Failing grades spike in Virginia’s largest school system as online learning gap emerges nationwide
S E E D E D C O N T E N T
A report on student grades from one of the nation’s largest school districts offers some of the first concrete evidence that online learning is forcing a striking drop in students’ academic performance, and that the most vulnerable students — children with disabilities and English-language learners — are suffering the most.
Fairfax County Public Schools in Virginia, which has been mostly online since March, published an internal analysis this week showing that, between the last academic year and this one, the percentage of F’s earned by middle school and high school students jumped by 83 percent: from 6 percent of all grades to 11 percent. By the end of the first quarter of 2020-2021, nearly 10,000 Fairfax students had scored F’s in two or more classes — an increase of more than 4,300 students as compared with the group who received F’s by the same time last year.
Experts have warned since the beginning of the pandemic, and the unexpected national experiment in online learning, that remote schooling would take a serious academic toll on children.
Now, evidence of poor achievement in virtual classrooms is beginning to emerge nationwide: In the Independent School District in Houston, more than 40 percent of students are earning failing grades in at least two of their classes, according to data reported by the Houston Chronicle. Likewise in St. Paul, Minn., where the superintendent recently reported that nearly 40 percent of St. Paul Public Schools high-schoolers have failing marks, local NBC station KARE reported.
Educators have struggled with the question of how to grade students in a virtual environment since the spring. Many districts opted for a pass/fail system to close out the final quarter of the 2019-2020 school year because students and teachers had been thrust into an online-only world with almost no time to adjust or prepare.
But the tactic led to significant dips in engagement and attendance, as families forced to navigate the vagaries of the pandemic prioritized other concerns. So, after school districts built remote learning curriculums from scratch over the summer, many advised teachers they should grade as close as possible to what they normally would come fall. School officials hoped to send a message: Students must take virtual school seriously.
The apparent consequences of this decision, demonstrated afresh by the Fairfax statistics published this week, are confirming fears about how the pandemic is driving an equity gap in American education that may prove impossible to close. Fairfax’s data shows that children who are engaged and care deeply about school — children in stable home situations, whose parents have sufficient resources — will stay engaged in an online environment, while children whose temperament, socioeconomic status or home situation have historically barred them from academic achievement will slip further and further behind.
Children who were middling or poor students suddenly began earning more failing marks, including in classes they had not failed before, according to the Fairfax analysis. Historically low-performing students are seeing an explosion of C’s, D’s and F’s this semester, far more than would have been expected based on their pattern of achievement in past years.
“Results indicate a widening gap between students who were previously performing satisfactorily and those performing unsatisfactorily,” the report concludes. “Students who performed well previously primarily performed slightly better than expected during Q1 of this year.”
“In contrast, students who were previously not performing well, performed considerably less well,” it continues.
Even in normal times, factors such as socioeconomic status, race and whether parents speak English accounted for roughly two-thirds of student achievement scores and standardized test prowess, said Jack Schneider, an assistant professor of education at the University of Massachusetts at Lowell who directs research for the Massachusetts Consortium for Innovative Education and recently published a book on public-school testing.
At this phase of the pandemic, he said, America has reached a tipping point: The damage done to schoolchildren with scarce resources is likely irreparable. The best thing the nation can do would be to offer everyone a “do-over,” Schneider said.
“The default should be, once we’re in-person again, everybody could go back to the grade they were in March of 2020,” he said. “We need to slow the pace down in the name of equity.”
In Fairfax, whose 186,000 students make it the largest school system in Virginia, Superintendent Scott Brabrand said officials are working swiftly to boost grades. He noted many children who were performing well academically before the pandemic are still earning high marks, although he acknowledged that others “who previously struggled in school . . . continue to do so.”
Brabrand added in a statement: “We are working on identifying these students by name and by need and are working on specific interventions to support them right now and as we phase back in person.”
Fairfax returned several thousand students to school buildings over the course of the fall, prioritizing students with disabilities, English learners and prekindergarten through elementary students. But as cases rose in the Washington area, the superintendent this month halted plans for further returns and sent some groups back to all virtual learning.
On Monday, Brabrand announced nearly 3,000 more students — elementary-schoolers and high school students taking career and technical classes — would return to online-only instruction.
