Does DCPS have a plan to remediate the learning loss caused by their long-term pandemic closure?

[Anonymous]

We are at a HRCS with very low at risk. Even with some support from families and this in person school year, some kids still have not caught up and are still behind. Parents in our class know where the kids need to be with the start of the school year next fall. The kids who are not there yet will be getting a lot of support from families at home over the summer or they are planning on hiring tutors. Our school also has a 4 week summer program that is prioritizing the kids who are behind.

Low SES kids don’t have many of the supports at home and families don’t have the means to outsource to 1:1 tutors. Unfortunately, many of these kids are never going to catch up and be left further behind. The achievement gap is real and going to be the greatest it’s ever been in the past 10 years.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:DCPS has no plan. I’m a teacher who signed up for high dosage tutoring in my school last fall. There was no structure, curriculum or guidance from anyone, including school leadership. I became a babysitter to 10 of my already far behind students who didn’t want to be there, with behavioral problems, and had no plan. I quit “ high dosage tutoring” at the end of November. I can get 3x what DCPS offers and work 1:1 with a student who is focused.

Teaching staff is supposed to follow the MTSS with documentation to identify academic and other needs for each student. A struggling student gets referred to the Academic Acceleration or tutoring before or after school, so in theory it should address needs. The problem is that DCPS can't mandate it, so if students and parents can't or don't want to participate no progress will be made.

The problem is that that there are not enough qualified adults who are willing to volunteer (paid) to do the work. The MTSS system in my school works, but there is nothing built to meet the needs of the kids. The primary problem is not that DCPS can't mandate it, but if that's what central office believes I guess it will make for a good bullet point to point fingers and place blame.

What is the pay they are offering these would-be tutors? Is it as abysmal as the substitute pay?

Standard admin premium - $40. DCPS should have used some of the federal COVID $ to create a real incentive based tutoring program with outcome measures and metrics. It's a joke and insult to teachers who have had a really hard year.

I agree. Stop buying devices and invest in teachers.

There are certainly resources available to solve this problem. But I don’t see any will in leadership to expend those resources. Not at the City level. Not at the school level. Schools never should have been closed for so long in DC. It’s shameful. Which candidate is saying that?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:
We are at a HRCS with very low at risk. Even with some support from families and this in person school year, some kids still have not caught up and are still behind. Parents in our class know where the kids need to be with the start of the school year next fall. The kids who are not there yet will be getting a lot of support from families at home over the summer or they are planning on hiring tutors. Our school also has a 4 week summer program that is prioritizing the kids who are behind.

Low SES kids don’t have many of the supports at home and families don’t have the means to outsource to 1:1 tutors. Unfortunately, many of these kids are never going to catch up and be left further behind. The achievement gap is real and going to be the greatest it’s ever been in the past 10 years.

+ 1. My kid is behind and I’m paying a crazy amount for tutors. Others can’t afford that. It’s a stretch for us but we prioritize it. This is an institutional problem, not an individual one.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:This article from the faculty director of the Center for Education Policy Research at Harvard University should be an eye opener. What is DCPS' plan to make up what was lost during their long-term closure?

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/05/schools-learning-loss-remote-covid-education/629938/

Kids’ Learning Losses Are Worse Than Educators Are Acknowledging
Remote instruction wasn’t good enough, and schools need a plan to repair the damage to students’ education.

"One-fifth of American students, by our calculations, were enrolled in districts that remained remote for the majority of the 2020–21 school year. For these students, the effects were severe. Growth in student achievement slowed to the point that, even in low-poverty schools, students in fall 2021 had fallen well behind what pre-pandemic patterns would have predicted; in effect, students at low-poverty schools that stayed remote had lost the equivalent of 13 weeks of in-person instruction. At high-poverty schools that stayed remote, students lost the equivalent of 22 weeks. Racial gaps widened too: In the districts that stayed remote for most of last year, the outcome was as if Black and Hispanic students had lost four to five more weeks of instruction than white students had.

By our calculations, about 50 percent of students nationally returned in person in the fall and spent less than a month remote during the 2020–21 school year. In these districts where classrooms reopened relatively quickly, student-achievement gaps by race and socioeconomic status widened a bit in reading but, fortunately, not in math. And overall student achievement fell only modestly. The average student in the quicker-to-reopen districts lost the equivalent of about seven to 10 weeks of in-person instruction. (That losing just a quarter of a typical school year’s academic progress is a relatively good outcome only underscores the dimension of the overall problem.)

What happened in spring 2020 was like flipping off a switch on a vital piece of our social infrastructure. Where schools stayed closed longer, gaps widened; where schools reopened sooner, they didn’t. Schools truly are, as Horace Mann famously argued, the 'balance wheel of the social machinery.'

Like any other parent who witnessed their child dozing in front of a Zoom screen last year, I was not surprised that learning slowed. However, as a researcher, I did find the size of the losses startling—all the more so because I know that very few remedial interventions have ever been shown to produce benefits equivalent to 22 weeks of additional in-person instruction."

"I fear that, in areas where classrooms remained closed for long periods, school officials are not doing the basic math. High-dosage tutoring may produce the equivalent of 19 weeks of instruction for students who receive it, but is a district prepared to offer it to everyone? Alternatively, suppose that a school offers double-dose math for every single student and somehow convinces them to attend summer school, too. That, educational research suggests, would help students make up a total of 15 weeks of lost instruction. Even if every single student in a high-poverty school received both interventions, they would still face a seven-week gap.

Educational interventions have a way of being watered down in practice; many superintendents and school boards may tell themselves that they are taking a variety of steps to help students make up lost time. And yet most district plans are currently nowhere near commensurate with their students’ losses."

