Transcript
Speaker: Hello and welcome to episode 96 of our podcast at Human Restoration Project.
Speaker: My name is Chris McNutt and I'm a high school digital media instructor from Ohio.
Speaker: Before we get started, I want to let you know that this was brought to you by our supporters, three of whom are Kate Rowbottom, Kimberly Baker and Rachel Lawrence.
Speaker: Thank you for your ongoing support.
Speaker: You can learn more about the Human Restoration Project on our website, humanrestorationproject.org or find us on Twitter, Instagram or Facebook.
Speaker: Today, I am joined by Nick and we are going to break down Human Restoration Project's recently released Learning Loss Handbook, providing an overview of the ideas that we present in the book, the faux narrative being created surrounding learning loss, and offering an alternative for educators to push for and pursue.
Speaker: You can find a free download at humanrestorationproject.org slash materials.
Speaker: So Nick, we are here and we are talking about the handbook.
Speaker: And we were just saying, hey, let's just go through the entire thing.
Speaker: Talk about what's in here, what we learned, the struggles along the way of trying to comprehend this.
Speaker: And basically what we're looking at here.
Speaker: And we had said before that basically learning loss handbook, in our view,
Speaker: is the best resource as of right now to understand what's going on.
Speaker: Because what we did is we tried to combine a bunch of folks that were, I guess, way smarter than us, and all assemble them into one place so that we can really tease this apart.
Speaker: That was like the genesis of this idea is that throughout the pandemic, going back as far as panic, like the moral panic over schools in the spring of 2020 when COVID was just getting started, I don't recall necessarily the learning loss narrative there.
Speaker: Maybe it started to pick up over that summer 2020 and into the fall as schools mulled over hybrid online remote options, but
Speaker: you know, by the spring of 2021, it really had kind of solidified into that solid narrative of like something profound is being lost here, but it didn't seem to be focused on what I think we felt were the right things that had been lost in those now 19, 20 months of the pandemic.
Speaker: So we
Speaker: we didn't see anything out there that had addressed it, I think, from that perspective.
Speaker: But I was just going back through and kind of seeing some of the things that led us to release it when we did, because it was it had been a project that had been in place for months.
Speaker: And it was really curious that that one of the things that kind of caused us to, you know, put in the last, the last kind of pull an all nighter and get that thing out there before the end of August was,
Speaker: An article that came out, an op ed in the New York Times, the school kids are not all right.
Speaker: And the whole piece was focused on this data that had been extrapolated out from from the learning loss narrative, not just to suggest that there would be academic experiences.
Speaker: academic gaps or academic learning loss that would need to be recovered, but actually that this could be extrapolated into the loss of future potential incomes.
Speaker: Even as far as to say the impact on the US economy could range from 128 billion to 188 billion every year as the cohort enters the workforce.
Speaker: So just this, this huge moral panic
Speaker: not around the sort of the socio-emotional impact on kids, not the impact on the lives that were lost and kids that we know were orphaned and are now in worse life situations because of the ongoing impact of COVID, but this asinine idea that because
Speaker: kids had an adapted school experience or maybe didn't finish their 2020 school year as they would normally have done, that that is going to lead to a drop in lifetime earnings and US GDP felt like that was the wrong thing to do.
Speaker: So for us, I think it was trying to refocus on what matters and what had mattered during that time.
Speaker: And then try to try to dispel a lot of those myths that had popped up around learning loss, where that data was coming from, and try to give some context to that, because it kind of seemed like the
Speaker: the media portion of it was sort of meant to circumvent that frontal cortex where you think about things and just go right to the amygdala and just turn on that fight or flight response and demand, you know, unsafe conditions for school, which I think we're seeing now has backfired in a big way.
Speaker: Before we move on and talk about more about what we have in this handbook, I do want to reiterate the fact that we're not claiming that learning loss didn't occur in terms of a major disaster didn't occur in our lives.
Speaker: I guess there's no issue going on that something wasn't lost.
Speaker: What we are claiming is that the narrative surrounding learning loss, as in the one that's been propped up by the McKinsey report, which we'll talk about in a second, as well as the testing companies in general, serves to earn profits for testing companies.
Speaker: It serves to have districts and therefore students
Speaker: take a bunch of additional tests, purchase a bunch of test remediation software, and do many things to increase their learning loss, quote unquote, from the pandemic.
Speaker: That is not the same as reestablishing connections.
Speaker: I guess the TLDR of the handbook is stop focusing on purchasing products that will increase test scores because that will lead to a lot more problems than it might attempt to solve.
Speaker: And instead focus on connections, rebuilding community, and social emotional learning.
Speaker: I mean, it was a global pandemic.
Speaker: It's still going on.
Speaker: And it's a major problem.
Speaker: The handbook itself is divided into two parts.
Speaker: The first part, which we'll start with is, okay, what is learning loss?
Speaker: Where does that come from?
Speaker: How is it being used?
Speaker: How are we making these claims?
Speaker: What's its connection to the standardized testing industry?
Speaker: And part two is, okay, knowing all that, what can we do instead?
Speaker: What other connections is this?
Speaker: How can we reimagine systems?
Speaker: How can we build back better?
Speaker: And I think that really the narrative is sadly timeless or it's cyclical.
Speaker: This is something that's not new.
Speaker: Even though we're talking about learning loss in a pandemic context, so 2019-2020 school year, 2020-21 school year, hopefully not longer than that, it's still going on with summer slide.
Speaker: the quote unquote learning crisis, even things like nation at risk and previous reports where test scores have been hyper low.
Speaker: And as a result, testing companies have said, hey, we need to buy all this stuff.
Speaker: We need to fix this.
Speaker: Have your kids do all these things.
Speaker: And I'm sure most teachers listening in have been told at one point or other to use some kind of testing software or test prep companies materials to
Speaker: had a kid sit in front of a computer or do some worksheet and say, hey, we're going to increase test scores.
Speaker: And usually it's absolutely miserable.
Speaker: Our claim is it's not really rooted in anything that's relevant.
Speaker: And hopefully we prove that here today.
Speaker: We're just going to start with it.
Speaker: Nick and I were just talking about how this is kind of like the audio narrative over the DVD special edition.
Speaker: We're going to talk about everything about what happened in this Learning Laws Handbook, where it came from, and hopefully give you all a good idea about what it is that we're trying to talk about.
Speaker: So the very first thing that we started talking about was just terminology and history.
