On April 2nd, the Harvard Graduate School of Education hosted CEPR Faculty Director Thomas Kane, CEPR's incoming Executive Director Christina Grant, and education leaders from across the country to discuss ways in which states and districts can act on new findings from the Education Recovery Scorecard, CEPR’s ongoing collaboration with Stanford’s Educational Opportunity Project, and work to close the gaps exacerbated by COVID.
Panelists:
- Dr. Aleesia Johnson, Superintendent of Indianapolis Public Schools (IPS)
Indianapolis experienced smaller losses than other high-poverty districts in Indiana and is now approaching 2019 achievement levels. Dr. Johnson has served IPS, the largest district in Indiana, since 2019. She is also on the advisory board of CEPR.
- Daniel McKee, Governor of the State of Rhode Island.
Governor McKee has focused on high-quality public education for all students throughout his career and launched the Learn365RI plan in 2023, which aims to lower student absenteeism and expand out-of-school learning time for students.
- Catherine Truitt, State Superintendent of Public Instruction for the North Carolina Department of Public Instruction
Superintendent Truitt has guided North Carolina in its focus on academic recovery, collecting better data than many states. Many districts in North Carolina are now approaching their 2019 levels.
- Moderator Dr. Christina Grant, CEPR’s incoming Executive Director and State Superintendent of Education for Washington, D.C.
An overview of the forum is provided below. Some questions and quotes have been lightly edited for length and clarity. Note: video playback may not be compatible with Google Chrome. If experiencing any errors, switching browsers may help.
The challenge
CEPR’s Faculty Director Thomas Kane set the stage for the panel by outlining the challenge. Students have made up one-third of the pandemic learning loss in math and one quarter in reading, a large recovery in historical terms. However, most states remain behind 2019 levels, and gaps between high- and low-poverty districts in many states have only continued to widen.
“Just imagine if, during the pandemic, the federal government said ‘We’re not going to try to come up with a vaccine. We’re going to take all that money that would have gone to a vaccine and just distribute it to local public health authorities and just say, you guys figure it out…' I’m sure what would have happened is some public health departments would have made more progress than others.”
There are many barriers to accelerating recovery:
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Chronic absenteeism has risen since the pandemic.
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Parents underestimate impacts on their children, making it hard to garner support for less politically popular options like extending the school year.
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Most recovery aid went directly to districts; the federal government had very little authority to regulate or coordinate how districts spent that money, leading to divergent results.
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Recovery will require an extensive multi-year set of interventions. The scale of the necessary intervention is often underestimated. As the presentation slides show, even combining tutoring, double math periods, and summer school for a percentage of students with an extended school year for all could only make up .5 years of learning in one year—and many districts remain more than a year behind their 2019 levels.
Now, the remaining $190 billion in federal pandemic aid must be spent by September 2024. Will leaders step up to complete students’ recovery when federal dollars expire?
Reflecting on the work so far
How do you think about your district or state's recovery efforts so far?
"Creating a system where you can see every child every day.... those are expenditures that might not make the nightly news, but were critical as we tried to put children's faces to the data point which we call chronic absenteeism." Christina Grant
The road ahead
Chronic Absenteeism
“It’s a community-wide solution, in every home, every day, learning should matter… Leadership does matter—supporting individuals like superintendents that are doing the work to stay the course is the most important thing we can do right now... After a world crisis, you never go back to normal. But it is your choice to decide where you go." Dan McKee
"This chronic absenteeism issue is a symptom of something else that’s wrong. I’m looking forward to seeing someone dig into the data more… I think this is across socioeconomic backgrounds, and race and ethnicity." Catherine Truitt
Even if we maintain rapid recovery, we will still be more than a year away from total recovery. But the federal money is running out in September— where will the leadership come from to pick up the reins?
"Our schools don’t exist in bubbles. Our schools are in our communities. They reflect the values of our communities. They also reflect the challenges of our communities. So we cannot do the work on our own. It takes the community to make it all happen." Aleesia Johnson
How do you get broad approval for your initiatives, given that your positions are political as well as strategic?
"I am elected, and our state BOE is appointed... and those appointees were in a different political party from me. Then we have the legislature, which holds the purse strings in North Carolina... I was frequently like a child of divorce, caught between the legislature and the state board of education. The way we handled this—aside from building relationships, talking through differences, et cetera—was we kept students at the center. And both groups responded to that." Catherine Truitt
The teacher shortage has demonstrated the teaching profession is no longer sustainable for many. How are you responding?
CEPR's Faculty Director Thomas Kane concluded the forum. "This is a pivotal moment. What we do in the next year or two will have a big impact," Kane said. "It really is up to us whether students recover, or whether we let these gaps remain. Everyone on stage will be doing as much as we can to make a difference—I hope you'll join us."
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Watch the full panel on the Harvard Education YouTube channel.