Stalled Learning Recovery and Bright Spots from 2023

What is standing in our way? 
“In one word, inertia, resistance to change.” 

Kenneth B. Mason of the Georgia State Board of Education and the Southern Regional Education Board offered this perspective during this week’s GLR Learning Tuesdays webinar, Stalled Learning Recovery & Bright Spots From 2023. 

As this session looked back at several 2023 sessions on data and learning to inform the path forward in education, we saw the same themes repeat again and again. 

• Growth lags behind pre-pandemic trends creating a compounding debt for unfinished learning.  
• Gaps can’t be addressed in one year or with one intervention. 
• Investment in teachers’ learning is necessary and works to accelerate student achievement. 
• High-quality curriculum and programs are necessary and have to be implemented with fidelity. 
• Targeted interventions work and are needed to mitigate learning loss. 

Yolie Flores of Families In Schools answered the question of “What is standing in our way?” this way: “Basic leadership around the importance of why it matters for all children to get a good education, not just some children.” 

Karen Lewis of NWEA, a division of HMH, acknowledged that there is fatigue around this conversation and these things are becoming the “new normal,” but stressed that learning loss is devastating for the kids at the margins.  

“How do we make learning ubiquitous and happening 365 days of the year?” 

Jean-Claude Brizard of Digital Promise asked this question asserting that learning recovery must happen in communities as well as in classrooms.  

When our panelists were posed this question, Flores pointed to the examples from the previous webinar highlights, noting “the reassurance of the reminder that we can solve this, that we have these bright spots. We have examples of what we know can get our kids on track.”  

Underscoring the critical role played by educators, Lindsay Sobel of Teach Plus reminded us, “Teachers are adult humans.…You can’t do change to teachers.…When you engage teachers in the decision-making process, when you really build on the expertise that they bring to the table — because they are the experts who work with students every single day, deeply embedded in communities and working with families — that’s a lever that can make a really big difference.” 

Mason continued to expand on this idea saying, “Prioritizing the wrong things [is a barrier]. Some school districts, some state-level leaders prioritize what I’ll call scorekeeping instead of learning. And I think when you prioritize learning, then that has everything to do with the family and the community. It is not a singular issue…learning should happen, should be planned, well beyond the boundaries of school.”

Flores said it this way, “This is a community problem. For so long we keep blaming schools, the teacher, the district, and we are all responsible for whether or not all of our children can fulfill their destiny.” 

“This is possible, we just have to get it right.” — Lindsay Sobel