Speaker: The beginning is just breaking down whatever the heck is going on when it comes to this.
Speaker: And I still remember in our first meeting when we were just trying to dissect the reporting around learning loss, it took a solid hour or two just to understand what exactly...
Speaker: This is it's very confusing.
Speaker: And I wouldn't be surprised if there is at least one error in this learning loss handbook, because a lot of the stuff doesn't make sense.
Speaker: Perhaps it doesn't make sense by design.
Speaker: Like, like, it's kind of like just a bunch of people working around something that just doesn't work.
Speaker: So therefore, it just doesn't make sense.
Speaker: Or maybe it's just, I don't know, I don't really know how else to put it.
Speaker: That's the thing I think that is really interesting, too, in the way that we have continued to kind of seed a lot more power into those groups that claim to be generating the data that we would make our data-driven decision-making from.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: But a lot of times people in education who work in the classroom or are closer to the classroom, right, aren't really equipped with the toolkit to understand what that data is saying.
Speaker: So as we as classroom teachers began to dig into that data, it came with a whole new terminology, a whole new jargon that we really had to dig into to ask, what
Speaker: not just what this is saying, but then is this thing significant?
Speaker: So we had to understand the language of the standardized tests in order to be able to interpret whether a one to 3% difference is significant or if that's even important, right?
Speaker: Are these things worth spending millions and millions and millions of dollars to try and recover?
Speaker: Like, what is this even measuring?
Speaker: So yeah, so that's why we start this thing off with, with basically a glossary, because a lot of the terminology is fly by night, like it's new, like what is accelerated learning versus learning loss or learning recovery?
Speaker: Are those just synonymous for things?
Speaker: There's been a lot of internet debate about what the appropriate use is of those terms, but they're the tip of the iceberg of that same kind of idea that goes back not just to the summer slide and those notions that in the seat time away from school, something is lost if we're not constantly cramming or pouring things into kids' brains.
Speaker: It's just going to ooze out of one side or the other, but really then
Speaker: I don't know if it's because we're addicted to context, because like we're, we were, we were social studies teachers, you know, or something, but, but we felt like we had to go all the way back to like what the early 1900s and talk about like, basically, the 20th century, the industrial revolution in the 20th century and the advent of
Speaker: of management and this concept of Taylorism and basically trace that Taylorist idea, you know, that was used to fine tune factories back in the day, clear up through what, clear up through the Cold War and Sputnik.
Speaker: And then, of course, in the 1980s through a nation at risk.
Speaker: And then up through then, of course, No Child Left Behind,
Speaker: In the in the early 2000s, a bipartisan, you know, push to a push towards standardization and the punitive use of assessments and the new accountability movement.
Speaker: And then, of course, President Obama's own version of that with the race to the top, kind of putting, you know, putting the.
Speaker: financial incentives in place for schools and districts and states and stuff who could adopt these test score delivering programs clear through, gosh, clear through today, right, with McKinsey and company.
Speaker: And I think they are probably the most cited in this whole learning loss narrative.
Speaker: So then, yeah, a little bit later on, we go a little bit more into McKinsey.
Speaker: But the whole premise of this thing is, like, measured on this Taylorist notion of seat time as sort of a method of inputting information.
Speaker: And the lack of that seat time means that there must be a loss of that information.
Speaker: And being able then to what be able to break these things down into, well, X number of days missed means you are this many units of learning, you know, behind or what you have lost from where you were previously.
Speaker: So we trace it back to Taylorism, but also the fact that.
Speaker: McKinsey, let's talk about McKinsey right now.
Speaker: McKinsey is a global consulting firm, like they are rooted in foreign policy, but specifically, their interests lie in like restructuring, usually management firms or companies, they're the folks that go into companies and will fire a bunch of people in order to try to increase their stock prices, kind of like old, I guess, Mitt Romney esque
Speaker: or I guess more modern day Pete Pudiech worked for McKinsey.
Speaker: McKinsey has been tied to the opioid crisis.
Speaker: They've been tied to some shady arms deals and work in Afghanistan.
Speaker: They have a pretty seedy history in general.
Speaker: And they've also worked at just basically spreading the idea of different business or neoliberal style practices to every facet of America and where America is, aka
Speaker: the world this this connection of learning loss is based off of the idea of global competitiveness through testing whenever we do testing in the united states we center our work on are we keeping up with japan or with france or whoever with our math and reading scores and
Speaker: If our math and reading scores are not, McKinsey, as well as the folks who draw upon McKinsey's work, believe that by using Taylor's principles or by just standardizing this model and putting more inputs in and treating school like a corporation, that you will see increased results.
Speaker: But sadly, as you and I both know, and I think most people listening, we're
Speaker: School is not a corporation.
Speaker: It doesn't work like that.
Speaker: You do not learn through neo-economic ways.
Speaker: You can't just hire a new manager and then just say, okay, everything's better now with all of the different problems that face the American school system.
Speaker: And it's not the teacher's fault per se.
Speaker: It's all of the underlying systems, including things like funding, solving issues of inequity in society, et cetera.
Speaker: So fast forward over about 50 years since McKinsey was founded, you have, as you just said, No Child Left Behind, Race to the Top, Nation at Risk.
Speaker: These are all just different reports that say American kids are behind, there's a giant achievement gap, et cetera, et cetera.
Speaker: So put more money into schools to address standardized testing so we can figure out what's going on and try to make things better.
Speaker: I think that that's rooted in perhaps good ideas.
Speaker: I don't think that everyone that believes in those things is necessarily doing it for nefarious purposes, but there's certainly a very strong lobbying wing that invests in this.
Speaker: That Taylorism, right, is rooted in the efficiency movement.
Speaker: You know, and that notion that, you know, what could work to either induce workers to work faster or churn out more widgets or however we could speed up the assembly line kind of practices there.
Speaker: That's what that kind of mechanical...
Speaker: management efficiency movement is rooted in.
Speaker: And it's just that mindset, but applied to schools, kind of like as a conveyor belt.
Speaker: And so, right, the notion that someone is at a third grade level or at a sixth grade level or at a whatever level kids are supposed to be at is, I mean, it's completely arbitrary, right?
Speaker: And determined by whom, you know, by
Speaker: the makers of this particular test by, is it determined by community standards, right?
Speaker: Is it determined by national standards?
Speaker: Is it by global standards?
Speaker: By whose standards are we judging where these kids are at?
