How has the COVID-19 pandemic affected student learning and school attendance? And how can parents, teachers, and schools help students recover?

On this episode of School’s In, hosts Dan Schwartz and Denise Pope welcome Professor Tom Dee as they tackle these challenges of the post-pandemic learning world. Tom’s research sheds light on key issues, including:

• The substantial learning loss during the pandemic, especially in math
• The possible effects of pandemic disruption on our youngest learners, who are still outside testing windows
• What factors are driving persistent chronic absenteeism among students
• Low-cost, scalable strategies to improve school attendance
• The importance of using targeted, evidence-based strategies and teaching methods to improve student achievement

Professor Thomas S. Dee is the Barnett Family Professor at Stanford’s Graduate School of Education. His research focuses on the use of quantitative methods to inform contemporary issues of public policy and practice. To learn more about his research, visit his faculty profile.

School’s In is your go-to podcast for cutting-edge insights and enlightening conversations in education. 

Presented by Stanford Graduate School of Education (GSE), GSE Dean Dan Schwartz and Senior Lecturer Denise Pope invite you to join them as they navigate the complexities of post-pandemic education and discuss the latest research in teaching and learning.

Stanford GSE is a leader in education research and teaching, known for its commitment to pursuing equitable, accessible, and effective learning for all. 

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Basically an additional six and a half million kids in K-12 public schools are now chronically absent.

Today we're tackling one of the most significant challenges post-pandemic, learning loss and chronic absenteeism. Our guest is Tom Dee. He's a professor at the Graduate School of Education and he's an expert in education policy and economics. He's also been deeply involved in researching the impact of Covid-19 on students' academic performance and their attendance.

Welcome to School's In, [00:00:30] your go-to podcast for cutting-edge insights in learning. Each episode, we dive into the latest trends, innovations, and challenges facing learners. I'm Denise Pope, senior lecturer at Stanford GSE and co-founder of Challenge Success, and I'm with my co-host, Dan Schwartz, Dean of Stanford Graduate School of Education, and the faculty director of the Stanford Accelerator for Learning.

[00:01:00] Denise, so good to see you. I hope you're doing well. It's good to be here and I'm looking forward to our show today, as always.

Me too, Dan. I'm so excited. It's going to be a really good one. If you were long-time listeners, we are so glad to have you back. We are so appreciative. And if you're new, we're glad you found us.

Denise, it is so good to hear the dulcet tones of your voice yet again.

Oh, Dan.

I'm so glad we're back together.

It's very exciting.

Tom has [00:01:30] been spending a lot of time looking into what's happening in schools post-pandemic, and in today's episode we're going to hear about his research on learning loss and absenteeism, and we're going to discuss what schools and parents can do to help students get back on track. So important.

Tom, we are thrilled to have you here. So we're going to just go ahead and dig in with the big question, just how much learning was lost during the pandemic?

Thank you, and thanks for having me. So in terms of learning loss, pretty substantial. So [00:02:00] basically 20 years of test score gains have been wiped out with particularly large losses in math and smaller ones in reading. For those in the audience who used to listening or reading about education research, on the order of 10 to 15% of a standard deviation. So pretty substantial. But those gains over 20 years were more modest than we would like.

But I also think there are important dimensions of the pandemic learning loss that we have yet to understand. [00:02:30] In particular, what a lot of my work done in collaboration with journalists and collecting data on enrollment has shown is that the kids who experienced the most substantial disruptions missing pre-K, skipping kindergarten, switching schools, were our very youngest learners who are just beginning to age into testing windows where we'll really know about how their trajectories have changed.

So we're going to learn a lot more in the next few years about that as those kids grow up. And [00:03:00] I've argued in some of my writing too, it creates a kind of bias in our discourse because we look where the light shines, we look at the older kids in tested grades, but there may be very serious harm to the kids who aren't yet in the penumbra of that light. It's not shining on them yet.

That's a little scary.

No, I've been worried about this. In particular, is there a developmental window that closes that there was some kinds of learnings that you can't get [00:03:30] at another age? Language acquisition gets a lot harder as you get older. I'll be interested to see the results.