He said Fairfax has already tried to help struggling children by instituting “catch-up days” and extending the first-quarter grading period. The school system also revised its workload to be less onerous this semester, for example instructing teachers to give students no more than one hour per week of homework for each course.
And the school system adjusted grading: Fairfax teachers are supposed to provide “additional flexibility” on deadlines, to accommodate student absences without penalizing them and to allow ample opportunities for test retakes, according to guidance posted online .
But one Fairfax high school teacher, who spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of retribution from the school system, said he is doing all of these things — and still, between 50 to 70 percent of his 150 students are achieving D’s and F’s, whereas before they had earned B’s and C’s.
This teacher is pursuing a very generous late policy, he said. And whenever he finds out that a student is facing extreme circumstances at home — for example, the student who was evicted from his home midway through the pandemic, or the other student whose father recently got the coronavirus— he sits down with the child to develop an adjusted work schedule.
The problem is that students do not always tell him of their troubles. And, like his colleagues, he teaches far too many children to be able to sit down individually with every single one to investigate their home life and then plan an individualized course of study. Nor can he relax standards entirely, because then he wouldn’t be doing his job as a teacher and making sure children learn.
“I’m working multiple extra hours per week to figure out ways to bridge the gap and get the kids where they need to be,” he said. “It really is exhausting. Co-workers of mine, usually some of the most energetic and vivacious, are worn down, too.”
Bob Farrace, spokesman for the National Association of Secondary School Principals, said educators nationwide are undergoing similar trials — and pushing themselves to the brink of breakdown to keep students learning and achieving in the classroom.
“But with so many challenges at once,” he said, “it’s like they’re holding back a tidal wave with a broom.”
Farrace said he is hearing about spikes in D’s and F’s from superintendents across the country. The Fairfax report, compiled over the past few weeks by the school system’s research arm, offers a window into how the consequences of online learning differ by things children have no control over: race, learning ability or whether they were born into English-speaking households.
Younger Fairfax students are struggling more than older ones: Middle-schoolers received four times as many F’s, while high-schoolers saw a 50 percent increase. Students with disabilities, meanwhile, saw their percentage of F’s more than double, to account for nearly 20 percent of all grades they received, while children for whom English is a second language saw their percentage of F’s rise by 106 percent to account for 35 percent of all grades they achieved.
Among racial groups, Hispanic students were most affected, with F’s jumping from 13 to 25 percent of all grades achieved.
Comparing grades achieved in past years to grades this year showed that the drop in passing grades is significant and unprecedented. The likelihood of passing an English class decreased by 40 percent this year for all students, according to the analysis, while the likelihood of passing mathematics decreased by 30 percent.
Student achievement is seriously off track in these two subjects from what would have been expected based on past performance. According to the analysis, 35 percent of all Fairfax students are underperforming in math, and 39 percent are underperforming in English.
Again, the dip is especially severe among vulnerable children and those for whom English is not their first language. Students with disabilities and Hispanic students both saw large spikes in underperformance, compared with other demographic groups studied.
But by far the biggest drop came for English learners: Forty-seven percent are underperforming in math this year, while 53 percent are underperforming in English.
Fairfax mother Rocio Portillo, 35, said she was saddened but not surprised by the report. That’s because of what happened to her daughter, a 17-year-old high school junior, this semester.
The teen achieved mostly A’s and B’s pre-pandemic. She was on track to fulfill her dream of studying forensic psychology in a four-year college. That wish is shared by her mother, who never finished college.
Then online learning hit. The teen cried every day during the first week this semester because she finds Zoom school nearly impossible to follow: The format is confusing and some teachers talk too fast. Despite hours of studying every day, her grades have slipped to all C’s and one F.
Recently, Portillo sat down with her daughter to suggest attending community college.
“What breaks me is that I know she’s trying, I know she is giving it her all,” Portillo said. “She knows that college is important. She wants to be somebody in life.”
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Parents - WHERE THE HELL ARE YOU?????
Demanding that schools re open so their kids can do better..
Not so MAGA - in many of the cases, they want the schools reopened so they don't have to "play" at being parents.