Speaker: So, you know, I imagine my seniors now that I have, who have had, right, two, three years now, gosh, it seems like forever, but, you know, they're the tail end of their sophomore year and then their entire junior year and now heading into their senior year disrupted, you know,
Speaker: by the pandemic, right?
Speaker: It doesn't fit into that efficiency conveyor belt mentality because if this pandemic has shown anything, it's that human beings and human life is messy and inefficient, particularly in times of crisis.
Speaker: So why would education be anything but messy and inefficient in this time as well, right?
Speaker: The notion that we would have stayed solid and steady on this conveyor belt or should have stayed solid and steady on this conveyor belt
Speaker: is something that I think the folks pushing this learning loss narrative have never addressed.
Speaker: What would be the acceptable level of disruption given the malevolent mishandling and mismanagement of this pandemic in the United States of America?
Speaker: We can point to international examples and say that, oh, kids in such and such country are going back to schools as quote unquote normal and pushing for those same ideas here when those other countries have just done, they've done the other public health work to make those things possible and just we haven't.
Speaker: So there's a lot else tied up in this notion, but the idea that we can distill that
Speaker: That's rebuilding the future on the college board's values.
Speaker: That's right.
Speaker: And Pearson's values and the people, again, who are giving us the data that we're using for data driven decision making and then turning around and buying their products.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: to resolve this crisis.
Speaker: So, you know, it's going to sound conspiratorial, but it's really, if you just peel the thing away, it's just about, you know, power and money is really what it is.
Speaker: And it's about, you know, them providing money
Speaker: marketing materials to solve a problem that they have the assessment data in their minds to resolve.
Speaker: And so it's a financial incentive for them to draw this into a hysteria so that way they can get schools to buy their accelerated computer software or to fund their summer academies.
Speaker: I have a feeling that we're probably going to spend the most amount of time just talking about that.
Speaker: But I do want to make sure that we start off with square one or step one, which is just, does any of it matter to begin with?
Speaker: So if we pull back the curtain and we just say, let's imagine that these reports never came out, does the standardized test actually measure anything of use?
Speaker: Like if we just look at the questions and we look at what standardized tests do and we look at the ramifications of issuing them,
Speaker: Does it even matter if hypothetically there were points that were lost or students are falling behind?
Speaker: Like, what exactly are we measuring?
Speaker: And we started this by simply looking at a series of different questions from a variety of different tests we pulled from.
Speaker: The MAP, the NAEP, the STAR, a couple of state tests, the PISA, all the acronyms.
Speaker: Yeah, all the different acronyms, all the different tests that kids have to take.
Speaker: Freshman year, our students last year, I believe, had to complete 17 different tests in the last two weeks of school.
Speaker: So it's just brutal.
Speaker: It is brutal how many tests pop up.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And we didn't, I was the one that threw these questions in this book, and we'll read a few of them here in a second.
Speaker: I didn't cherry pick these.
Speaker: Like I didn't Google like hardest test questions or like search through and browse a bunch of test questions before I chose one.
Speaker: It was usually like one of the first three.
Speaker: And I kind of chose them at random just because they're all absurd.
Speaker: We'll start with the ones that are supposed to be easy here.
Speaker: We'll do a few.
Speaker: So there's a test question on here from the map.
Speaker: It's an adaptive test.
Speaker: So you could get this question at any point in elementary school, depending on your quote unquote reading level.
Speaker: And it's two paragraphs about swimming.
Speaker: And it's like Alex says, swimming is really fun.
Speaker: It's really easy to learn how to swim.
Speaker: My favorite place to swim is the lake near my home.
Speaker: I do not like swimming in pools.
Speaker: Pools are too crowded.
Speaker: And then Carl says, swimming is hard work.
Speaker: It took me all summer to learn how to swim, but I'm glad I learned.
Speaker: I like going to the pool to swim.
Speaker: I have fun swimming with my friends.
Speaker: And then it has you sorting between all the things that Carl and Alex agree on and things that they disagree on.
Speaker: You have to like pull them into the right sections.
Speaker: And what we were curious about is if you are reading this prompt, first off, could you answer it?
Speaker: I think most adults probably could answer the question.
Speaker: But I think the better question for this one is like,
Speaker: Why might a student answer this question correctly or incorrectly?
Speaker: What barriers could fall in there?
Speaker: This is on page 13, if you're looking in the book at the same time that we are.
Speaker: But I think the thing that happens when I see this is that there's just cognitively so much going on on the page for this question.
Speaker: Like if I'm a child and taking this test, it's just really hard to figure out the formatting and then to figure out what the question is asking and then processing, how does it want you to answer it?
Speaker: So something that could be very easily resolved, you know, or assessed between students and teachers just by having, making this a conversation, you know, and then you can pretty easily sort out what kids, you know, get and what they don't get, turns it into, I don't know, kind of like a cognitive nightmare, honestly, just trying to sort through this piece.
Speaker: And yeah, clicking and dragging and moving around.
Speaker: So there's like the technological elements of this thing too.
Speaker: Yeah, it's just...
Speaker: It's just kind of a nightmare question, honestly.
Speaker: Well, also, there's a cultural component to this.
Speaker: This has been heavily critiqued.
Speaker: The narrative surrounding this typically brings up cultural critique and the fact that there is a sizable population of people that don't swim in pools, that don't have a pool near them.
Speaker: If this is aimed at elementary school students, they might not have any idea...
Speaker: what this prompt is really even talking about.
Speaker: They might hypothetically know what these things are, but it's really hard, especially when you're in first or second grade, to visualize and answer a question like this without the experience of knowing what these things are.
Speaker: I could see students struggling with this, but to me, the bigger part is that's just really boring.
Speaker: If I've read 10 of these prompts, I don't care anymore.
Speaker: Who cares?
Speaker: cares if swimming is really fun and what Alex thinks.
Speaker: What bothers me about this is that is the data useful to know?
Speaker: Yeah, of course it's useful to know if like a kid can't read and they're in elementary school.
Speaker: Like we want to make sure kids can read.
Speaker: But this is not motivating kids to want to read to begin with.
Speaker: Like you could easily issue a test like this between teacher and student, if you're a support specialist or something, where you can figure out this exact same data.
Speaker: But you could do it in a way where the kid actually enjoys doing the thing that they're being measured on and you'd be helping their way through it.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: This is this is not something, again, that could not just be assessed in the moment by a teacher and a student that would take an inordinate amount of time to sort out.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: take a day to look at the data if you need to, and then be actionable like the next day.
