Episode 151: Are Students Bouncing Back from the Pandemic?

During the COVID-19 pandemic, over half a million K-12 students in Connecticut had to rapidly pivot to remote and hybrid learning. Now, after five years, schools have reestablished their regular rhythms, and it’s easy to imagine that the pandemic’s effects on learning have subsided along with social-distancing and mask mandates. But unfortunately, this isn’t the case for many students. Our guest on this episode of the UConn 360 podcast is Morgaen Donaldson, the Associate Dean for Research and Philip E. Austin Endowed Chair of the UConn Neag School of Education.  She has worked to investigate and address the pandemic’s effects on student performance and well-being. Donaldson works to identify the issues currently faced by schools, develop research studies to analyze them, and ultimately design solutions. 

Listen to Episode 151 on Podbean

Mike: Hello everybody. Welcome to another episode of the UConn 360 Podcast. It’s Mike Enright from University Communications, along with Izzy Harris from University Communications. Hello, Izzy. How are you?

Izzy: Good morning. I’m well. How are you?

Mike: I’m doing good. We have a serious subject to talk about today, which affects a lot of people in Connecticut and really around the country, and, for a lot of people, the COVID-19 pandemic seems like it was a long time ago. I’m sure for some people it seems like it was very recent, but there’s still lingering effects, especially with our school age children. That’s what we’re going to talk a little bit about today. Our guest is Morgaen Donaldson.

She’s from our Neag School of Education here at UConn. She’s the director of the University Center for Educational Policy Analysis, Research, and Evaluation.

She’s also a research affiliate of the Project of the Next Generation of Teachers at Harvard and co-director of the Center for Connecticut Education Research Collaboration, which is an innovative partnership between the State Department of Education and researchers from Connecticut’s various colleges and universities.

Morgaen’s been on the ground level. She was a high school teacher in urban and semi-urban schools and was a founding member of the Boston Arts Academy. She earned her undergraduate degree from Princeton and has graduate and doctorate degrees from Harvard. So, Morgaen, thank you for joining us today.

Welcome to UConn 360 Podcast.

Morgaen: Thanks, Mike. Thanks, Izzy.

Mike: So, all of us, some of us were parents, some of us were children, some of us were teachers. We all were affected certainly by COVID-19 and the effect it had on our educational system. Students went remote; they did hybrid learning.

Schools appear from the outside to be on regular rhythms, but your research shows that maybe students quite aren’t back on track yet. Can you tell us a little bit about your research and what you found?

Morgaen: Sure. So, we found that the COVID-19 pandemic had a huge impact, and this is nothing new.

Parents, children, community members know this. But what’s more troubling is that the recovery from COVID-19 has been pretty slow. So, if we look at the NAEP scores, the NAEP assessment has been administered to children around the world every year since 1990 or thereabouts.

And we see that the math scores have returned a little bit, but mostly at the highest achieving levels. So, the students who were doing pretty well anyway before the pandemic have kind of rebounded to doing pretty almost at the level of 2019 as of right now in math. But the other students have not really rebounded.

So, if you get below the 50th percentile, their scores are pretty steady and have not really recovered since 2019. And then the reading scores haven’t really moved for any group much. So, these are national data. Of course there are differences by state, there are differences by locality, there are differences by demographic, but on the whole, as a country, we haven’t really seen the rebound that we were hoping to see.

And I think in some ways that’s predictable. COVID-19 had a huge impact on students, and it wasn’t just academic, it was also mental health, physical activity. So, it’s not surprising it’s taking a while to return to quote unquote normal.

Izzy: Your work identifies possible solutions for students in schools to decrease this COVID gap. What are some of those solutions?

Morgaen: So, one big solution that’s been pretty effective is high dosage tutoring. This is students working one-on-one or in small groups with a qualified tutor over time.

So, two, three times a week, with often the same person on their academic skills. And this has been shown to have huge effects on student learning. And we’ve seen, even in Connecticut, some of the projects that we’ve done within CCRC, our collaborative, have shown some really positive impacts of high dosage tutoring on student learning and achievement.

And I think one of the aspects of high dosage tutoring that makes it so effective is the personal connection between the student and the tutor, that really helps motivate that student and helps them figure out complex topics and really make progress.

Mike: So Morgaen, you’ve done a lot of research work on educational leadership, teachers, instructional practice, but you’ve been there on the front lines.

Tell us a little bit about your experience as a high school teacher and how you first got into education.

Morgaen: Sure. Well, education runs in my family. So, my parents met as teachers in a middle school in Philadelphia in the 1960s. So that’s how I got my start. I grew up playing school and my sister was a teacher.

My brother’s a principal, so it’s kind of the family business. After I graduated from college with a history degree, I knew I wanted to be a teacher, so I went and got my master’s and was luckily hired as a founding teacher at the Boston Arts Academy, which is Boston’s Public School for the Arts.

And so, at the age of 25, I was in there, you know, having conversations about the very basics of schooling. Do we want the students to call us Ms. Donaldson or Morgaen and things like that and how are we going to balance the arts and also the academics. And it was just such a positive experience.

It was so difficult because we were teaching some of the students we taught had significant academic challenges, but it was a small enough school and we were a strong enough team that we were able to find the way to reach pretty much every student and help those students address their weaknesses and graduate and go on, whether it was into the arts or onto college.

It was a very, very successful high school, and it continues to be. And so, after a few years of doing that, I thought, I want to go study what makes schools great because I had such a positive experience, and I want to figure out how to replicate that school so that more kids have that sort of opportunity.

Mike: So, it seems like teaching is obviously a very difficult profession right now. What’s your elevator pitch to somebody maybe who’s a high school student that’s thinking about becoming a teacher and maybe they’re hearing from some people, why would you ever want to become a teacher?