Also though, I want to stress a kind of historical-minded perspective on this because anyone who's studied education knows that crisis rhetoric comes up as regularly as the sun. And so I have that in the back of my mind as I'm sitting here saying, this feels very much like a crisis, that we've said this before, but we really mean it this time.

[00:04:00] But I think it is serious both because of that learning loss, because of the enrollment disruptions, but even more disturbingly what we're seeing about how kids are readjusting to a kind of return to normal and in-person instruction. And with some of the most recent work I've done in collaboration with the Associated Press has underscored this, that we've seen a near doubling of chronic absenteeism among students in the '21 - '22 school year. And all the data available [00:04:30] to us suggests that has persisted into the '22 - '23 school year, and to suggest a large scale failure of many kids to fully reintegrate into schooling as we knew it before the pandemic.

Yeah. So tell us more about that research. Part of my reaction to learning loss if I'm feeling jaded is does it really matter if kids graduate with one year less of schooling? At 12th grade you're not doing anything anyway, so [00:05:00] I can be sort of jaded. But then, if there's this part where there's sort of these lingering effects that are just going to keep cascading through the system, I start to get very, very worried. So say more about how you found out.

Yeah. Well, on how we found out, I mean this was really my work and my collaborators at the Associated Press most recently trying to infill the deep inadequacies of the data systems that the pandemic has exposed. Because I had been hearing scattered anecdotal accounts from districts [00:05:30] and a state or two that my gosh, chronic absenteeism has really spiked. And so there was a kind of folk wisdom among the cognoscente that this appeared to be a problem, but nothing like comprehensive data.

So I mounted this effort to go state by state and collect, verify and draw together those data, and that was the substance of the report that I put out in August. And the linked reporting from the Associated Press have documented that doubling, basically an additional [00:06:00] six and a half million kids in K-12 public schools are now chronically absent.

Tom, can you define chronically absent, because I don't know if people understand what that actually means?

Yeah, that's a great point. Thanks, Denise. It basically refers to kids who are missing 10% or more of school days for any reason, excused or unexcused. The typical school year has about 180 school days, so we're talking about kids missing typically 18 days or more. And this is a metric [00:06:30] that's really come into broad use as a kind of index for barriers to learning under the federal Every Student Succeeds Act. Because schools were given a lot more flexibility to move beyond test scores and thinking about how they were meeting kids' needs, and chronic absenteeism became kind of instantiated as a very widely used measure.

And that's why I was able to collect these data because for the last five or six years, virtually all states have been reporting that. So we were able to get data covering [00:07:00] 92% of school kids across the US.

So it's missing 18 days. They don't have to be all in a row, just 18 days-

That's right-

... the course of a school year. What was interesting is you said excused or unexcused absences.

That's right. And it's very intentionally meant to be this sort of very broad index for, could be in school, out of school factors that are just inhibiting kids opportunities to learn.

Because you get Covid and [00:07:30] you can't go back when you're testing positive. That's practically in the old days, that was 14 days. I know it's less now. I think it's like five or six at schools, but still, you're like a third of the way there, you get Covid once.

I think that's right. And that raises the questions of how do we understand this sharp rise in chronic absenteeism? And I tried to engage that in my analysis. I think we're going to need richer, more disaggregated data to do this really definitively.

But basically I linked the state level growth in chronic absenteeism to a variety of candidate [00:08:00] factors that might explain it, the prevalence of Covid infections during that year kids were returning to school, the presence of bans on wearing masks or requirements to wear masks, information on CDC data on the deterioration in student mental health over this period, enrollment change. We might think that the differential exodus from public schools during the pandemic could mechanically create changes in the chronic absenteeism rate.

[00:08:30] None of these seem to explain the state level growth. Only one thing really did. And that was the extent to which during the previous 2020 - '21 school year, schools had been in remote only instruction. If the schools had been closed during that first full school year during the pandemic, predicted much higher chronic absenteeism when kids returned to school in fall of 2021.

So again, this is just [00:09:00] correlational, it's not definitive evidence, but it's consistent with the idea that the major factor was kids falling out of the habit of going to school or maybe parents no longer seeing the value in regular school attendance.