That's unfair to parents, 1st. The majority of families now have 2 parents working outside the home. Daycares have limited the numbers of kids they can take, to allow for social distancing. So not having kids in school is a hardship for those families, and it's more than just parents not wanting to parent their kids.
Even for parents who can work from home right now, having kids at home can be a hardship. Even if the kids are doing well at school and are well-behaved, if having too many devices connected to the home's WiFi causes devices to bog down, that's an issue, both for the kids doing homework, and for the parents working from home.
Teachers - WHERE THE HELL ARE YOU? My grandsons chemistry teacher shows up on Mondays to list the weeks assignments than isn't seen again until Friday to give a test.
Teachers - Get you asses back in the classroom, you're screwing America's youth out of an education.
This has been my virtual learning experience. Bear in mind that I am a divorced woman with a job, and I own a business, which means that my at-home hours are limited.
Our schools are using a platform called Schoology for virtual learning. Kids access it using their school-issued Chromebooks. It cannot be accessed fully from any device other than a school-issued Chromebook. I have limited access to it on my desktop. That is by design - I am not meant to be able to see his schoolwork.
Our schools also continue to use our old Parent Portal platform to report grades and attendance. The link to Schoology is on the Parent Portal page we're used to using, but other than that, they operate independently of each other.
Some teachers use Schoology to teach. Some use Google Classroom. Some use Zoom. I can't see any assignment on any platform, due to limited access. I can only see his grades. For most of the semester, the Parent Portal showed no grades, and Schoology showed him with As and high Bs. In mid October, the Parent Portal started showing Fs. The Schoology page was still showing high Bs. But it turned out that the Fs were the accurate ones, except for one class, where he actually has an A.
Then, I started working with him on his assignments. I kid you not, some assignments were worksheets that just said "Use Google to find the answers." There are no textbooks. There is no written material handed out. There is no link to online materials provided by the teacher. There is no video lecture. There is only "Google it." Actually, one class had a packet that was passed out at the beginning of school. My son didn't get the packet, because he picked up that class late, due to a scheduling SNAFU. He didn't know the packet existed, and so didn't ask about it, and was reamed for not having it. Shouldn't the teacher have known that a student picking up her class late would need the course materials?
I had to talk to a school board member to even find out what our kids' school day was going to look like. Would they be in class via a video conference? All day? Part of the day? What if our internet service was on the blink? Nobody knew, one week before school was to start, and parents were stressed. And when we finally got an email about it, it was inaccurate (said there would be real-time instruction on the same schedule as their regular in-person class schedule), and focused mostly on how to log in to our Schoology account - the one where we can't look at their assignments. Two short videos about using Schoology were all the guidance we received.
Our schools closed in the middle of March, and no instruction took place after that. Our educators had 5 months to work something out, and what we got was "Google it" and two platforms that report wildly different grades. They failed our kids. I follow my kid's grades, and their platform said everything was fine, until all of a sudden, it wasn't. Now, is a lot of this my son's fault? Yes. He can be a lazy and difficult kid. But parents are not being given the tools to keep on top of their kids' grades. Not when the school can't get it together. And while the occasional assignment might involve internet research, no class's assignments should consist mostly of "Google it".
Sandy - what you've said is partially true in some of the school districts - they got behind the curve and haven't figured out how to get ahead of it.
My wife's a teacher - Spanish I, II, III and Medical (don't have the foggiest idea what that is) and has 188 students during an 8 hour day - BUT - there is no such thing as an 8 hour day. She's putting in 12 - 16 hours a day, either on line or telephonically with her students - and that's seven days a week.
She is part of the state group who is/did developed/developing the on-line program in the language arts arena and it has been a bear. They use the ZOOM method but they have developed it in a manner that allows parents to interact with the teachers. Their largest problem, and this is high school, is getting the kids to actually show up for the classes. If they don't show, the parents are brought into the equation to help work out the issues that may be with that family. The largest problem is that our population is 101,712 at the end of 2018. Its demographics were 34.9% Non-Hispanic White, 2.6% African American or Black, 1.5% Native American, 1.7% Asian , 0.0% Native Hawaiian or Pacific Islander, 2.9% Two or more races, 58.6% Hispanic or Latino of any race . Many of the Hispanic/Latino population of not U.S. Citizens and are here illegally. The kids and parents of those students make no bones that they are here illegally, BUT, they also state, very loudly, that the Supreme Court sez that ain't anything we can do about giving them their free education ( Plyler v. Doe , 457 U.S. 202 (1982)) and they will attend if they want. Ya don't have a lotta leeway with that logic.