Speaker: I don't know what why this has to be on a map question.
Speaker: Now, when you brought up that cultural competency piece, it made me think of some questions that didn't actually make it in here, because I think we had far more pages than ended up being in here.
Speaker: And one was actually about a toll booth.
Speaker: Do you remember this question?
Speaker: It's on page 15.
Speaker: Oh, is it?
Speaker: Oh, okay.
Speaker: Well, that's great.
Speaker: There it is.
Speaker: So that's the same kind of idea, right?
Speaker: The toll rates for crossing a bridge are 650 for a car and 10 for a truck.
Speaker: Now, you know, in Iowa, where we don't have a toll for anything, right, you might get to 10th grade and not have an understanding of what toll roads are, if that's not something that you've experienced or something that you know about.
Speaker: So, so then in that question, it's not even asking you, it's
Speaker: it's a it's asking you like to do hardcore algebra with this.
Speaker: So so then which of the following systems of equations yields the number of cars and the number of trucks that cross the bridge during the two hours?
Speaker: So you have to turn this concept that you don't understand into this mathematical equation.
Speaker: But meanwhile, you're wondering, what the hell is a toll rate?
Speaker: What's a toll bridge?
Speaker: I've never driven a truck across that.
Speaker: Why?
Speaker: Why is that there?
Speaker: So that question.
Speaker: So that question is from the SAT.
Speaker: for someone that can't see it, it's asking you to input these values into x and y to make the equation that you would use to solve this.
Speaker: So for example, x plus y equals 187, 6.5x plus 10y equals 1,338 divided by 2.
Speaker: And it's one of those things where I do not know a person alive
Speaker: who would ever solve this question like this like this might be mentally what you're doing like with a calculator in your head but no one would write this out as x plus y and put it into some it feels like it's forcing this to make up for the fact that you had to learn this very specific standard to meet this test it's not rooted anything realistic and again just like
Speaker: If this is my 10th test in two weeks, and not to mention, this is the SAT, so I'm super anxious about it, who cares?
Speaker: Who in their right mind would do it?
Speaker: Who cares how many trucks and cars pass a toll road?
Speaker: Even if you know what toll roads were,
Speaker: All I care about is, do I have enough money to pay for the toll?
Speaker: I don't know.
Speaker: It's a very silly question.
Speaker: What I wanted to bring up is the one right before that on page 14 from the star.
Speaker: I think this is the fan favorite for us.
Speaker: I still can't pronounce this word.
Speaker: I still can't.
Speaker: I'm going to embarrass myself because I don't remember either to bring it up.
Speaker: And we've looked it up several times.
Speaker: The star is another one of the plethora of tests that's used to gauge student understanding for multiple times during the year, kind of like the map test.
Speaker: from Renaissance Learning.
Speaker: So this is a 12th grade test.
Speaker: So this is supposed to be the hardest test that they issue.
Speaker: It's from English.
Speaker: Nick, do you know how to pronounce it?
Speaker: Did you look it up?
Speaker: I do because I just Googled it.
Speaker: So how is the word actually pronounced?
Speaker: Synecdoche.
Speaker: Okay, synecdoche, which to be fair, Thomas, who is an English teacher on our staff, knew what this word was.
Speaker: Kind of.
Speaker: However, it took all three of us studying this question to figure out what the right answer is.
Speaker: So quiz for you at home, see if anyone knows this.
Speaker: It says synecdoche is a figure of speech in which a part of something is used to mean the whole of, or conversely, the whole for the part.
Speaker: One example would be if someone referred to her car as her wheels, which is another example of synecdoche.
Speaker: One, the captain called all hands on deck.
Speaker: Two, the pen is mightier than the sword.
Speaker: Or three, the dawn raised her rosy red fingers.
Speaker: I feel like I'm on a game show.
Speaker: It legitimately sounds... What's wild to me is this one gives you an example of what it is, which in theory is supposed to supply context.
Speaker: But I'm not gonna, I know we discussed this before.
Speaker: I still do not know what the right answer is.
Speaker: I do not know which of those three is the right answer.
Speaker: And there's only three.
Speaker: That's the thing.
Speaker: It's not even like the traditional four, like on some of them.
Speaker: Yeah, so like the first hurdle obviously is, can you even pronounce this word correctly?
Speaker: And if you can't,
Speaker: Is it that important knowing anyway?
Speaker: I mean, if you were pronouncing this, you would literally read synekdouche.
Speaker: That's just like how you would phonetically pronounce that.
Speaker: Or synekdouche.
Speaker: Synekdouche.
Speaker: Yeah, we're just embarrassing ourselves now, but
Speaker: We have college degrees.
Speaker: We are college educated, successful, right?
Speaker: Like successful in big scare quotes, right?
Speaker: But like functional maybe is the correct word here, right?
Speaker: Like have functional adult lives.
Speaker: Like I've got children, you know, like we both have homes and cars and like, you know, we manage these things in our lives.
Speaker: And like at no point in my life has there been a gate that has been kept closed to me because I have not understood synecdoche.
Speaker: So I think really that's kind of the lens then that we were thinking about with these questions.
Speaker: Somewhat of the absurdity of them aside, I mean, you can kind of quiz yourself at home or do it yourself if you'd like to.
Speaker: But we were really asking, yeah, what is this really assessing?
Speaker: For students who might be unmotivated or disinterested, what would cause them just to...
Speaker: You know, if they couldn't 50 50 and guess just look at the prompt feel overwhelmed fill in a bubble and move on and then how accurate then is the information that we're getting is that actionable in the first place because if we're not acting on whether or not kids know we're acting on whether or not they care to answer the question in the first place so you know we're responding to the wrong thing.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: Also, if we were acting on if kids knew, then we wouldn't receive almost the vast majority of these test scores partway through the following year.
Speaker: Almost all of these tests, you don't get the data anyway.
Speaker: And even when you do, so much time has passed and that usually teachers have changed that there's no way for you to even act on the data.
Speaker: The data just serves to showcase typically the problem more than it does to actually offer any kind of solution for you outside of purchasing more test prep materials.
Speaker: And before maybe we wrap up this section, I'll kind of maybe with an anecdote here for me.
Speaker: Really quick.
Speaker: I'm pretty confident, by the way, the answer is three.
Speaker: Dawn raised her rosy red fingers because the trivia side of me wants to have that answer right.
Speaker: But I'm not positive.
Speaker: That's okay.
Speaker: So somebody at home listening right now, send us an email.
