New report shows youngest students off track

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Amplify, a curriculum and assessment provider and NATP Platinum Partner, released a new report on student achievement for US students. The analysis reveals that our youngest students continue to remain off-track. See below for more pandemic lessons learned:

• Young children learning to read, especially Black and Hispanic students, are in need of significant support nearly two years after the pandemic disrupted their transition into school, according to new assessment results.
• Mid-year data from Amplify shows that while the so-called “COVID cohort” of students in kindergarten, first and second grade are making progress, they haven’t caught up to where students in those grade levels were performing before schools shut down in March 2020. 
• Results from fourth- and fifth-graders, however, show greater recovery, with the rates of students meeting benchmarks nearly back to the same level they were in the winter of the 2019-20 school year.
• The percentage of students in K-3 off track in reading is still higher than it was before the pandemic, but reading performance in grades four and five is back to where it was before schools closed in March 2020. (Amplify)
• What has happened in the past couple years is more dramatic, but it’s not anything new for us who work in early literacy. Children have been struggling with reading for years and years.
• State-level efforts to improve reading instruction continue to spread, but it can take two to three years before districts start to see gains.
• Schools also need to identify children who might have learning disabilities and provide parents with materials to use at home.
• When children returned to in-person learning, social distancing from peers and teachers still got in the way of listening and speaking, which contribute to early reading skills. 
• The Amplify data also shows racial disparities, with Black and Hispanic students in K-2 not making as strong of a comeback as white students and gaps growing larger than they were before the pandemic.
• Schools are “doubling down” on remediation and using both virtual and in-person tutoring programs to help students catch up.

Full article HERE

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