Teachers Push Back on Claim They Caused Learning Loss

During the pandemic teachers did the impossible. A new RAND report argues it wasn't enough.

Warning Bell is a new newsletter focused on the incredible stress being put on the teaching profession, and on teachers themselves. My name is Stephen Noonoo—I’m a longtime education journalist and editor for Edutopia, EdSurge, THE Journal and elsewhere.

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We’re on summer break so news is light, but we’ll be ramping up as back to school season gets underway next month.

Education Week is getting a lot of heat—and rightfully so—for its uncritical reporting of a shortsighted report* that used admin data and test scores to shift the blame for pandemic learning loss onto teachers.

As you might expect, teachers weren’t having it, taking to social media to point out how the flawed research cherry picks data to conclude that teaching deficits are responsible for test scores and student learning not bouncing back instantaneously. (The EdWeek Twitter thread linking to the article is an absolute object lesson in the art of the ratio.)

The now-infamous report was authored by the Center on Reinventing Public Education and used data collected by that org and RAND. It looked at 5 (unnamed) districts and surveyed admins and leaders but no teachers. Instead of realizing that teachers have been incredibly resilient during the last few years, picking up new digital skills and adapting their pedagogy on a dime, districts blamed their teachers for not doing enough learning acceleration—as if that was the silver bullet all along. Near the top of the piece, EdWeek quotes the report calling teachers’ instructional methods “outdated and ineffective.” Yikes on bikes.

The districts did acknowledge interruptions to professional development, coaching, classroom observations (not to mention the growing exodus of high quality teachers from the profession) heavily contributed, which is kind of a self own if you think about it. Later in the EdWeek piece, the perfectly anonymous district leaders complain that teachers, struggling with burnout and the challenge of adapting their lessons, did not even want to attend long professional development sessions, assuming they could be ginned up on the fly in the first place. As if teachers are well-known layabouts.

With all these telling admissions, it’s hard to believe these admins could conclude that the test score drop is anything but an unfortunate consequence of the pandemic, or their own failure to adequately assist their teachers.

Meanwhile, other research is finding that factors such as equality gaps, school closures, disrupted daily routines, and depression and anxiety—things teachers have no control over—are what’s really fueling test score declines. Without significant investment and additional learning time, students may never make up their lost ground.

Most of the blame (there’s that word again) in this brouhaha can be ascribed to the original report and its narrow methodology being used to support sweeping conclusions. On the whole, I don’t have much of an opinion on RAND—which co-led the panel the data was collected from—as a think tank/research group. Sometimes they get things right, sometimes they don’t. (US News lists them as politically centrist, which sounds about right.) But the most generous thing you can say about this particular report is that it’s lazy. The worst? Well, suffice to say, Warning Bell is a family publication….

That goes for EdWeek too, whose quality often varies on the strength of the particular reporters and editors working that day.

This isn’t a media crit publication, so I’ll spare you most of my thoughts on EdWeek and reporter Caitlynn Peetz’s coverage. Except to say I’ve worked at similar outlets to EdWeek and I know that sometimes a report lands in your inbox and it seems like a quick piece you can pair with a saucy headline (in this case, the scorcher: “Teachers’ Skills Took a Hit During the Pandemic, Too, Report Says,” which is flat out hostile and misleading). For these stories, you interview some expert—in this case report researcher Robin Lake of the Center on Reinventing Public Education—and quote liberally from the report and move on with your life. It’s the kind of journalism that’s one step above rewriting a press release, but I’ve done it before myself, mostly early in my career, though rarely to such opprobrium.

These days, I’d probably use it as a jumping off point to talk to teachers about their perceptions of their time teaching during the pandemic and after, and about the problems associated with relying too much on before/after test scores. In other words, there was a lot of nuance to the issue that neither RAND nor EdWeek bothered to get into.

One teacher noted on Twitter that teachers are not miracle workers, though they’re often expected to be. When teachers must supply this context themselves, in place of the media and researchers who should know and do better, they can be forgiven for adding a little snark. But on the whole, they were remarkably restrained, it seemed to me.

After all, as teachers know, someone has to be the adult in the room.

*Updated to reflect that the report was authored by the Center on Reinventing Public Education, using data co-collected by RAND.

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ICYMI

Edutopia: Who should evaluate teachers? In many schools, it’s admins, but a growing body of research suggests that when experienced teachers do the observing, they move the needle further. Adding video, coaching, and even student feedback can help too. Admin observations, on the other hand, might be scaled back in favor of shorter checks relating to things like classroom management.

Chalkbeat: A new Chalkbeat analysis of 15 states confirms a sad truth: “Every single one showed an increase in teachers exiting the classroom, compared to the year before the pandemic. A number of individual districts have also reported jumps in teachers leaving.” Texas, for example, is losing around 3.5% more teachers each year than before the pandmic.

CBS News: “Today, education is an afterthought for many college students, who are more likely to study business, engineering, and even the visual and performing arts, according to data from the National Center for Educational Statistics. Even as the population of college students has increased by 150% since 1970, the number of bachelor's degrees in education has plummeted by almost 50% — a steeper drop than that for English, literature and foreign language majors. Meanwhile, schools in all 50 states report teacher shortages in at least one subject area last year, according to the Brookings Institution.”