Charter schools show how to reverse pandemic learning losses | Opinion

COVID-19 hit America’s students hard, even if they never got sick. The added stresses at home, coupled with lengthy school closures and online learning, caused millions of students to fall behind.

How far behind? “The Nation’s Report Card,” an annual assessment by the U.S. Department of Education, showed historic declines from 2019 to 2022 in math and reading scores for fourth- and eighth-grade students. Currently, just 26% of eighth graders are proficient in math, down from 34% in 2019. For fourth graders, 36% are proficient in math, down from 41%. For both groups, only about a third of students now read at grade level.

Since the scores were released this fall, they’ve become a political football, used to defend every kind of educational policy position. But the truth is, we’ve all suffered: Although Hispanic, Black and low-income kids were affected disproportionately, student scores fell across every racial and economic group. They fell in nearly every state, in both private and public schools. Traditional public schools and charter schools — which have more flexible and autonomous instructional models — experienced roughly equivalent learning losses.

These losses, as Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona said, are “appalling and unacceptable.”

Yet our educational system has been through tough times before, and we have the resilience to bounce back.

Even now, individual schools offer beacons of hope. Some defied the odds and improved student performance despite the pandemic.

Take DC Bilingual, a charter school in Washington, D.C., where the number of third-, fourth- and fifth-grade students meeting or exceeding grade-level standards increased by six percentage points in language arts and nine percentage points in math between the 2018-2019 and 2021-2022 school years.

Meanwhile, D.C. schools across the board finally showed an academic recovery beginning in the spring of 2022, according to a study of 45,000 students across the capital at both traditional and charter public schools. Conducted by the training organization EmpowerK12, the study showed that student improvement rates in grades three to eight had returned to pre-pandemic norms.

The study also analyzed what strategies were particularly successful at preventing students from falling behind. Those strategies included more time with instructors both during and beyond the regular school day, the evidence-based approach to literacy known as the “science of reading,” high levels of communication among school leaders, teachers, students and families, and frequent data analysis and progress monitoring.

More broadly, recent research published by Brookings has found that adding more instructional time — per day or per year — is associated with higher student achievement. Currently, instructional time varies wildly across the United States, and even sometimes within the same district. This points to room for improvement.

In some cases, charter schools’ independence allowed them to adapt more speedily to the pandemic. Stanford University’s Center for Research on Education Outcomes (CREDO) recently released a study on the experiences of charter schools in California, New York and Washington state from the start of the pandemic through the end of the 2020-21 school year.

CREDO found that it took charter schools 3.5 days to pivot to remote schooling when the pandemic hit in March 2020. In comparison, many traditional schools didn’t fully transition until May of that year. And a study by the RAND Corporation found that once remote learning was established, 95% of charter schools monitored student attendance in online classes through multiple daily check-ins, compared to 70% of all schools.

That sort of adaptability may have helped some charter schools minimize their students’ learning losses amid the pandemic. Consider HIVE Preparatory, a charter K-8 school in Hialeah. Its students are well on their way to reaching pre-pandemic academic success levels — at a much faster rate than their peers. In 2021, HIVE ranked in the top 10% in math and top 4% in reading on both third and eighth grade student assessments.

No school emerged unscathed from COVID-19. But certain schools adapted faster than others — and it made an enormous difference for students. That gives us reason for optimism as we take their lessons to heart.

Darryl Cobb, of Chicago, is the president of the Charter School Growth Fund.