Students in Michigan have started to recover from the negative academic consequences caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, according to research from Michigan State University’s Education Policy Innovation Collaborative, EPIC. There are important lessons from the past two school years that policymakers, educators and stakeholders can use as they direct resources and design policies and programs aimed at accelerating learning.
As the strategic research partner of the Michigan Department of Education, researchers at EPIC have been studying pandemic learning in Michigan since the initial outbreak of COVID-19, which ushered in the first “Return to Learn” law to monitor student progress and study districts’ efforts to support students. Today EPIC released two reports stemming from the law. The first report documents students’ progress toward academic recovery using achievement on benchmark assessments through the 2020-21 and 2021-22 school years. The second report captures the perspectives of district and school leaders to identify best practices for supporting learning during the 2020-21 school year.
The first report incorporates new results from spring 2022 benchmark assessments, like the NWEA MAP and Curriculum Associates i-Ready tests, which were given at least twice during the year to measure student progress toward academic goals. The report finds that students were more likely to demonstrate achievement growth and more likely to make a full year’s achievement growth in 2021-22 than in 2020-21. Further, the percentages of students who did not demonstrate any achievement growth shrunk from nearly a quarter in 2020-21 to 15% in 2021-22. While this is a substantial reduction, it is still a greater proportion of students than the 11% who failed to demonstrate any achievement growth in a typical year prior to the pandemic.
However, while math and reading scores increased at a faster rate in the 2021-22 school year than the year prior, these improvements were often not enough to counteract the effects of interrupted learning in 2020-21. Overall, fewer Michigan students scored above per-pandemic national averages in 2021-22 than in 2020-21.
Katharine Strunk, the Clifford E. Erickson Distinguished Chair in Education and the faculty director of EPIC, noted that these trends are in line with findings from other states.
“Although these findings mirror what we are seeing across the country, they nonetheless reinforce the need to double down on recovery efforts,” Strunk said. “Students have not caught up academically to where they were prior to the pandemic, and we will need an all-hands-on-deck effort to support our schools and students as they work to overcome the trauma of the pandemic.”
The report also provides evidence that students whose districts provided more in-person instruction during the 2020-21 school year fared better — both in 2020-21 and in 2021-22. Each additional month that a district offered in-person instruction in 2020-21 was associated with an increase in average spring 2021 achievement of about 3% to 6% of a typical year’s learning. These impacts persisted into the 2021-22 school year, even as most students returned to in-person learning. In the 2021-22 school year, average achievement still increased by between 2% and 7% of a year’s learning for every month a district offered in-person instruction the year before.
Economically disadvantaged students, students with disabilities, Black students and Latino students improved at faster rates than their peers. As a result, the disparities in growth outcomes across race/ethnicity subgroups shrunk considerably by spring 2022. However, these groups of students still were less likely to achieve a typical year’s growth in math or reading achievement in both 2020-21 and 2021-22.
The second report delves more deeply into how schools and districts supported student learning. EPIC researchers conducted 46 interviews with district, school and teacher leaders across five districts that demonstrated better-than-predicted gains in student performance in the 2020-21 school year. Several common areas of success were identified by local education leaders across the state including clear and consistent two-way communication with families and other stakeholders and the prioritization of social-emotional learning. However, there were some different approaches across districts depending on whether they provided remote, hybrid or in-person instruction. Those providing in-person instruction tried to foster a sense of “normalcy” with a return to school and in-person social activities, while those providing hybrid instruction leveraged in-person and virtual opportunities for students to connect. Districts providing remote instruction scheduled time and space during the virtual school day for relationship building.
Local education leaders in all districts demonstrated increased awareness of educational inequities in their school systems, stemming in part from interacting directly with students and their families in their homes. This awareness deepened local leaders’ commitments to providing more equitable access to educational opportunities, including digital devices and internet access as well as targeted supports aligned with students’ individual needs.
There were also common areas of challenge, including the tension with balancing health and safety needs while trying to deliver high-quality learning experiences, and educators’ heightened stress and burnout as they went above and beyond to support students and families.
Hayley Weddle, assistant professor of education policy at the University of Pittsburgh and an EPIC-affiliated researcher, noted these successes and challenges must be grappled with during pandemic recovery efforts.
“Leaders and educators shared several promising strategies to support student learning amidst the traumas of the COVID-19 pandemic, which can inform ongoing recovery efforts. Their experiences point to the need for long-term investments in educator and leader pipelines, bolstering technology infrastructure and strong partnerships with families.”
“These two EPIC studies are important,” said State Superintendent Michael Rice. “One shares those districts that outperformed their peers in certain ways during the pandemic, irrespective of instructional modality. The other shares benchmark assessment data that indicates that we are improving, but that we have — to paraphrase the poet Robert Frost — miles to go before we sleep. Though these data may be uncomfortable to many, they serve as a critical impetus not simply to return to where we were pre-pandemic, but also to take the lessons of the pandemic and our generational fiscal year 2023 budget passed this summer to help us build better schools and a better educational system for our school children.”
While these reports help to deepen our understanding of how Michigan public school students progressed and learned during the 2020-21 and 2021-22 school years, the authors stress the limitations of the data. The analyses in the first report represent only a subset of the K-8 student population across the state, and prior research has shown that the pandemic has had a greater negative effect on achievement and growth for the specific student populations who tend to be underrepresented in the data. The second report is limited to the experiences of five districts across the state.
“Given what we now know about the immediate and longer-term impacts of the pandemic on student achievement trajectories, it is critical that we continue to track student progress in the years to come,” Strunk said. “We cannot know where to target resources and what supports educators and students need without understanding where they are and how far they’ve come.”