Data shows how much learning Tucson students lost in COVID

When COVID-19 struck, shutting down schools in spring 2020, much was lost, including time with peers, daily routines and milestone moments. A new data project has now pinpointed how much learning was lost in Arizona and across the country.

For most Pima County students, the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic resulted, on average, in the loss of four months of learning, with some losing over a year of learning.

The Education Recovery Scorecard, created by researchers at the Center for Education Policy Research at Harvard University and Stanford University’s Educational Opportunity Project, found that most Tucson-area school districts showed lower levels of academic performance in reading and math when comparing standardized test scores for grades third through eighth pre-pandemic and the most recently released results for last school year.

The Tanque Verde Unified School District was the only major district in Pima County to show learning gains in both reading and math.

TVUSD students gained an additional four months of learning in reading and about one month in math compared to the district’s scores before the pandemic. That placed students about a full academic year ahead of the national average in math and about an academic year and six months ahead of the national average in reading.

“This is the first time I’ve seen something that gives us that level of context across the entire country, but we felt positive that the work we were doing and what the students were doing was moving kids along,” said TVUSD Superintendent Scott Hagerman.

Hagerman said some of the factors that made those learning gains possible was that the governing board made it a goal to discuss student learning at every meeting and to take a deeper look at how to help students become more engaged inside the classroom.

“The next part of it was really working on something called teacher clarity, which is making sure you know exactly what you want your kids to be able to do, and you make sure that the students have that same information,” he said.

He added that it was also a matter of building balanced curricula that were challenging and clear, but not overwhelming and boring.

Lower averages

All other local school districts showed learning losses in math, compared to average scores in 2019.

The Sunnyside Unified School District, the second-largest in the county, showed the lowest math scores among local districts, with students about two academic years and five months behind the national average. That was a drop of about a full academic year compared to the district’s 2019 math scores.

Pam Betten, the district’s chief academic officer, said that those results were to be expected based on what the district has been assessing on its own part.

“It’s not all, it’s an aggregate across, but there are definitely even students who were once on grade level, but the missed opportunities that happened in those times created gaps for those students,” Betten said. “So they’re not where they need to be sitting at this moment.”

The Sunnyside district also fell behind by about two months from its 2019 scores in reading proficiency. That placed students about two academic years behind the national average in reading.

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To help close those learning gaps, Betten said, the district is focusing on an accelerated curriculum to help students catch up, as well as often dividing classes into group work to address students’ different learning levels and needs.

Results for the Tucson Unified School District, the largest in the county, showed that students are more than two academic years behind in math and about one school year and five months behind in reading compared to the national average.

Spokeswoman Karla Escamilla said that the district also expected those findings, as they align with the district’s own analysis of assessment results.

“We estimate that the impact of remote instruction on learning loss may take up to (three) years fully to make up,” Escamilla said in an email and noted that the district has still seen some academic growth in its own analyses.

At the Flowing Wells district, students showed decreases in both subjects compared to the district’s 2019 averages. Scores for 2022 were nearly eight months behind in math and six months behind in reading compared to the national average.

Marana Unified students placed slightly below grade level in both reading and math, with students scoring a bit over a month behind the national average in reading and about four months behind in math. Still, students in the district showed gains in its average reading scores, with about three months improvement from the district’s scores in 2019.

At or above grade levels

As for the Amphitheater district, students scored about three months lower than the national average in math. However, the district made small improvements in its reading scores, which placed the district at less than a month gain than the national average.

And despite placing lower in math than their respective 2019 averages, the Catalina Foothills, Vail and Sahuarita school districts still remained at or above grade levels in both math and reading compared to the national average.

In Sahuarita, students’ math scores decreased from 2019. But both reading and math scores remained at about three months and about one month higher than the national average, respectively.

Vail students lost about two months in math compared to its 2019 average. Still, the district’s math scores remained about a full academic year and eight months ahead of the national average in math and one school year and seven months ahead in reading.

At the Catalina Foothills district, students’ average math scores decreased by about three months from 2019. But the district still remained at about two full school years above the national average in reading and about one academic year and three months in math. The district declined to comment on the findings, stating that administrators were not familiar with the metrics used and it would take more time to look into.

For a full look of the Education Recovery Scorecard findings, visit educationrecoveryscorecard.org.