Category Archives: Student Data

How Can Educators Evaluate Virtual Student Engagement During the COVID-19 Pandemic?

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Before the COVID-19 pandemic, educators commonly assessed student engagement using student self-report measures, teacher reports, and observational measures. These measures work for in-person learning environments where student participation and connectivity can be easily visible.

Now most teaching and learning occurs in virtual spaces, where instruction is delivered through learning management systems (e.g., Google Classroom) either synchronously or asynchronously. Teachers and school leaders have to engage students — and evaluate their engagement — in a remote environment with little formal or comprehensive training and often a limited ability to even see their students. 

There has been a great deal of writing recently about improving student engagement, but few resources provide guidance around measuring student engagement during remote learning. 

Based on a close read of the existing research and resources, and our own in-house expertise, Bellwether’s evaluation team is currently helping three clients to design and implement tools to evaluate virtual student engagement. While the measures themselves have not changed much since the pandemic, the uses and evaluation of these measures must adapt to our current realities, like many other approaches in education, to better serve and engage students and families. 

Here are two key considerations for educators and school leaders to keep in mind when evaluating virtual student engagement:

There is no one-size-fits-all model for measurement  Continue reading →

The 3 Million Who Never Showed Up for Virtual Schooling

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For some students, the devastation of the COVID-19 pandemic on education goes far beyond coping with the difficulties of distance learning. For these students, a day in March or April marks the last day of their formal education altogether. Out of the approximately 53 million K-12 students in the United States who stopped attending in-person school in the spring, an estimated three million may have never showed up online at all.

That figure comes from a new Bellwether analysis that estimates the number of students who, due to various barriers, did not make the transition, remaining disconnected even as schooling continued online. Just as the pandemic has disproportionately affected our most vulnerable and marginalized communities, this “disconnected” population is more likely to be composed of English learners, students in foster care, migrant students, students experiencing homelessness, and students with disabilities. Three million students is approximately 1 out of every 4 of these student populations combined — and also roughly equivalent to the entire school-age population of Florida.

Against the backdrop of the pandemic, wildfires, hurricanes, social unrest, and a general election, it’s easy to miss what’s happening here. But just like the pandemic itself, the defining feature of this crisis is the scale — this is something that every district, in every state, is struggling to address. Once a young person leaves school, it can be very difficult to re-engage them. The long-term implications of even a short period of learning loss are serious, and the outcomes associated with dropping out of high school are even more dire.

We could be witnessing the beginning of an event that has lifelong implications for this generation of students, in much the same way that the Great Recession has hamstrung millennials’ accumulation of wealth relative to previous generations. And among the young people of this new generation, the harshest impacts fall, time after time, on communities of color, students with disabilities, and those living in poverty. 

That’s a gloomy picture to paint, and it’s easy to feel as though we can’t grapple with this problem the way we would want to, given the enormity of everything else happening in the world. But there are concrete steps we can take right now to mitigate the damage being done, from improving attendance data collection — and data sharing — across public agencies to implementing interventions that meet the most vulnerable students where they are. Many teachers and leaders have identified a need for collaboration with social service providers and telecommunications firms to provide Internet connectivity to those in dire need. And states must provide stronger guidance, funding, and resources for schools and social services that can be spent flexibly, effectively, and in a timely manner.

Above all, the number one thing public officials can do to start to repair the damage done — and to prevent the unimaginable harm of a “lost generation” — is to develop and effectively implement the public policies needed to defeat the COVID-19 pandemic by reducing community transmission to levels negligible enough to permit a return to the normal school environment. There is no sustainable education policy workaround that can surmount a public health crisis of this magnitude. Back on March 13, seven months ago, it was difficult to imagine we would find ourselves in this position; our best course of action now is to take aggressive action on behalf of the roughly three million students whose educational futures are in the balance.

Four Speakers and Four Themes From Our “Lost Year” Webinar

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The pandemic is not behind us. Delivery of education in schools continues to vary from state to state, district to district, and even school to school. 