What’s your pitch to somebody, why they should become a teacher?

Morgaen: Teaching is just a great, great job, and a great, great profession. And so, for high school students who are thinking, what do I want to be when I grow up? I think the number one motivation to go into teaching is the ability to shape the lives of the future.

Future citizens, future residents of your community, your state, and your country. There’s just no better way to impact the future than teaching. And it’s also an opportunity to continue to study things you love. So, if you love biology, why not marry your love of biology with your opportunity to really impact the future by going into teaching?

And I think another thing, I have two high school, well, I have one high school student, one first year college student, and I tell them, you know, teaching is such a great guarantee of a job for the future. These young kids, they’re worried about the future. They’re worried about getting jobs. Well, we’re always going to have schools, we’re always going to need teachers, and it’s such a steady way to have a job and to contribute to society. I just don’t think it can be beat.

Izzy: Talk about the work that the Neag School of Education is doing in partnership with Connecticut Alliance districts.

Morgaen: The Neag School has a lot of partnerships with alliance districts for student teacher placement for our leader preparation programs, etc. But the aspect of the partnership that I’m most involved with is a collaboration to respond to a couple different problems.

One is Alliance District leaders need good information, and yet they don’t have really the time to do the research to really gather good data on the solutions to the problems that they’re seeing in their schools. And they don’t necessarily have access to all the research. On the other hand, in Neag we have students, graduate students who have great access to the best research, but they don’t have opportunities to use it in ways that have real impact in schools.

So, what we’ve done is we’ve set up a program called the Rapid Research Brief Program. Where Alliance District superintendents identify pressing problems in their school districts, such as student absenteeism or attracting and retaining teachers or figuring out the best high school schedule to raise student performance.

And we identify Neag, and not just Neag, actually engineering and liberal arts graduate students who have time and substantive interest in these issues, and we match them together. And so, our students go out and do the research and prepare these rapid research briefs and provide them to the alliance district superintendents, and then they can use them to really make informed research-based decisions on how they should allocate their funds and how they should spend their time.

Mike: So, we hear about it and some of us live it, but talk about how we’re doing in Connecticut and where we are on chronic absenteeism. I’m sensing maybe the news isn’t good, but maybe it is.

Morgaen: It’s improving for sure, which is great because during the pandemic in some districts, it was up like, you know, 50% were chronically absent, which is just; kids can’t learn if they’re not in school. So, it’s a really basic need to get kids back in school and in Connecticut. We have a program called LEAP, which was established by the governor through some partnerships, and it involves home visiting.

Schools put together teams including teachers, administrators, social workers, and they go out when students are chronically absent, they go out to the home, and they try to get at the root cause of that absence problem. And we found through a project within CCRC that this program has had huge positive impacts on chronic absenteeism in the districts that are participating. And it’s also actually had impacts on student learning, on their achievement scores as well.

So, Connecticut has decreased chronic absenteeism quite a bit from that early, you know, up to 50%. Now we’re down below 20% in general. So that’s really good. And some districts have really decreased it even more, which is great.

Izzy: I guess some might say one upside of the pandemic changed education. You say that educators took the opportunity to support whole student development.

What does that mean and how did that change the way and what students learn about?

Morgaen: Yeah. So, some research we’ve done has looked at how, if at all, teachers’ practices have changed since the pandemic and they’ve changed in some ways that we might predict, like they’re using more technology, but they’re also using socio-emotional learning techniques.

So, they have curriculum that they’ve adopted and that involves different ways of fostering empathy and collaboration and cooperation and that sort of thing. But then another thing that we weren’t really expecting is that teachers reported that when they start thinking about planning a lesson, they’re much more likely to think about the emotional and the social aspects of it.

So, for example, not just launching into a group work project, but really kind of starting with brainstorming with the students, how are we going to collaborate together? How are we going to work through our issues, our conflicts, that sort of thing. So, it seems to me that there’s been a shift towards really kind of recognizing the social and emotional skills that are needed if students are to learn at the levels, we want them to learn.

Mike: Morgaen, we always try to close out here. You know, we always on the podcast try to do news you can use. If you’re a parent of an elementary school student or a high school student out there, what can they do for their children to close this COVID gap, especially if their own child isn’t quite there yet?

Morgaen: Well, one big thing is to keep reading. The reading scores are stubbornly low, which is really disappointing. I think, you know, there are many reasons for that, but partially it’s our plugged-in generation, and it’s not just students, but it’s also their parents. So, I think parents can read more with their kids.

They can also look at their own behavior. If we are using our phones around our kids, of course our kids are going to want to pick up their phones, and they will get sucked in. So, with my own child at home, I really try to encourage him to read, I try to encourage him not to use his phone as much as he wants to.

And it’s not easy at all. They are engineered to be addictive, and social media is engineered to be addictive. So, the more that we can get kids to be reading, to be outside, enjoying nature, to be doing things, interacting with other kids, whether it’s sports, whether it’s arts, whether it’s nature, whether it’s whatever community group.

I think this society, we really need to emphasize coming together and being involved in our communities and also not resorting to this ready-made entertainment, which we carry in our pocket 24 hours a day. Because that’s really not going to help us solve these educational problems.

And I think it creates more societal problems that we just have to stem the tide on.

Mike: Well, that’s good and good luck to all the parents out there that are part of that because it’s not easy.

Morgaen: Absolutely it’s not.

Mike: So, Morgaen, thank you very much for joining us today and an interesting topic and something to keep an eye on. You know, we think COVID is in our rear-view mirror, but in some ways it isn’t.

Morgaen: Thank you.

Mike: Izzy, we’ll talk to you next time on the podcast.

Izzy: See you next time.

Mike: Bye everybody.