Ohio schools address 'exponential increase' in educational setbacks from COVID-19 remote learning

July 7, 2021

COLUMBUS, Ohio — K-12 public schools in Ohio are addressing learning gaps from the pandemic’s disruption to education, hopeful that opportunities for more normal in-person instruction will help students who’ve fallen behind get back on track.

Ohio is also partnered with a project at the Center for Education Policy Research at Harvard University, focused on attendance, Proving Ground Director Dave Hersh explained. 

“Ohio is extremely focused on attendance. They've sort of really adopted the argument that if the kids aren't actually going to school, it doesn't really matter what else you do,” he said. 

The Harvard team uses data to understand the impact of attendance interventions in Ohio to identify what’s working and what isn’t. Hersh said he works with a couple dozen schools in the state. 

Due to wonky data that’s a result of schools tracking attendance very differently during the pandemic, Hersh said it’s hard to quantify exactly how much attendance worsened in Ohio during the pandemic.

Still, most schools reported increases in absenteeism despite generally having more flexible attendance policies, which indicates that the increase was quite significant.

“The threshold to meet to be marked as present for a given day was lower, and so if you're looking at higher absenteeism with a lower threshold, that's even more concerning,” he said. 

Urban schools were impacted somewhat more and attendance among younger students declined more than it did for older students, he said.

Concerningly, the number of chronically absent students also shot up due to the pandemic.

“There are a much larger number of students with whom schools had no contact whatsoever this year than we would normally see in the past,” he said. “Schools are all facing this big challenge of how do we re-engage these students, how do we connect to these students?”

Rice agreed that attendance data is complicated this year. Some of his students were gaming the system, briefly logging on to get a checkmark, but not actually doing any work. 

The school is hiring tutors, bringing on additional staff to create more opportunities for credit recovery and preparing to conduct assessments to identify the areas where students have fallen behind the most.

 

The Harvard team uses data to understand the impact of attendance interventions in Ohio to identify what’s working and what isn’t. Hersh said he works with a couple dozen schools in the state. 

Due to wonky data that’s a result of schools tracking attendance very differently during the pandemic, Hersh said it’s hard to quantify exactly how much attendance worsened in Ohio during the pandemic.

Still, most schools reported increases in absenteeism despite generally having more flexible attendance policies, which indicates that the increase was quite significant.

“The threshold to meet to be marked as present for a given day was lower, and so if you're looking at higher absenteeism with a lower threshold, that's even more concerning,” he said. 

Urban schools were impacted somewhat more and attendance among younger students declined more than it did for older students, he said.

Concerningly, the number of chronically absent students also shot up due to the pandemic.

“There are a much larger number of students with whom schools had no contact whatsoever this year than we would normally see in the past,” he said. “Schools are all facing this big challenge of how do we re-engage these students, how do we connect to these students?”

Rice agreed that attendance data is complicated this year. Some of his students were gaming the system, briefly logging on to get a checkmark, but not actually doing any work. 

The school is hiring tutors, bringing on additional staff to create more opportunities for credit recovery and preparing to conduct assessments to identify the areas where students have fallen behind the most.

“Think of what it's like being a teenager, and now you're a teenager at home where your parents are working to provide for the family. So you are responsible for waking up every day and getting online every day and working very independently every day. That’s just not a recipe for success, so we have some huge gaps that we are working to identify and overcome with this upcoming school year,” he said.

Read the full article at Spectrum News 1.