So Tom, the threshold of 10% is interesting to me. How do you choose it? I guess the question behind it is, is there a strong linear slope between absenteeism and school grades [00:09:30] or school achievement tests, or is it more of a dogleg that suddenly when you hit 18 days, test scores start to get affected?

Yeah, I don't think there's anything sacrosanct about that particular threshold. The way researchers commonly do, they alight upon it for a variety of reasons. But we see similar reductions in attendance. And all the evidence I've seen is that across all margins, attending school more is beneficial to kids on a variety of outcome indicators. [00:10:00] But there's nothing particularly sacred about the way we've chosen to define.

I'm worried about parents out there. If their kid misses four days, are they going to do worse, like six days or should the parents relax?

I think first they should relax 'cause being relaxed probably makes them better parents, but they should also try to make sure their kids are in school as much as they can healthfully be.

When [00:10:30] you were a kid, did your parents let you skip school and did they force you to make it up?

I was a kid a long time ago, Dan. That's asking me to really think back. I can tell you, it's sort of funny that you're asking this because we have this story in my family that my grandmother tells about missing school. So I'm going to sidestep that question and just tell you the grandma story for a second, which is I don't know why, but this comes up at family dinners where she'll say, "You know, I was absent on the one day that they [00:11:00] were teaching square root," and she always would say square root. And she said, "And I've regretted it my whole life."

So when any of our kids or at this dinner would say, "Oh, they weren't excited to go back to school," or whatever, she would say, "You know, be careful 'cause you could miss the one day where you learn square root." And so it's like ...

I had that experience.

What do you mean?

Oh, it was statistics in graduate school and there was one day where I was tired too much and I missed it. And it's turned out every year a graduate [00:11:30] student asks me exactly about the thing I missed. And I bluff. I do a good job of bluffing, but it is pretty amazing. It was that one, one day.

Tom, time to recover. How are schools doing? Anything working especially well?

I think we've got a few bright spots. I mean, there's a great deal of enthusiasm, for example, around providing tutoring opportunities for kids, though I think [00:12:00] real challenges in doing that well and at scale.

I think I'm also encouraged by the fact there's really good evidence on tier one initial strategies to promote school attendance among kids and tactics that are low cost and scalable with fidelity. In particular, there've been a number of carefully designed experiments that simply will communicate to parents through texting or through postcards, personalized information about how their child is [00:12:30] doing, that they might be missing too much school.

And there's some interesting design elements that are kind of psychologically informed that can enhance the impact of that. So for example, what in the literature is called social norming, saying this is where your kid is and this is where their classroom peers are. Adding that little bit of social context can be impactful.

And also attending to the language used in that communication, making it less judgmental and instead kind of underscoring shared purpose around having kids [00:13:00] attend school regularly. But getting that communication out is low cost, can be done at scale with great fidelity. And I think any school district that's not doing that now should really look into making that happen.

Tom, you're going to get a postcard from me pretty soon about the social norms of faculty.

Who else is showing up?

I don't think I'll be alone.

Is part of this just making it more attractive to go to school, making school more fun and exciting? Is part of this just like [00:13:30] school seems like boring and they took all the fun stuff away?

Well, I don't know that the school has changed per se, as much as just people's sense of engagement with it. I think we really, this is purely subjective on my part, as I said again in my home office, but we fell out of the habit of regularly going to the place of work or study, and I think that's proved enduring for kids in ways that are going to be problematic.

So Denise, you underestimate habits. [00:14:00] I'm wearing pajamas now at the office so..

We got out of the habit of coming in every day. That was our kids that were the adults. That was a bunch of us. Right? That's one theory.

So Tom, you did some interesting work on a reading curriculum or an interesting approach that showed some catch up effects. So talk a little bit about this study and intervention.

Yeah. And this is part of the Science of Reading debate, which I just think is one of the most fascinating issues in education [00:14:30] research and policy right now. Many listeners may be familiar with the decades-long reading wars, which basically had researchers and policymakers sparring over the best way to teach, in particular young learners how to read. And it pitted an older tradition of more phonics-based instruction against a newer tradition based on whole language and then a kind of middle ground called balanced literacy that purported to combine the two.