Speaker: Chris at human restoration project.org.
Speaker: Don't send it to me.
Speaker: Send it to Chris.
Speaker: But in my own experience, I remember, I don't know, I had been in my district maybe three years, maybe four years.
Speaker: So I was fairly new to the district and at that point fairly new to the profession as well.
Speaker: And I can just remember us being called into a meeting where we were meeting with somebody from the Iowa assessment team.
Speaker: Like they were part of the test development team or part of the research team, something like that.
Speaker: And they were going to come and talk to us about the social studies portion of the like then the Iowa assessment in its form, maybe back in the mid 20 teens or something like that.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: And I can just remember sitting in that meeting and kind of just being excited at first because it was like, oh, we're going to pull back the curtain and kind of see, you know, how the sausage gets made on this kind of stuff.
Speaker: And maybe that'll help us with the responses.
Speaker: I mean, our scores weren't bad to begin with anyway, but the more that we went into the actual test, which as educators was the first time that I had actually gotten to see the test, they handed us the test booklet.
Speaker: I still have it.
Speaker: They handed us the test booklet and we went through the whole exam.
Speaker: So this is what students take.
Speaker: What's your response?
Speaker: How can we improve our teaching in response to what we know now?
Speaker: And the answer was, we're not going to change a damn thing because what we're doing is head and shoulders above anything that this test expects our kids to do.
Speaker: We're getting kids to, uh, you know, write, uh, write letters to, to local elected officials, right.
Speaker: And, and kind of learn about that process.
Speaker: We're having them go to school board meetings.
Speaker: We're right.
Speaker: Having them do, um, experiential kind of project-based learning stuff.
Speaker: We're getting them to think and read, uh, like a historian, you know, we're getting them to, um,
Speaker: You know, understand the impact of economic thinking on everyday decision making and all these other kinds of things.
Speaker: And the test wanted to try and reduce that whole experience into a series of the most inane, the most irrelevant questions that I could ever imagine.
Speaker: So I left the meeting just being disgusted.
Speaker: And the decision that we made as a department was, well, we're not going to do anything in response to this because it's not worth responding to.
Speaker: And we never have.
Speaker: We've never been responsive to these tests.
Speaker: And we're not like a big tested subject.
Speaker: So it hasn't mattered.
Speaker: But that's at the end of the day.
Speaker: It's like, is what you're doing in your classroom right?
Speaker: right by students or in front of you?
Speaker: Or are we trying to impress, right, the people who are furthest from students with the researchers for your state assessment and to try and, you know, to try and juke the stats a little bit to show progress in those areas?
Speaker: Or are you teaching the kids in front of you?
Speaker: There's so much cognitive dissonance here because what a test manufacturer and district will tell you is that in theory, you are not supposed to be preparing students for the test.
Speaker: These tests are meant to just see whether or not teaching is effective and you're not supposed to cater your content towards the test.
Speaker: You're supposed to cater your content towards the standards, which are then addressed by the test.
Speaker: However, at the exact same time, every district does this.
Speaker: Every district cares about their test scores because typically your funding is associated with your test scores.
Speaker: And every test company, either themselves or through some kind of partner, offers resources that do increase traditionally test scores.
Speaker: And the way that they do that is by teaching students exactly how to answer the questions, not because they necessarily understand the content, but because they know these very specific clues and hints and types of questions that this content asks.
Speaker: And the same reason why I'm sure everyone had a friend in high school who was great at taking tests, but ultimately had no idea what was going on.
Speaker: Because the tests only measure a very, very, very specific subset of knowledge and don't accurately measure learners at all.
Speaker: I myself am a terrible test taker, but I think I can produce things and do things quite well.
Speaker: And also we highlight on here, I don't want to get too caught up on it, but...
Speaker: We highlight on here, I mean, there's a lot of data about standardized testing and the problems it cause.
Speaker: There's anxiety, sleep deprivation, fear, assume cultural knowledge.
Speaker: It attracts from creativity.
Speaker: I mean, modern day tests that are created by AI in order to speed up the process, not only are the multiple choice test questions, okay, whatever.
Speaker: I mean, obviously they are quickly graded, but now they do writing through AI.
Speaker: And there have been multiple circumstances where folks have just written nonsense.
Speaker: And the test is like, okay, that's a five out of five because you use this certain amount of words and these certain sentences.
Speaker: No one actually cares what you wrote.
Speaker: So if you have an original idea or you're a creative writer, who cares?
Speaker: Did you use the word synecdoche in your paper?
Speaker: In which case that's a five out of five.
Speaker: And just the whole legal apparatus that surrounds this, even pulling these questions and putting them on this document,
Speaker: I had to use previous versions or things from test prep companies.
Speaker: I can't actually pull up the test myself and take screenshots of it because that would be illegal.
Speaker: Test companies own the rights and don't allow folks to share the data.
Speaker: I mean, I'm sure everyone has probably given or been around, like giving like the SAT, ACT, etc.
Speaker: or you have to read the ridiculous prompt that's like if you share this date on on social media we're going to come after you and you could be like sued like what like your test results will be deemed inaccurate it's like why are we making tests that we can't prepare for by looking at the test first that meant to me makes no sense
Speaker: The irony of leaving that meeting, you saying teach the test prompted this.
Speaker: The irony of that meeting, and this has kind of become a running joke in our department for some time, is we were advised by the IO assessment person to teach, or what was their line?
Speaker: Yes, teach to the test, because that's going to get you the results that you want.
Speaker: Teach to the stuff that's on the test.
Speaker: You just can't teach the test.
Speaker: So we're like, isn't that just more difficult?
Speaker: Like if I know what's going to be on the test, why not just give them the same kinds of questions and things that are going to be on there?
Speaker: Like if that's what matters, why wouldn't you just spend all of your time doing the things that are going to improve those test scores instead of, you know, to your bigger point, you know, if you have some standards that you can draw from a broad range of skills, abilities, content, time periods, like
Speaker: thinking from a social studies background, why would you not do that?
Speaker: But those are going to be things that may or may not reap rewards for you on the test later on.
Speaker: I mean, I teach an AP class.
Speaker: This is the world that I live in is, you know, this constant tension between, you know, giving my students what I think they deserve out of that classroom experience and teaching to a single three and a half hour exam in May.
Speaker: And that's the tension that we're at at a systemic level.
Speaker: K through 12 is teachers.
Speaker: Are you teaching kids to 360 days of the year?
