevailing assumptions about mass schooling, ingrained beliefs about ‘minimally-guided’ student learning, and idealized visions of ‘21^st century learning’ have been severely tested and found mostly wanting. Entering the school year, our five million students, their teachers and families, are far more attuned to the impact and realities of “learning loss” and the current challenges of tackling the impact upon student achievement and well-being.

What’s most amazing is that a surprising, although diminishing, number of school administrators, education professors, and educators continue to deny the existence of “student learning loss” to the point where it may now qualify as the latest example of a “zombie idea” in K-12 education.

“Zombie ideas,” New York Times commentator Paul Krugman argues are “beliefs about policy that have been repeatedly refuted with evidence and analysis but refuse to die.” Nine years ago, American education historian Larry Cuban, alerted us to their prevalence, especially in relation to popular and inflated claims about “online instruction.”

School closures have cost the ‘pandemic generation,’ from province-to-province, from 8 (Quebec) to 24 (Ontario) weeks of regular, in-class instruction. Prominent Canadian public policy analyst Irvin Studin, president of the Institute for 21^st Century Questions, estimates that some 200,000 students, poor and affluent, have been “lost” or excluded from participation in any form of schooling.

Topsy-turvy pandemic education definitely left marginalized and special needs students more vulnerable. That is not in dispute, but there is still a residue of what might be termed ‘learning loss’ denial, perpetuated mostly by education theorists and their allies imbued with romantic ideas once associated with ‘progressivism.’   

A recent examples of this Canadian education school of thought was the response to the “pandemic catastrophe” produced by University of Toronto Schools teacher Josh Fullan, echoing the sentiments of  a vocal group of colleagues at the University of Ottawa faculty of education. Fullan and the University of Ottawa contingent continue to see ‘silver linings’ and urge schools to “honour what students gained amid the pandemic.”  

Learning was disrupted and often imperfect, Fullan contends, but not lost.  “Strong public systems,” “allies at school and home,” and the “adaptability of students” deserve more credit than they are receiving, according to Fullan. That is why he believes that phrases like “catching up” or “closing the gap” should be avoided and, rather remarkably, the term “learning loss” stricken from the lexicon in K-12 education.

Such assertions are simply outlandish on the heals of a global crisis affecting schools, students, teachers and families everywhere. Claiming that “learning loss” either doesn’t exist or is inconsequential (after 18-months of school disruptions) is one “zombie idea” without a shred of supporting evidence and one that “refuses to die.”

A profoundly important recent Ontario study, produced in June 2021 by Kelly Gallagher-Mackay and a team of Ontario Science Table university researchers, documented the extent of system-wide school closures and flagged the problem of “learning loss,” identified and being researched in education jurisdictions around the world.

While the researchers recognized the limitations of the current system-wide student assessment model, they noted the absence of any “learning loss” data in the province and identified the blind spot that compels researchers to utilize and apply research findings from other comparable jurisdictions.  That simply would not be necessary if the “zombie idea” that “learning loss” doesn’t matter was not already heavily influencing the prevailing research agenda in our ministries of education and education faculties. 

 Closing provincial school systems for weeks on end has got to have some academic impact; otherwise, one might ask – if learning is so natural, why do we go to school in the first place?  Without sound, reliable student assessment data, we can only assume that missing huge chucks of schooling, lurching back-and-forth into remote learning, and rapid adjustments to hybrid secondary school schedules, has already produced significant academic and psycho-social consequences for kids and teens.  

            “Zombie ideas” never seem to go disappear in K-12 education. A few months ago, Bryan Goodwin, head of Denver research institute, McREL International, created quite a stir with an ASCD commentary identifying six “zombie ideas” that refuse to die. Learning styles, unguided discovery learning, whole word reading, and teach critical thinking rather than facts made that ignominious list. The peculiar fallacy that “learning loss is of no consequence” never occurred to him, likely because it’s so implausible.

School closures have cost the ‘pandemic generation,’ from province-to-province, from 8 to 24 weeks of regular, in-class instruction and thousands opted-out of any form of schooling. Surely that matters and will have consequences, down the line, for our elementary and secondary school-age students.

Why do “Zombie Ideas” persist in K-12 education?  Is “Learning Loss is of little consequence” the latest “Zombie Idea” to surface and persist 18-months into the massive disruption of regular schooling?  Is it persisting because of educators’ passive and determined resistance to the resumption of system-wide student assessment?  If we keep delaying student testing, how can we possibly know the extent of the “learning loss” in terms of knowledge and skills?

 

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