Study Says COVID Slide Is Hurting New Jersey Students – Newark, NJ Patch

NEWARK, NJ — New Jersey’s students are suffering due to a phenomenon that’s been dubbed the “COVID slide,” with Black and Latinx learners especially vulnerable, a new study claims.

On Tuesday, the New Jersey Campaign for Achievement Now (JerseyCAN) released a report that tried to get a feel for how the coronavirus pandemic has affected students throughout the state. Read the full study and see its methodology here.

Researchers took a look at the first half of the 2020-21 school year for 18,000 students in grades 3 to 8, comparing it to data from the spring of 2019 and using the New Jersey State Learning Assessment (NJSLA) as the main measuring stick.

The news wasn’t good, researchers said.

The study found “significant drops” in the number of students proficient at grade level in English language arts (ELA) and math. Compared to 2019 statewide proficiency numbers, the study predicts a statewide 24-percentile point drop in ELA proficiency and a 23-percentile point drop in math by the winter of 2021.

“Now, only one-third of New Jersey students are expected to be academically proficient in ELA, and less than one-fourth of our students are expected to be proficient in math,” researchers said.

The suspected culprit? Learning loss caused by the pandemic.

“If learning loss continues, approximately 393,000 students in ELA and 430,000 students just in grades 3 to 8 will not be on grade level by the end of this school year,” researchers said. “This includes students who were not on grade level before the pandemic, as well as students who are projected to be off grade level due to the disruptions caused by COVID.”

While all students lost significant amounts of learning time in the first half of the 2020-21 school year, the COVID slide has been particularly hard on Black and Latinx students, researchers said.

According to the study:

  • On average, New Jersey students lost 30 percent of expected learning in ELA and 36 percent of expected learning in math, but the loss was greater for Black students, who lost on average 43 percent in ELA and 50 percent in math
  • Similarly, Latinx students lost 37 percent of expected learning in ELA and 40 percent in math

Economically disadvantaged students may also be vulnerable, researchers said. While they experienced a learning loss of about 40 percent in ELA – similar to their more affluent peers – they saw a greater expected learning loss in math, 43 percent, compared to just 33 percent for students who aren’t economically disadvantaged.

Researchers continued:

“New Jersey was one of the earliest states hit by COVID-19, forcing all schools in our state to be shuttered from mid-March through June 2020. Now, more than halfway into the 2020-21 school year, some of our largest and neediest school districts are just welcoming students back to the classroom. With long-standing achievement gaps across our state and a digital divide that persisted for too long in New Jersey, COVID has the potential to drastically exacerbate the educational inequities in New Jersey for an entire generation of students.”

“This is an urgent situation and we must be transparent and work collectively to address this issue,” said Sen. Teresa Ruiz (District 29), chair of the New Jersey Senate Education Committee.

“There is no time to wait,” Ruiz said. “Students who were already lagging have slipped even further behind due to the pandemic.”

“Our low-income, Black and Brown communities are bearing the brunt of the COVID crisis, not just when it comes to the virus itself, but the long-term impacts of a year away from school buildings,” said Vivian Cox-Fraser, president and CEO of the Urban League of Essex County.

“This study should be a call to action for those of us who care about equity in our communities,” Cox-Fraser added.

Other nonprofits supporting the report included EmpowerK12 and the New Jersey Children’s Foundation.

WHAT CAN BE DONE?

The study recommended five ways to combat the COVID slide. They included:

  • “Urgently prioritize the adoption and statewide implementation of extensive summer programming”
  • “Adopt and implement personalized, research-based solutions for accelerating student learning like high-dosage tutoring”
  • “Allow parents to exercise their choice to retain or hold back their child, if desired, to provide additional time to students for learning and the provision of social and emotional supports”
  • “Incentivize all districts to adopt high-quality instructional materials that are aligned to statewide assessments, which can provide teachers and parents with ongoing information about student academic growth and that can project proficiency on the NJSLA”
  • “Administer statewide assessments in Spring 2022 that are comparable to those administered in Spring 2019 to establish a new baseline from which to measure student growth moving forward and to also enable comparisons to pre-pandemic statewide proficiency”

Partly due to ongoing advocacy efforts, there is some hope that things can be turned around, the study pointed out. Researchers wrote:

“In recent weeks, a coalition of educators, civil rights leaders, and advocates – including JerseyCAN and leaders of the Urban League of Essex County, the New Jersey PTA and the New Jersey Children’s Foundation – sent a letter to Gov. Phil Murphy calling for critical learning interventions. Shortly thereafter, Governor Murphy announced a new grant program for schools to support learning loss with interventions called for by the coalition, including high-dosage tutoring and summer programming. In addition, the Murphy administration has released a grant program to support student and staff mental health, which the coalition also supported. As part of the application process for the learning loss grants, schools will be submitting student data to enable the New Jersey Department of Education to conduct their analysis on learning loss.”

“In addition to these state-administered grant programs, local districts in New Jersey are receiving $1.1 billion in federal stimulus funds for education from the Coronavirus Response and Relief Supplemental Appropriations Act (CRRSA) and an additional $2.4 billion over the next three and half years from the newly signed American Rescue Plan,” researchers added. “This is an unprecedented level of federal resources that will be used at the local level to address the COVID slide identified in this study.”

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