Speaker: Or are you teaching to those five days that they're going to be trapped in MAP tests or whatever the case might be?
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And also just the fact that the way that you fix this isn't by attempting to improve the test.
Speaker: We've tried that for decades.
Speaker: Honestly, even going back to the old Thorndike-Dewey debates back in the day, back in the 30s, people were debating whether or not multiple choice tests could be valid measures of intelligence.
Speaker: Honestly, I don't think it's worth the effort.
Speaker: We have tried to make tests more fair, more equitable, make them make more sense, make them more culturally responsive, and it doesn't work.
Speaker: Because ultimately, you can't take an entire year's worth of learning.
Speaker: in entirely different contexts and entirely different communities and say, all right, take this test and then figure out whether or not they learned something.
Speaker: It doesn't make any sense.
Speaker: There are other ways of measuring student growth.
Speaker: I think both of us would probably advocate for portfolios or showcasing of learning.
Speaker: And you could have perhaps a state board that reviews those things to see if teachers are on the right track and if kids are still reading and writing.
Speaker: It's not like they're
Speaker: we should get rid of all oversight it's just that that oversight should be working in a different way to support learners and support teachers instead of paying them against each other in a competitive testing environment especially when well one uh the testing obviously uh it hurts students from low-income backgrounds because typically funding is attached to this and students from low-income backgrounds face so many different challenges that they typically don't do well in standardized testing uh but two
Speaker: The overall narrative here, if we were to really go back, is that these tests are rooted in the idea of racist systems and practices.
Speaker: Like they're doing what they were designed to do.
Speaker: The whole idea of meritocracy through a multiple choice test, through the SAT and its origins,
Speaker: was designed to keep students of color and poor students out of higher education and out of potential opportunities for them.
Speaker: And that's documented.
Speaker: That's that's evidenced.
Speaker: That is a real thing.
Speaker: We know this.
Speaker: That's in the history.
Speaker: I mean, yeah, like it goes back, I mean, to Alfred Binet via Carl Brigham, who, I mean, was a eugenicist at his core.
Speaker: And Alfred Binet, you know, of course, with those IQ tests and those military proficiency exams around the turn of the century, too.
Speaker: And then, of course, lockstep with that eugenics movement with, you know, the development of racist science that validated in their minds Jim Crow and segregation and every other discriminatory policy imaginable.
Speaker: And, you know, at the risk of of Poe's law here, right, those things got exported to certain countries and they abused them in horrific ways, of course, in the 1930s and 40s.
Speaker: And
Speaker: We still use those exams at the same time.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: They were they were deliberately designed to keep, you know, Jews out of Ivy League schools back in back in the day.
Speaker: And in the 1950s and 60s and stuff, there actually was like a huge as as desegregation led to more college entrance and stuff for for, you know, people of color in marginalized communities.
Speaker: The score percent, the score averages went down, right, as people from disproportionately underserved communities took these exams.
Speaker: And, right, this led to a little crisis in the SAT and in the college board, and like led to recentering the
Speaker: has led to a lot of things over the years to basically, right, again, from their perspective, if it to juke the stats, so you can keep the certain groups of people out under the more objective basis than just discriminated against them based on race, religion, socioeconomic status, but
Speaker: We know that these things are just proxies for all of those.
Speaker: One of the, I don't know if it's a Jack Schneider quote, something that he maybe tweeted out sometime during the pandemic, but he says like, well, we know if the argument is that we need these standardized test data to know which communities are underserved so that way we can better serve them.
Speaker: We already have that information.
Speaker: It's called their zip code.
Speaker: And there's no new information that these tests can provide that isn't already delivered somewhere else.
Speaker: So save the money that we would be having on be using to what, like take the tests, analyze the tests, make these things actionable, buy the accelerated learning software, and just give it to schools, right?
Speaker: To serve, to provide free lunches and breakfasts and meals and to...
Speaker: make before and after school programs and to build better schools and better conditions, like build air conditioning, build, right, the things that are going to serve them in this pandemic.
Speaker: So, yeah, so there is like a huge controversial history with that, that for some reason just gets thrown down the memory hole and we never really think about it.
Speaker: I mean, it goes back to even like picking up like a Jonathan Kozl book from the 70s, where we see this today.
Speaker: Anyone who's even vaguely familiar with public education in the United States knows that if you go to a school that typically serves students of low socioeconomic status, those schools tend to be more prison-like.
Speaker: They are hyper-vigilant about preparing students for tests.
Speaker: They tend to be more worksheet-driven, more lockstep.
Speaker: They sadly do things like lock the bathrooms and make you be silent in the hallways.
Speaker: They're super gross and dehumanizing.
Speaker: Meanwhile, a lot of politicians and some rich folks send their kids to schools where they do whatever they want, and there's a public, beautiful library, and everything's experiential, and
Speaker: their test scores still end up being higher than the students who spent the entire year just preparing for that test.
Speaker: Because ultimately, test preparation and the way that we do test prep and the way that we focus on tests is a better indicator of how much wealth and how much access you have to, I guess, like a quality living circumstance.
Speaker: I don't know if that's the best way to put it, but I think you know what I'm saying.
Speaker: And I think the best way to highlight that, it's in our booklet we wrote about on page 19, is what happens if you get rid of the test?
Speaker: As of the 21, 22 school year, more than 1,500 U.S. four-year colleges have
Speaker: are not going to require ACT and SAT results.
Speaker: That's a lot.
Speaker: That's 65% of all four-year institutions in the United States.
Speaker: Because during the pandemic, people dropped tests and society did not collapse.
Speaker: And what's interesting to me is that in 2018, so this was before the pandemic, this was study, there was a research study that went out.
Speaker: And they looked at certain colleges and those that were test optional and they saw, well, what ramifications does this have if schools go test optional?
Speaker: To be clear, test optional means you can still submit test scores, but you can choose not to submit test scores.
Speaker: And I'll get to some caveats here in a second.
Speaker: But in a study, a fourth of all applicants didn't submit any scores.
Speaker: And as a result, obviously more people applied.
Speaker: However, interestingly enough, you saw higher numbers of Black and Latinx students apply and be admitted.
Speaker: What they found was that students of color were more likely not to submit scores.
Speaker: So 35% of black students did not submit scores in comparison to 18% of white students.
Speaker: And as you saw higher numbers of black and Latinx students be admitted, first-year grades were slightly lower for those who did not submit scores, but everyone graduated at the exact same rate or higher rates than their test-submitting peers.
