What they say – and don’t say — about students with disabilities
The pandemic’s effect on student learning and achievement continues to be a big concern for parents, educators, and policy-makers.
Last fall, the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) tests, (‘Nation’s Report Card) gave a snapshot of student learning and the effect the pandemic had on it. The last battery of these tests was administered in 2019.
Some news outlets described the report’s findings as a measure of the “Learning Loss” caused by the pandemic. While the report raises real concerns, it’s important to know that declines measured by the NAEP tests don’t mean that students failed to learn anything, or forgot things they already knew (although that does happen). Rather, the tests show that students as a whole did learn over that period, but they learned at slower rates than in prior years.
A better way to understand this round of NAEP tests is that they measure where students are and where they likely would be, if not for the pandemic. Positive gains would indicate steady learning or even improvements; declines would indicate a slowing, sometimes significant, pace of learning.
In 2022, the United States saw its largest drops between testing periods since the exam was first administered in 1969. The 2022 results revealed that New Jersey students had declines in math and reading at steeper rates than those across the country.
U.S. Education Secretary Miguel Cardona called the overall impact “not acceptable,” adding that the results “show that children who were already furthest from opportunity before March 2020 and who were most impacted by COVID now need the greatest support to make up for lost ground in reading and math.”
Nationwide, math scores fell an average of five points for fourth-graders and eight points for eighth-graders since 2019. No state or large urban school district saw an improvement in math scores.
Across the country reading scores fell an average of three points in both grades since 2019.
New Jersey students showed declines in math and reading at steeper rates than the national average.
New Jersey fourth-grader’s math scores dropped 7 points on average since 2019. Eighth graders math scores dropped 11 points on average. This is among the greatest declines in eighth-grade math scores; only three states had a larger decrease for eighth grade math scores.
New Jersey fourth-grade reading scores dropped 4 points on average, slightly below the national average of a 3 point drop. Eighth-grade reading scores were reasonably steady with a decline of 1 point.
The Impact of the Pandemic
In addition to test scores, the NAEP also collected information about how the pandemic and virtual learning affected students. Not surprisingly, students with access to quality instruction and technology did better than those with no or limited access.
“Across both subjects and grades, higher percentages of higher-performing students (students performing at or above the 75th percentile) had access to key educational resources than lower-performing students (students performing below the 25th percentile) during remote learning in the 2020-21 school year.”
– NAEP Report
Key education resources included: access to a desktop computer, laptop, or tablet all the time; a quiet place to work at least some of the time; their teacher available to help with schoolwork at least once or twice a week; and for eighth-graders, real-time video lessons with their teacher daily or almost daily.
What About Students with Disabilities?
The NAEP has provided accommodations for students with disabilities in their testing process since 1996. This allows many students who were previously excluded to participate in the assessments. Although the tests are not administered to ALL students with disabilities, roughly 13% testing population (close to the national percentage of classified students) are students with identified disabilities.
2017 was the last cycle for which the testing data for students with disabilities was analyzed, so there is not yet quantitative data to show the impact of the pandemic on students with disabilities. However, when the pandemic response started in 2020, students with disabilities were already experiencing declining scores and increasing learning gaps with typical learners.
While all students have generally improved learning from 1996 to 2017, the performance gap between those with and without disabilities has not improved. Students with disabilities show on-going and statistically significant performance gaps in math, and even greater gaps in reading performance. One notable concern lies in the results for fourth grade math performance for students with disabilities, where the performance gap for students with disabilities actually increased, with real performance for students with disabilities falling 6 points from 2009 through 2017, as performance for typical students rose.
So while all US students experienced the greatest measured learning loss on record, partial data show that learning loss experienced by students with disabilities may be significantly worse.
