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Clemens v. Vogelsang is licensed under CC BY 2.0
Education Dive
Survey: Teachers favor moving on to next year's content in the fall
Linda Jacobson
April 30, 2020
Sixty-five percent of teachers in a new nationwide poll favor starting
next year with "regularly scheduled instruction” over other options,
such as revisiting concepts from the end of this semester, extending
next school year or offering students the chance to repeat a grade.
Conducted by the Collaborative for Student Success, the results show
administrators — who made up about 12% of the 5,555 respondents — think
beginning the next year with April 2020 concepts is the best strategy
for addressing learning loss due to school closures. Advocates and
policymakers, about 250 respondents in the sample, agreed with
administrators.
But those in that group were also the most supportive of extending the
current school year, an option only 15% of teachers favor. Teachers
represented the largest segment of respondents — 81%.
In written comments, additional suggestions include having students
return to their current grade for a month at the beginning of the
2020-21 school year, extending the school day or creating a mandatory
“study hall” to work on material missed during closures.
Others recommended trusting educators to differentiate instruction and providing additional classroom aides for support.
“Allow classroom teachers to individualize instruction for students to
fill in gaps — based on each student’s need — with no pressure from end
of year state testing requirements,” wrote an administrator in
Tennessee. “It could take multiple years to ‘catch up.’”
Seventy percent of administrators are in favor of assessing students at
the beginning of next year to determine learning loss, while 59% of
teachers agree with that idea.
“Despite heroic efforts by educators and parents, the extended lack of
in- class instruction has no doubt resulted in significant learning
loss that must be diagnosed and addressed— particularly for our most
at-risk students,” Jim Cowen, executive director of the Collaborative
for Student Success, said in a press release. The survey report says,
however, that whatever assessment is used “should be non-punitive and
unrelated to state accountability requirements.”
The organization, a nonprofit focusing on standards and accountability,
also recommends a public campaign “to provide ‘air cover’ and support
for states to embrace more aggressive steps” to make up for lost
learning. Those steps could include ongoing remote learning as a
supplement to in-person schooling and addressing teachers unions’
concerns over how educators will be paid for adding instructional days.
Suggestions for summer
Respondents also shared some of their ideas for summer learning, even though it’s still unclear how soon buildings will re-open.
An administrator in Indiana said “jump start” programs would be offered
for three weeks in July, but much depends on funding for transportation
and child care, since a lot of students provide care for younger
siblings. A teacher in North Carolina suggested summer school should be
targeted to at-risk students and that students should be given summer
packets with required reading and math instruction.
“Kids have already lost one month plus these two months of essentially no new concepts learned,” the teacher wrote.
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