So there's been [00:15:00] that long-standing debate, but a shift in recent years I think, and a sense that the science of reading, which includes for young readers more phonics-based instruction is really the right way to go. Now the problem we have is that efforts to really make that happen in the classroom simply haven't worked.

There was a major federal initiative as part of No Child Left Behind that had no effects on student outcomes. And there've been a variety of state level initiatives that purport [00:15:30] to push out and encourage teachers to use science of reading practices and haven't really worked.

Now, we studied a California initiative that targeted the 70 lowest achieving elementary schools in California and came out of a legal settlement. The state had been sued for violating its constitutional obligation to educate children and to provide them with early literacy skills. As a result, they took around $50 million and directed it towards science [00:16:00] of reading pedagogy in these schools. And in a recent study with a Stanford doctoral student, we found looking over the first two years of that program that it really appears to be working. It's moving the needle on reading achievement in meaningful ways.

Okay. I have a hypothesis about this, and you can shoot me down, Tom 'cause you're the expert, but here's my hypothesis. When I was reading about this, they said they weren't just handing people a curriculum to use saying, "This is the Science of Reading curriculum, use it." But that money was going toward professional [00:16:30] development for educators, it was involving parents in this, and maybe you can say more about that, but it was doing a lot more than just saying, "Go back to those boring phonics instruction books."

Yeah, this is such an important question Denise, because I think generally in education, when we see a policy effort that appears to have been impactful, we have such trouble replicating it and doing it a second time. So I think it's really important to pay attention to the unique design and implementation [00:17:00] details of what went on with this money. And it was this, seems like this delicate balance between being prescriptive and also providing school flexibility.

So just to sketch it out briefly, they began by offering eligible schools money to develop school level literacy action plans and support in the contours of that, making it consistent with the science of reading.

Then they provided oversight of those plans and looked at the proposed budgets before approving them. They gave [00:17:30] schools, it was over half a million dollars for three years to implement those plans on average and gave them broad spending guidelines, four different categories that could include professional development for teachers, additional instructional support staff, strategies for family and engagement, money for new textbooks and things of that sort. So broad guidelines, but then flexibility within them for schools to kind of design their own plan.

So I think these kind of design features are probably really critical [00:18:00] for the early success of this program. That balance of being prescriptive in evidence-based ways and flexible in ways that engage substantive change within the school and ultimately critically within the classroom.

So is it possible that the gains were just because the school got aligned as opposed to the science of reading? Everybody's lined up, right? They're consistent. They're coherent. There's an agreement. Is it possible this is what's driving these results [00:18:30] as opposed to the science of reading?

Well, that might be because there is that embedded in it, but there's always this challenge in understanding the impact of these kinds of policy initiatives because they're so multifaceted. And so there's often this effort when we see it's having an effect to say, "Okay, I see it was doing seven different things." It probably compelled some instructional coherence and alignment as you're describing along with the science of reading.

And so people will commonly ask what the special [00:19:00] sauce is. And I'm at a point where sometimes I think that question is too reductive and to think that there could be one singular silver bullet within it because they may interact in ways that aren't additive and they really have to be there together as complements.

But if we were to learn, it was really about forcing instructional coherence and alignment, I'm happy to claim that is the reason for the success. I have no history in the reading wars, [00:19:30] but I'd be curious what perspectives you guys have on that long-standing debate.

Well, there's actually an entire School's In show on the reading wars where Dan and I enter into a debate with Rebecca Silverman here, who's at the School of Education. So our listeners can find that one. It's a very juicy, interesting debate that if my memory serves, Dan and I completely lost to whatever the competition was that Rebecca was setting up about is it this or this? And we always [00:20:00] chose the wrong one. So I don't know. Dan, do you have a strong opinion, phonics versus whole language?

I'm a math science guy.

Way to skirt.

How's that?

Way to skirt the issue.

The thing I always wonder is how these wars get started is a war between ... I mean, it's like two faculty member quibbling with each other. How did it become a war?

