Should the school year be extended to combat learning loss?

(NEXSTAR) — The COVID-19 pandemic had a lasting impact on education in the United States bringing discussions of extending the traditional school year to the forefront.

When schools shut down and went remote, students fell behind. The learning those students lost, as a result, will need to be made up to avoid a ripple effect down the line.

Tom Kane, Faculty Director of the Center of Education Policy Research at Harvard University, helped develop the Education Recovery Scorecard, which tracks the amount of learning loss from reporting districts in the United States. According to the scorecard, the average student lost the equivalent of a half-year in subjects like math.

“It’s important to point out that it’s not that students forgot knowledge that they had gained, it’s that they didn’t do the learning that they normally would have been doing. Especially during the 2021 school year,” Kane said. “So when I say half-a-year’s worth of loss, I’m referring to the typical gains students make on the national assessment of educational progress, which is something that is administered every couple of years.”

Kane referred to the learning loss caused by the pandemic as a band of tornadoes running across the country. Some districts were affected more than others, even neighboring districts.

He said there is evidence that districts that spent more time shut down, in remote learning, or were in communities that saw high COVID death rates, saw more learning loss than others.

Making up for learning loss requires additional instructional time, which Kane said can come in the form of a longer school year, year-round schooling, or the implementation of academic programming into summer.

“The advantage of extending the school year is that we already have the teachers, we already have the buildings, families already have the pick-up and drop-off routines. Logistically, the easiest way to provide additional instruction time to students is through extending the school year, but of course, we’d have to pay teachers to work that extra time.”

In Texas, the state government provided incentives for schools to extend the school year. For each additional day, up to 30, past the typical 180 school days they chose to extend, they would half-day funding.

An alternative to extending the school year would be to focus on the ninth grade as a “fire break,” Kane said.

“When they’re fighting a fire, [firefighters] don’t try to put out every square inch of fire… instead what firefighters do is they create a fire break where they say, ‘We’re not going to allow the fire to spread beyond this point.’ We should think of ninth grade as a fire break,” Kane explained. “Anybody who fails to reach proficiency on the state assessment in eighth grade, for instance, suppose that the state would provide resources for a district to provide an extra period of math to those students or maybe a math tutor.”

Funding is another key piece in the recovery of learning loss and the potential of extending the academic year.

During the pandemic, the federal government provided relief and recovery funds for schools, but that funding is set to expire in September 2024. Kane believes that there is still time to allocate the money and add time to the school year, but it is likely that those federal dollars are already budgeted.

The lasting impact of the pandemic learning loss is also affecting enrollment rates in advanced placement courses and higher-level math and science courses in high school. Kane suggests that due to the learning loss, students don’t have enough time to complete prerequisites.

“We can’t let this whole generation of students have a permanent decline in their post-secondary education that is going to hurt our economy and those students’ future for decades to come,” Kane said.