A fragile system?

Teachers are still seeing the effects of the COVID lockdown.  Why?

Our tutoring consultant reports a continuing problem with students who are well behind where they should be, especially in mathematics.  It appears this is common in schools at all levels, and is attributed to the year or so of virtual schooling during the virus lockdown.  That we still see it, this long after we reopened, is troubling.  It points to some feature of the system that we think needs to be understood.

Perhaps the system was over-optimized.  That is, the subjects and levels were so well-matched to the development of children that a year’s disruption inevitably meant a lower level of performance.  Learning the basics of algebra in, say, grade 8 instead of grade 7 made a big difference.  On the whole, this is unlikely.  Not only did students already take different levels of classes in Middle School and High School, but school districts themselves have a vast variation in level and quality.  It simply wasn’t (and isn’t) a finely-tuned system.

Perhaps we are measuring in a deceptive way.  We are comparing a student’s performance to where he or she would have been without the lost year; but if we adjust the time-scale, the performance curves should match, and everyone will catch up eventually.  Well, no.  The gap persists.  Our tutor is teaching half a dozen High School students how to work with fractions, an Elementary School skill.  In his pre-COVID experience, he could expect one or two to have forgotten details, and a few more to try to avoid fractions when possible.  But he’s had to start at the very beginning with these.

It is certainly true that rigorous testing was largely abandoned during the virtual year, for practical reasons, and many students were waved through when they hadn’t actually mastered the material.  Since mathematics is cumulative, a hole in one’s background will have effects all down the line.  A fix for this might have been to hold all (or most) students back.  But it strikes us that, with the current system, it would be vastly disruptive and maybe impossible to have great masses of students repeat grade levels.  Should the schools as a whole, then, be made more flexible?  We don’t know how difficult that would be.  Many school districts are barely managing to make things work as it is.

But the fact that the remedial measures in place are not adequate also tells us something about learning, something that maybe should have been obvious from summer vacation.  When students return to a subject again after a hiatus, they don’t pick up where they left off.  Some facts have been forgotten, some techniques are incomplete; every math course we know of starts the fall term with a review chapter.  When the gap widens, the review has to be longer and more thorough.  A full year off might require more than a year of review.

It could be that continuity is the most important factor in schooling.