It’s been five years this month since the pandemic shuttered classrooms, and California’s students continue to struggle. Most still achieve far below pre-COVID levels, many fail to attend school at all.
Yet, islands of potent reforms are surfacing — in surprising places — where inventive educators are bending children’s learning curves upward once again.
The long-term challenge is daunting. Students in public schools, rather than bouncing back, remain half a grade level below pre-COVID levels in reading and math. Most troubling, literacy skills have declined since kids returned to classrooms. Less than one-third of the nation’s fourth-graders are proficient readers.
Nor is this dogged slump limited to test scores. Two in every five teens report persisting feelings of sadness or hopelessness, says the Centers for Disease Control, and the angst has eased only slightly since the pandemic. Also, nearly 1.5 million California kids miss four weeks of school or more each year, double the pre-COVID count.
Turning a blind eye to our languishing children, President Donald Trump slashes education spending, harming disabled pupils and denying families relief from college debt. He aims instead to subsidize private and religious schools.
So local educators are stepping up to revive and lift kids.
At the Milpitas Unified School District, leaders decided in COVID’s wake to revolutionize high school. Pupils no longer listen sleepily to teachers talking at them. Instead, kids pull around work benches or plug into design software — assembling robots, designing graphics or even building an electrified Homecoming float.
One student team recently built a mechanical pig atop a wheelchair chassis, allowing them to compete regionally with other aspiring engineers. Milpitas schools chief Cheryl Jordan and teachers also nudge students into active roles, helping them learn in hands-on workshops and out in the community. As a result, Milpitas test scores have climbed a grade and a half above the state average since the pandemic.
Or take Compton, where teachers and principals meticulously track each pupil’s learning in reading and math, reviewing any gaps each month with Superintendent Darren Brawley. He has recruited more than 250 adults — many of them college volunteers — to tutor and buoy students who would otherwise fall behind. Warm and demanding relationships with kids prove key to Compton’s strategy.
Compton’s teachers have revamped much of the curriculum, with new learning options to motivate students, from hip-hop poetry to lift writing skills to drone construction to advance math and science skills. District techies enliven classrooms with digital tools; strong students work at computer-aided learning stations while teachers work directly with kids needing extra help.
Such efforts have paid off. The learning curves of Compton pupils have climbed half a grade level since Covid. High school graduation rates, just over 50%a decade ago, have risen to 93% today.
In Glendale, schools offer a new class period that encourages students to voice simmering anxieties with peers or at home, nurturing kids more holistically. Science teachers have scrapped dry didactics in classrooms and now explore subjects like biology outside. Diverse families flock to Glendale schools as teachers foster bilingual skills in Armenian, Korean, or Spanish — starting in kindergarten. The district’s students have climbed more than a grade level above the average California student.
Still, these success stories will remain rare until educators and policymakers spread the word. Gov. Gavin Newsom and state lawmakers have spent $61 billion in efforts to stop the unrelenting decline in learning. But politicians rarely ask which of their myriad programs actually pay off for students.
Equally distressing, achievement gaps have widened among economic groups since the pandemic, despite the pro-equity rhetoric of leading Democrats. Reading scores for Latino fourth-graders remain two grade levels behind white peers on average statewide.
Remedies are best found in local schools, crafted by imaginative educators, not in the state capital. Yet, unless we replicate what’s working, these islands of innovation will be swamped by a sea of dreary schools, uninspired teaching and age-old rituals.
Bruce Fuller, emeritus professor of education and public policy at UC Berkeley, is the author of “When Schools Work.”