Research will be critical for figuring out what methods are working, how much learning is actually happening, and what innovations are showing early promise.

On October 5th, Bellwether Senior Adviser Allison Crean Davis gathered four accomplished education researchers to discuss how the pandemic has impacted education research, the emerging significant equity issues, and the future of education research. Complete captioned video is available here or below:

As researchers articulated how they are making sense of this moment, a few key themes emerged:

Missing Data — and Missing Students

Education researchers are already busy developing statistical models and simulations to account for “missing data,” i.e.,the lack of data from state assessments in spring 2020, which is typically used to measure student achievement from year to year. According to Megan Kuhfeld, Research Scientist at NWEA, researchers are discussing the multitudes of caveats and asterisks that will follow any conclusions based on what happened during the 2019-20 school year. The studies, models, and data will have to include significant nuance to capture the varied impact on students by subgroup, learning setting, access to technology, and attendance. 

More pressing, though, than missing data is missing students. As Constance Lindsay, Assistant Professor at UNC School of Education pointed out, there are students who have not “shown up” since schools physically closed. We need to know where they are and who they are. From an equity perspective, it is important to understand the exacerbated effects of the pandemic on missing students’ learning and outcomes. 

The 2019-20 and current school year are emerging as a new baseline to begin to capture “what happened.” Studies are being published, by Kuhfeld and others, with early estimates of learning loss in general and by some subgroups.  Continue reading →

FAQs for Future Applicants to the Federal Charter School Program Grant

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As applicants anxiously await the results of the FY2020 Charter School Program (CSP) State Entities grant competition, we want to offer some tips for prospective future applicants. As my Bellwether colleagues recently wrote, the CSP is a discretionary grant that provides federal resources to create, replicate, and support high-quality public charter schools. Developing a strong CSP application takes significant time and forethought. Although future funding of the CSP hangs in the balance, charter networks thinking about applying should plan far in advance to develop a strong application. 

Bellwether has partnered with a number of charter management organizations to develop winning federal education grant proposals, including CSP Replication and Expansion grants. The Frequently Asked Questions below explain what differentiates a successful application and provide advice on developing a winning proposal. 

Logistics of applying 

When should I start thinking about applying for a CSP grant? 

Six-to-eight-week turnarounds are fairly common: in 2019, the notice inviting applications appeared on November 26, 2019 and the deadline for transmittal of applications was January 10, 2020. Because the turnaround is pretty quick, occurs at a time of year when many staff may be planning time off, and the applications themselves are often over sixty pages long, preparing in advance is very helpful. 

As you think about applying, consider your network’s readiness to grow and increase impact. Indicators of readiness to grow can cross multiple dimensions, such as quality of programming, strength of student outcomes, clarity of instructional and cultural visions, student and staff retention and satisfaction, and financial health and sustainability. Bellwether offers a “Readiness to Grow” diagnostic tool that can help organizations assess their strengths and areas for focus before or during a growth process (see case study that used this tool here).  Continue reading →

College and Career Readiness, or a New Form of Tracking?

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In a new paper, Lynne Graziano and I look at what data states are collecting around college and career pathways.

On one hand, there’s a positive story to be told. States have changed their formal high school rating systems beyond graduation rates and test scores to include a host of college- and career- readiness measures. By our count, 34 states plus DC have some form of indicator along these lines. Another 12 states are tracking one of these measures but do not yet hold schools accountable for them.

While we find this trend promising, many of these states are lumping all “college and career” measures together, even though those pathways may not be equally rigorous or helpful for students. Worse, only 16 states are disaggregating these measures by subgroups of students, so we have no way of knowing whether certain groups of students, such as Black or Hispanic students, are being tracked into, or away from, certain pathways. We argue states need to do more to ensure the latest push toward college and career pathways yields equitable results for all students.

Read the full paper here.