School districts’ intervention efforts aimed at making up for significant learning lost during the pandemic are frequently falling short of their original expectations, according to a new study.
A report by the National Center for Analysis of Longitudinal Data in Education, or CALDER, found that interventions often aren’t meeting the scale or intensity of treatment that K-12 officials intended, despite districts having access to federal relief money.
What’s more, the study — co-authored by the assessment organization NWEA, Harvard University, and Dartmouth College — found that interventions had few statistically or practically significant effects on students’ math and reading test scores.
Districts are running into big challenges in implementation, according to the study, which looked at a dozen mid- to large-sized districts across 10 states. They include difficulty targeting students in need, engaging families, allocating staff, and making room in already packed student schedules.
“The implementation challenges district leaders recounted suggest that the simple-sounding logic of academic intervention — identify students in need and provide them extra support — belies a host of complex design and implementation decisions,” the study says.