More high stakes testing mandates lol

[Anonymous]

There was a thread about this a while ago. The answer is that Ferebee, Paul Kihn, and other DCPS leaders promised that extensive "high-dosage" tutoring programs would make up for learning loss. They haven't.

https://www.dcurbanmom.com/jforum/posts/list/1036781.page

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:There was a thread about this a while ago. The answer is that Ferebee, Paul Kihn, and other DCPS leaders promised that extensive "high-dosage" tutoring programs would make up for learning loss. They haven't.

https://www.dcurbanmom.com/jforum/posts/list/1036781.page

They kind of did in the sense that they provided the ability and the funds. But like I said in a previous post, they counted on teachers wanting $40 an hour to do it. No one on my team wanted to do it so no one in my grade level was offered it. And there was no back up plan. They just assumed we’d all be scrambling to sign up I guess.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:There was a thread about this a while ago. The answer is that Ferebee, Paul Kihn, and other DCPS leaders promised that extensive "high-dosage" tutoring programs would make up for learning loss. They haven't.

https://www.dcurbanmom.com/jforum/posts/list/1036781.page

They kind of did in the sense that they provided the ability and the funds. But like I said in a previous post, they counted on teachers wanting $40 an hour to do it. No one on my team wanted to do it so no one in my grade level was offered it. And there was no back up plan. They just assumed we’d all be scrambling to sign up I guess.

Not to mention that if it's anywhere like it is at my school around the city, unvaccinated kids are losing crazy amounts of in-person instruction due to mandatory quarantines. The students that I currently have and should be getting high dosage tutoring have missed 30-60 days of school this year.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:There was a thread about this a while ago. The answer is that Ferebee, Paul Kihn, and other DCPS leaders promised that extensive "high-dosage" tutoring programs would make up for learning loss. They haven't.

https://www.dcurbanmom.com/jforum/posts/list/1036781.page

They kind of did in the sense that they provided the ability and the funds. But like I said in a previous post, they counted on teachers wanting $40 an hour to do it. No one on my team wanted to do it so no one in my grade level was offered it. And there was no back up plan. They just assumed we’d all be scrambling to sign up I guess.

Not to mention that if it's anywhere like it is at my school around the city, unvaccinated kids are losing crazy amounts of in-person instruction due to mandatory quarantines. The students that I currently have and should be getting high dosage tutoring have missed 30-60 days of school this year.

Wow. That makes absolutely zero sense at this point and needs to stop. Yes, I think they should get vaccinated, but clearly this policy isn't working as an incentive for these families, so drop it already and stop punishing the kids.

[Anonymous]

I'd love to see plans to integrate prior-grade-level content into regular programming. So if a kid is not getting e.g. the 7th grade standards in math, but is doing fine in ELA, how can we move them forward into 8th grade but provide the cohort of kids who are specifically struggling with the math an extra year of 7th grade math?

Also would love to see grace periods for HS graduation (and I'm shocked we didn't see that this year). Let kids have the extra year if they need it.

[Anonymous]

Can anyone identify a solution? Because right now we are 1. Blaming teachers 2. Blaming a candidate for mayor. 3. Blaming a school board with no power 4. Arguing among ourselves.

Do we eliminate all summer, winter and spring holidays for all students grades 1-11 for the next 3 years?

No one actually has a plan or any idea of to solve it. But I’m sure this thread will have 31 pages of nonsense.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Can anyone identify a solution? Because right now we are 1. Blaming teachers 2. Blaming a candidate for mayor. 3. Blaming a school board with no power 4. Arguing among ourselves.

Do we eliminate all summer, winter and spring holidays for all students grades 1-11 for the next 3 years?

No one actually has a plan or any idea of to solve it. But I’m sure this thread will have 31 pages of nonsense.

You go first, cause this one is really hard.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Can anyone identify a solution? Because right now we are 1. Blaming teachers 2. Blaming a candidate for mayor. 3. Blaming a school board with no power 4. Arguing among ourselves.

Do we eliminate all summer, winter and spring holidays for all students grades 1-11 for the next 3 years?

No one actually has a plan or any idea of to solve it. But I’m sure this thread will have 31 pages of nonsense.

If the issue was that they didn't offer teachers enough money to get them to participate in tutoring, they could have paid a higher wage, lowered the number of students it was supposed to involve, and at least they would have gotten something useful out of it. It's not that hard to figure out how much you're going to have to pay your workforce to do this kind of thing - you can explore how much they're making doing private tutoring, or you can ask them.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:DCPS has no plan. I’m a teacher who signed up for high dosage tutoring in my school last fall. There was no structure, curriculum or guidance from anyone, including school leadership. I became a babysitter to 10 of my already far behind students who didn’t want to be there, with behavioral problems, and had no plan. I quit “ high dosage tutoring” at the end of November. I can get 3x what DCPS offers and work 1:1 with a student who is focused.

Teaching staff is supposed to follow the MTSS with documentation to identify academic and other needs for each student. A struggling student gets referred to the Academic Acceleration or tutoring before or after school, so in theory it should address needs. The problem is that DCPS can't mandate it, so if students and parents can't or don't want to participate no progress will be made.

The Academic Acceleration program ended in April. I am unsure why they did not continue into May and June.

[Anonymous]

Oyster and Adams kids didn't. Too many longtime parents bailed.

[Anonymous]

And don’t forget about Zoom in a room. That’s surely doesn’t count as “back in school.” That was all that was offered to many in DC, if at all, in late spring 2021.