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The recent release of results from the 2023 TIMSS assessment — a math and science exam given to students across the globe — paints a bleak picture of learning recovery in the U.S. In 4th grade math, 39 of 53 participating nations or regions scored similar or better in 2023 than they did in 2019. The U.S. was one of 14 that scored significantly worse.
As an education researcher who has been studying the impacts of the pandemic, these results come as no surprise. They align closely with U.S. national and state data — including North Carolina’s.
One point of good news, at least, is that scores have improved from the lows of 2021 and 2022.
But will we continue making progress on recovery moving forward? There are several reasons to worry we might not.
There is a youth mental health crisis. Teachers are finding student behavior to be more challenging than pre-pandemic. Chronic absence rates are elevated, with absenteeism becoming deep and persistent for many. Some families are facing new financial hardships. And after years of operating in crisis mode, many educators are burnt out and leaving their jobs.
Given all this, it may be a great testament to the efforts of our educators, parents, and students that recovery has been occurring at all. But the gains that have been made are tenuous, particularly as pandemic relief funding expires. Some national data shows that recovery may have already begun to stall out — or even reverse.
These trends have critical implications for the long-term health of North Carolina’s population and economy. When young people enter the workforce with gaps in their skills and knowledge, mental health challenges, and lacking in career readiness, it hurts their own employment prospects and the state’s economic productivity and growth.
How can we continue moving towards full academic recovery in these conditions? While exam results make clear that lost learning still needs to be made up, the range of other problems facing schools suggests that focusing on academic recovery alone will not be enough — we must also work on attendance, socio-emotional, and behavioral recovery.
Recovery is not guaranteed
To catch back up, students need to master significantly more material each year than their pre-pandemic peers. Accomplishing this is the focus of academic interventions like high-dosage tutoring and summer schooling. Yet despite considerable efforts to implement programs like this across the country, full recovery remains distant. Why?
To some extent, expectations may have simply been too high. Scaling up programs is always difficult, all the more so when those programs are being rapidly implemented during a pandemic. As a result, recovery programs ended up reaching fewer students than desired and had weaker impacts than small-scale programs implemented in more ideal conditions pre-pandemic.
But there may be more to the story than this. Focusing only on learning loss can miss a vital point: It was not just learning that was affected by the pandemic. When students are experiencing depression, anxiety, burn-out, and chronic absenteeism, they will not learn as much. When educators are burnt out and spending more time on behavioral management, they will not be able to teach as effectively.
And when we consider these additional challenges that schools are facing, it becomes evident that schools likely need extra support and resources just to keep pace with pre-pandemic learning rates, let alone to exceed them.
Strengthening conditions that support learning
To help ensure that investments in instructional time and quality realize their maximum possible impact, education leaders may also need to support efforts to improve students’ well-being and behavior, combat absenteeism, better engage students and parents, and reduce educator burn-out.
Some light-touch interventions may help. For example, sending automated messages to parents about their child’s absenteeism can improve attendance. Emerging evidence also suggests that expanding Career and Technical Education can improve attendance and engagement, perhaps because these courses help students see the practical relevance of what they are learning.
To make a larger impact, schools may need additional support staff, such as counselors, social workers, and teacher aides. In helping to address academic, attendance, behavior, and mental health challenges, these staff can directly support students and indirectly support teachers, freeing up time that educators might have spent on classroom behavioral management to instead spend more time on instructional activities. Support staff could also play key roles in implementing new curricula that teach durable skills, such as collaboration, responsibility, and a learner’s mindset, that are the foundations of North Carolina’s “Portrait of a Graduate.”
Certainly, the challenges that schools have faced to scaling up tutoring show that “implementing new programs” is not as simple as it sounds, perhaps even more so if this stretches to non-academic interventions that schools do not have as much experience implementing and if this is added on top of many other tasks that we are already asking schools to do to achieve recovery.
But these challenges are not insurmountable, and may be especially worthwhile to take on if investments into attendance, socio-emotional, and behavioral recovery can also improve the efficacy of academic interventions. Chances of success will likely be highest if new staff and implementers of new interventions are given clear and manageable responsibilities, if their work helps teachers be able to focus more on core instructional tasks, and if schoolwide efforts are undertaken to ensure that new programs complement and integrate with, rather than compete with, existing instructional activities.
More investment still needed
To tackle the many interrelated challenges facing schools today, continued investment into both academic and non-academic recovery will be needed. But while there is much more work to be done, there is reason for optimism. The tremendous efforts towards recovery made by educators, parents, and students so far shows that our schools can do great things even when facing multiple crises.
If we can help schools get out of crisis mode, they could do even more. With the right support moving forward, we might truly put learning loss behind us.