Speaker: As in over time, it all equated out in the graduation rate
Speaker: was roughly the same or higher than the folks that did submit test scores.
Speaker: There is a caveat because test optional still doesn't work perfectly because those that submit good test scores are still given preferential treatment over those who choose not to submit test scores.
Speaker: But I think in practice, this shows that, I mean, if I was a college admissions counselor, I'd be like, well, what the heck?
Speaker: If students can get in and have the exact same graduation rate or higher graduation rate by not submitting a score, what does that mean for the test scores in general?
Speaker: Or a better question.
Speaker: Last year, during the pandemic, a ton of schools were test optional.
Speaker: If all of those schools and all of those students ultimately end up having the same graduation rate or higher and perform the same as or better their peers, why do any of this?
Speaker: What's the purpose of all this?
Speaker: It doesn't make any sense to me.
Speaker: I think especially if you consider...
Speaker: You know, we focus so much on that admissions process, you know, and getting kids to, you know, to the drive out to the parking lot at the college campus.
Speaker: And then we forget about it and we don't care.
Speaker: We don't realize, like, to what extent there actually is like a dropout crisis anyway.
Speaker: And if you look at the reasons that cause students to drop out, you
Speaker: it's overwhelmingly not because they, it's not because of scores.
Speaker: It's not because they didn't have background knowledge.
Speaker: It's not because, you know, they weren't well-prepared or whatever.
Speaker: It's because of cost.
Speaker: It's because it's expensive.
Speaker: It's because they have to, you know, take care of family members.
Speaker: So it's really about like those community support aspects too.
Speaker: So again, like the test score as college prep,
Speaker: conversation is like another non sequitur like squirrel, because then it gets us focusing on content and standards and, you know, the things that we need to micromanage in the classroom rather than like building an off ramp from kids to move from one environment successfully into another and then stay there, right?
Speaker: And be successful in those environments.
Speaker: One thing that's really interesting that I wrote about just pre-pandemic, this was like early March 2020, while this was all coming out, was about Grexit.
Speaker: And this was the GRE exit, where increasingly schools, particularly in what we call the hard sciences,
Speaker: like physics and some of those things too, they were going through hundreds of programs had been dropping GRE requirements.
Speaker: And what they found was that GRE didn't correlate at all to the quality and the success and the completion of their doctoral programs in these areas, but that GRE requirements actually did select against underrepresented groups.
Speaker: So it's like, okay, there's no correlation between the quality, but it keeps people from underrepresented groups out.
Speaker: What function does it serve other than like as a huge gatekeeper to, you know, people who traditionally have not been able to be entered into those programs?
Speaker: It just perpetuates those same biases.
Speaker: It's almost like there is a system in the United States that could be analyzed about how different legal practices and practices of testing and meritocracy exclude certain groups intentionally.
Speaker: I wish there was a thing that folks learned about that dealt with
Speaker: You should develop a theory around that, perhaps.
Speaker: Maybe about critical race or something.
Speaker: I don't know.
Speaker: Speaking of research, too, I'm not going to go through this whole page.
Speaker: We have a page in the handbook that goes through just the amount of research that does not support standardized testing.
Speaker: There are studies that come from the 80s, the 90s, 2000s, 2010s, this year, about standardized testing.
Speaker: And I think almost every educator knows some of these.
Speaker: But I did want to highlight a few just because I forget
Speaker: just how big of an impact it is.
Speaker: Like there's obvious things that I just like, oh, right, this is a thing.
Speaker: We should probably care about this.
Speaker: Like the fact that our high school does not have a gym class because of a focus on college readiness.
Speaker: The students just don't have gym.
Speaker: So they don't, or phys ed or any kind of outdoor activity outside of what we integrate into our own classrooms.
Speaker: The fact that a lot of teachers will do like the quote unquote real curriculum after the test occurs.
Speaker: All the fun stuff happens after the test.
Speaker: The fact that educators and students just face so much pressure from this.
Speaker: You see a lot of teachers getting in a serious amount of trouble because they're worried that they're going to lose their jobs or have a salary cut.
Speaker: So they manipulate test scores.
Speaker: I don't understand, like, why in the world would you develop a system where people feel like they need to cheat when it's just a measure of their knowledge?
Speaker: It's not meant to be competitive.
Speaker: The fact that the results don't add up, we'll talk about that here in just a second with a little more than a lot of narrative in the McKinsey Report.
Speaker: uh engagement uh it is linked to pushing students out of school it's hyper boring no one likes doing test prep there are very few students who enjoy taking tests um and if they enjoy taking tests they can still take them but there's different ways of doing that they can get really good at trivia uh enjoy it there um the equity issue i think we've exhausted that conversation just
Speaker: The way that this selects against students of color is overwhelming.
Speaker: The data is so clear that it's disgusting to me that the conversation even has to occur.
Speaker: It's so obvious.
Speaker: And finally, just when you focus on preparing for the test, you lose out on so much.
Speaker: I think about all the different times where students have wanted to explore something that I thought was super cool, even in design, because I have a standardized test in design.
Speaker: And I'm like, well, I'd really like to do that.
Speaker: But if I focus on that right now, that's going to take a month.
Speaker: And there's no way you'll be able to get that part of that test done.
Speaker: Like we really do have to cover this to make sure that test is there.
Speaker: And always in the back of your mind, you can't lead a classroom that is truly based off of student interest.
Speaker: If constantly you have to shift and pull towards meeting ultra specific narratives and ultra specific questions that will appear on a test.
Speaker: It's not that the tests are never broad enough to encompass just generalized learning during the course of a year.
Speaker: Yeah, right when you've gotten past the initial sort of bite, right as kids begin to grasp a concept or begin to get excited about it and want to dig and dive in as deep as they can on that thing, you're moving right along.
Speaker: So even the concept of learning loss kind of takes...
Speaker: the content coverage narrative of this thing too, right?
Speaker: And says that like, you know, we can break these into these discrete bits of information that need to be delivered on X, Y, and Z day.
Speaker: And so if you miss so many days, right, you're missing these discrete bits of information instead of, right, losing out on the process, right?
Speaker: And not being able to practice, right?
Speaker: You know, the kinds of thinking skills that, you know, otherwise competent, successful adults might be able to practice.
Speaker: No, you're missing the discrete bits of information that are going to be used against you and your and your schooling institutions later on.
Speaker: Exactly.
