SPOTLIGHT | Shaping the National Conversation Around Pandemic Learning Loss and the Road to Recovery
Client: Center for Education Policy Research (CEPR) at Harvard University| Partnership Length: 2021 - Present | HCM Service Area Spotlight: Strategic Communications, Campaigns + Coalitions| Portfolio Category: K-12
HCM partnered with the Center for Education Policy Research (CEPR) at Harvard University to lead the release of unprecedented data around learning loss in K-12 public schools across the country.
OVERVIEW
In May 2022, economist Tom Kane, Walter H. Gale Professor of Education and Economics at Harvard Graduate School of Education and CEPR faculty director, released findings from the most comprehensive study done to date on the impact of remote instruction during the pandemic.
Researchers from the Center for Education Policy Research at Harvard University (CEPR), CALDER Center at the American Institutes for Research, NWEA, and Dartmouth College examined testing data from 2.1 million students, between third and eighth grade, in nearly 10,000 schools in 49 states and the District of Columbia. Their findings indicate that high poverty schools not only spent more weeks in remote instruction during 2020-21, but their students suffered larger losses in academic achievement when they did so. Overall, they found that within school districts that were remote for most of 2020-21, high-poverty schools lost a half-year of achievement growth, roughly twice as much as low-poverty schools in the same districts.
With this data in hand, and paired with the release of the 2022 National Assessment for Educational Progress (NAEP) scores that showed a staggering national decline in achievement across math and reading scores, Tom Kane and Sean Reardon at Stanford’s Educational Opportunity Project collaborated to provide the Education Recovery Scorecard, the first view of district-level learning losses between 2019 and 2022 (launched October 2022). The Education Recovery Scorecard provides the first opportunity to compare learning loss at the district level across the country, providing opportunities to further understand how time remote, federal dollars expenditure, and other factors impacted students during and after the COVID-19 pandemic.
OUR WORK + IMPACT
HCM Strategists led the advocacy and communications strategy alongside the Center for Reinventing Public Education (CEPR) at Harvard University and the Education Opportunity Project (EOP) at Stanford University to create an understanding of learning loss in the U.S. in the past two years. The data, which used the 2022 NAEP scores to put state proficiency levels on the same scale, allowed the first-ever comparison of declines by district and subgroup across the country, culminating in a newly designed website: EducationRecoveryScorecard.org. This website served the unique purpose of providing reporters with all of the information and data they would need to dig deeper into their local context.
The goal of this strategy was to prompt local education leaders and policymakers to re-visit their recovery strategy and use of ESSER funding based on the magnitude of their actual learning loss at the district level as opposed to the state level.
Because the research found significant variability within states and across similar cohorts of communities across the country, a localized communications strategy was employed to develop the public’s understanding of learning loss not only at the state but the district level. An exclusive partnership was developed with the Associated Press, engaging local reporters in each state and providing them with press releases populated with unique data for each state (where data was available). Through established national partnerships and network relationships, the research produced by the teams at CEPR and EOP received more than 800 stories across radio, tv, and print covering all 50 states.
This strategic awareness campaign is helping shape the national conversation around pandemic learning loss and providing unparalleled insights for recovery efforts that are targeted and specific to districts large and small.
Up until the release of this data, many parents and policymakers had no way to know how the national trends have affected their students. According to a June 2022 survey by Learning Heroes, over 90% of parents responded that their child is at or above grade level – a finding that is in stark contrast to national assessment data. As stated on the Education Recovery Scorecard website: “Our hope is that these resources will prompt local communities to plan more ambitious catch-up efforts, using the $190 billion in federal pandemic relief aid. The interactive maps and corresponding data you will find on this site also provide insight on time spent in remote instruction, federal ESSER allocations and instructional spending per student. When available, achievement data are disaggregated by race and poverty status to provide a complete picture of the disparities in learning loss across the country.”
Prior to the fall NAEP release, HCM Strategists partnered with Dr. Thomas Kane from CEPR on the strategic rollout of new data, “The Road to COVID Recovery”. This report, which received focused reporting from major news outlets including the New York Times and the 74 Million, detailed the consequences of remote and hybrid instruction during the pandemic, and laid the foundation for a deeper impact of the data introduced through the Education Recovery Scorecard.
This work is ongoing and will continue to shape the conversation around learning loss and showcase recovery efforts to drive improved incomes for our nation’s youth.
PARTNERS
Edunomics Lab at Georgetown University
NAGB
SchoolDigger
American Enterprise Institute
Stanford University Education Opportunity Project
Calder (National Center for Analysis of Longitudinal Data in Education Research)
NWEA
Dartmouth
PRESS
About Learning Loss Report
About Recovery Scorecard:
COLLATERAL
Education Recovery Scorecard
Learning Loss Report
Report link: The Consequences of Remote and Hybrid Instruction During the Pandemic
Road To COVID Recovery website: https://cepr.harvard.edu/road-to-covid-recovery