Well, I think this is actually really fascinating. For all the attention that reading wars and the science of reading has received, at some level I feel it's as if it's not enough. Because when I think about [00:20:30] if you believe the science of reading and phonics-based instruction for early readers is important, the scale at which we've been failing is at some level mind-numbing 'cause surveys indicate that something like 80% of teachers are using three cueing methods in the classroom and have been doing so for something like four decades.

Three cueing. Tom, you want to just tell, again, tell our listeners-

Oh, sorry. Three cueing is an instructional method sometimes associated with balanced literacy, but really grounded [00:21:00] in whole language. And the idea is you don't have to be didactic in teaching students phonemic awareness, the sounds of words and their components and how to sight read. Instead, you have them draw clues from the context, the sentence, any graphical images available, et cetera.

And so the science of reading would emphatically discredit that type of three cueing instruction. Yet we've been doing it at scale for decades, and my rough calculations suggest in our nation of over 300 million [00:21:30] people, that implies that something like 200 million people have been taught a foundational academic skill the wrong way. So that's really striking, and-

Okay, maybe I do have an opinion...

Okay. I was waiting for this. Go ahead, Dan.

I knew I could draw him out.

Yeah, yeah. So meaning-based approaches where you're trying to figure things out and connect them are really important. You need to learn to interpret a passage, and that's meaning making. You can do it at the word level. What must this [00:22:00] word be?

On the other hand, there is some value at just memorizing routinized things like recognizing that BR is a blend and this is how you pronounce it. So I would've assumed that the blended would've won, except there's probably a mistake in the execution of the blending.

But you need both. I mean, I haven't memorized every word that exists. I have to look at some and figure it out, and I may not use context. I may sound it out.

So I think part of the confusion here too though, is that people think the science of reading [00:22:30] is just phonics.

Yes.

It's phonics at early stages, but there are different science of reading for the kinds of comprehension and fluency you're describing. But it's just that the phonemic awareness and sight reading and all of those foundational skills are where you need to begin.

The number of times someone, I try to explain to someone that there's a different way to learn that might be more effective. And they say to me, "No, no, no, no. I learned that way. I did just fine." And my response to them is, "You [00:23:00] may have other people didn't work so well for."

I would just quickly note how we got here too, because based on what I've read about the evolution of the reading wars, at some level the villain is siloed academic scholarship. The fact that these different intellectual traditions were able to persist in isolation because intellectual communities within the academy were not talking to each other and engaging with each other sufficiently. And so that allowed those who were closer [00:23:30] with teacher training to have one view and another community to have a very different view. And we need to do better collectively, I think.

So important. So true. Thank you so much, Tom. What a great show.

I agree. Thank you, Tom.

The past year or so, we've finally started learning how consequential Covid was for our students and where the effects are taking place. So thank you.

100%. Now, as good educators, we like to end our [00:24:00] lessons with some tangible takeaways. So Dan, I'm going to put you on the spot. Are you ready for this? What stood out to you?

What stood out to me is that Tom's research just clearly shows that absenteeism is a problem that we need to get under control. You know some districts have had successes, but overall, getting kids back to school has been harder than everybody anticipated.

Oh my goodness, way harder than people anticipated.

You know another thing we heard was that schools need better communication strategies with parents and students. So [00:24:30] I'm thinking when Tom mentioned things like getting in front of parents more with text messages or other interesting low cost ways to just inform them and nudge them, it's really about ditching the judgment and together focusing on the shared purpose.

Okay, so that gets folks back in. Now we need to catch them up.

We absolutely do. Tom mentioned that a lot of schools are having success with tutoring, and I know there's a lot of research to back that up. Also, [00:25:00] we probably need to shed old ways of teaching and really be open to adopting more evidence-based approaches.

Tom did mention a recent study on a reading program that's boosting student achievement. It's a great example of how targeted evidence-based strategies can make a significant impact.

Well said, Dan. Thank you again to our guest, Tom Dee, for this thoughtful conversation. And thank you all for joining us on this episode of School's In. Remember to subscribe to our show on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your [00:25:30] podcasts. I'm Denise Pope.

And I'm Dan Schwartz.