So, the district is rapidly attempting to find ways of rectifying that. But, until then, the pass/fail rate is much higher in the fail rate.
It's gonna be a hassle to try to develop a program where all students are covered. The schools here issue Chrome books to the students at no charge (unless they're lost or broken). However, we have 19 Pueblos and 3 Fed Recognized Tribes/Nations who don't have the luxury of issuing IT equipment to the students. Hell, some of the Tribal/Nation/Pueblos don't have any access whatsoever to IT stuff, let alone internet connection for the kids in school.
The parent part of the equation comes from - these are high school students - 15 to 18 y.o.'s. They "should" be able to do their classes on-line, but many of the parents complain that the student's have two much homework (two hours per week) and the kids are "always" on the computer. Unfortunately, with no one at home to monitor them or without the parental upbringing they "should have had", the students who are "always" on the computer are being caught doing the ol' porn thing or high tech gaming stuff and, when caught, offer no excuse and the parents take no discipline other than to call the school and ask when the students can come back to class because the parents "can't handle them being at home all the time."
1st, I'm glad that your teachers seem to be more willing to work with parents' input. Here, while we are encouraged to "be involved", when it comes to actually seeing our kids' work, we're prevented. TBH, I see no reason why I'm not allowed to access his assignments via my desktop so I can tell if he needs help, but I can't. I also see no reason why it should be such a guessing game to figure out what his grades are, but it has been. Basically, I have access to a list of his classes, his grades (with conflicting reports), and that's it. There is no real-time learning for middle and high school students. Kids are on their own. And they're losing over a year of their education because of it.
Our schools pretty much threw in the towel in March. At first, we heard of plans to finish out last year virtually. We filled out surveys to determine which families might need help with internet service and devices. And then we'd fill out the exact same surveys a week later. We were finally told that, even though we had missed about 2 months of school, there would be no virtual learning for last year, since most of the curriculum had already been covered. We were told then that too many students didn't have internet access. I found out later that only 4 families in the entire county lacked any sort of internet access.
We could have done a lot better. We had the tools - all of our students middle school and older already had school-issued Chromebooks. Almost all families have internet access, and the school had WiFi hotspots placed in public areas for those few who didn't. Elementary-aged students are given a few hours of real-time instruction even when they're in school only virtually, from what other parents tell me. But middle and high school students are basically doing everything via online independent study. Like Monster Mash said above, they have the occasional Zoom meeting where they hand out assignments, and that's all the real-time interaction they have during the week. Some are doing ok with it, but many are not.
This does not surprise me
Me either. When schools close parents have to choose between staying home with children forced to stay there or go to work and keep the family financially viable. Kids do better in person than on a computer or tablet. Even home schooled kids have in person teaching to go with the lesson plan.
I was talking with my neighbor and his son today and asked the boy what he had been doing, his father quickly said he has been catching up on school work the last 3 days. The boy said he was almost cought up.
I think kids in my area are getting a year older and not much smarter
We have had in person schools in my county most of the school year. We had a 10 day distance learning where I work earlier and will have distance learning after Thanksgiving week until finals week and an extra distant learning week after Christmas break. Since I’m in special education and we provide services students need and can’t get with distance learning and we are separate enough from the rest, we will be providing instruction in person through that time. My other job as an after school staff in a different district with younger kids in an after school program that won’t happen until the new distance learning ends in Jan. Distance learning from Spring break to the end of last school year did not work out all that well.
Kids in school since the virus hit are going to be known as the Idiot Generation. IMO most teachers love it, they get to stay home doing minimal teaching while collecting a full paycheck. Teachers protest going back to the classroom " Fuck the kids' education, I'm still getting paid"
Here even when there’s distance learning the teacher still goes to the school and does the learning on line from the classroom every day during the same time they would be doing it in person.