Speaker: So I realized this is going to end up being a real long podcast, but that's all right.
Speaker: Because I honestly think that every part is just so hyper valid.
Speaker: So hopefully people are right.
Speaker: It's pause and take a break through this thing.
Speaker: Because this next part to me is the most interesting.
Speaker: I feel like everything that we've covered up until this point, if someone's been involved in education, they probably realize, yeah, this is a problem.
Speaker: And hopefully we're providing more evidence and more tools to communicate that.
Speaker: But the next section deals with the connection of the standardized testing industry and this new learning loss narrative, the one that we're currently involved in right now.
Speaker: This was the part that was done first before we did anything else.
Speaker: This one was mostly me sitting down and it's the Charlie Day meme from Always Sunny.
Speaker: What's the woman's name?
Speaker: Who is Pepe Silvia?
Speaker: Yeah, who is Pepe Silvia?
Speaker: It's that meme with a conspiracy theory.
Speaker: So I literally made a graphic showcasing all of the weird connections between the testing industry, testing companies, and
Speaker: and the reports that highlight this idea of learning loss.
Speaker: And here's the gist of it.
Speaker: So you have like Pearson, Savas, College Board, NWEA, Curriculum Associates, iReady, Illuminate.
Speaker: These are all testing companies.
Speaker: Some of them are huge scare quotes, nonprofits, and some of them are corporations.
Speaker: that generate an absurd amount of revenue.
Speaker: College board alone generates a billion dollars a year, over a billion.
Speaker: Technically, you could make a billion dollars and still be a nonprofit somehow.
Speaker: I'm not really sure how that works.
Speaker: And pay your executives a lot of money, FYI.
Speaker: You have just an absurd amount of money.
Speaker: And pretty much every single one of these organizations sells services that address the concept of learning loss.
Speaker: So obviously, all these testing companies offer textbooks, resources, et cetera, that you pay for in order to do better at their test.
Speaker: But now all of these testing companies are...
Speaker: selling explicit services to address learning loss.
Speaker: That this is this major problem where, hey, you need to buy this special curriculum and do this at the beginning of the year.
Speaker: Our school has done this.
Speaker: In fact, the federal government has required
Speaker: that 20% of school budgets be dedicated towards addressing what was lost in the COVID year, which is highly connected to this learning loss narrative.
Speaker: So I would not be surprised that pretty much everyone listening has had to purchase some kind of testing software or do increased testing as a result of this learning loss narrative.
Speaker: So they're all offering these services, making them even more money.
Speaker: But where this comes from, so like the way that we know that we need to address learning loss is mostly through three reports, the big one being the McKinsey
Speaker: So tying it back together with that global consulting firm, McKinsey.
Speaker: McKinsey published a report in 2020.
Speaker: They actually established multiple reports now saying that, hey, we have this major problem as a result of students leaving school during the pandemic year and schools shutting down and going virtual, even though they don't always say that.
Speaker: Students have a lot of academic needs.
Speaker: So we need to make sure that we address this.
Speaker: So McKinsey pulls data from Illuminate Education, iReady, and a couple others to say, hey, look, test scores are going down.
Speaker: Then all of the testing companies point to the McKinsey report and say, man, this is terrible.
Speaker: Look at this.
Speaker: McKinsey says that all the test scores are going down.
Speaker: They analyzed all of our data.
Speaker: So therefore, you need to spend $25,000 this year to purchase something to address this.
Speaker: But here's where it gets interesting.
Speaker: The actual data, even at taken at face value, if we ignore the fact that the test itself doesn't mean anything, that it's irrelevant, that the questions that are being asked are absurd,
Speaker: The data doesn't add up.
Speaker: So we dove into the actual reports.
Speaker: We looked at what these reports said, how much learning was lost, quote unquote.
Speaker: And here's a few examples.
Speaker: So you have the McKinsey report, the Annenberg report, and the Illuminate Education report.
Speaker: Often in articles, you'll see the McKinsey report cited.
Speaker: And now they started citing each other.
Speaker: So like Annenberg will cite McKinsey, McKinsey will cite Illuminate, et cetera.
Speaker: Those are the only three major ones to our knowledge.
Speaker: In the Illuminate report, there is this chart, which is a screenshot.
Speaker: It's on page, well, it's in the learning loss section, which is actually just on the page, but I think it's page 24.
Speaker: Here there is a figure which shows grade one A math scores, which is an adaptive test that shows students math level.
Speaker: The y-axis is the predicted A math score.
Speaker: The x-axis is a student's free and reduced lunch amount.
Speaker: And the lines represent the 2018, 2019.
Speaker: And then the other one is the 2019 or 2020 school year.
Speaker: So for example, if you had a student who was on entirely free to reduce lunch in an urban school environment, and they received a predicted score of, let's say, 197, the previous year they received a 200, which if anyone is having trouble visualizing that, that's a three-point difference.
Speaker: So from a quote-unquote normal school year, the score was 200, to the year where school shut down and a global pandemic shut us all down, their score was a 197.
Speaker: That, when you look at all the data on this entire report, is the largest gap.
Speaker: As in, the largest gap that is used on this entire report is three points.
Speaker: And that is three points on an over 200-point scale.
Speaker: So it's not even 3%.
Speaker: We're talking like minute percentage points.
Speaker: In fact, if you were using an adaptive test model, we're talking about probably one or two questions difference.
Speaker: There's a similar one in here where it's third grade aid reading.
Speaker: It's a wider scale.
Speaker: So the scale is actually 510 points roughly.
Speaker: There was a one to two point drop year to year.
Speaker: So one to two points on a roughly 510 point scale.
Speaker: That's it.
Speaker: And the most interesting part about this whole thing, this is the one that blew my mind.
Speaker: This is the one that I screenshot, I tossed in our Discord, I'm like, yo, can you believe what this is written in here?
Speaker: I'll just read it ad verbatim.
Speaker: So this company, which is looking at this data saying, look how terrible this is, look at this data.
Speaker: They also say like,
Speaker: Hey, we want to bring up the fact that MAP and STAR tests maybe didn't find the same thing that we did in their reports.
Speaker: They write, in the comparison with MAP math results, the drop in the medium national percentile is very similar to FastBridge results, with differences ranging from zero to three percentile points.
Speaker: It is worth noting that when analyzing learning loss in FastBridge by using changes in mean achievement scale scores across years, the estimated learning loss is consistently similar than the loss derived from ROI differences.
Speaker: This may imply that MAP results underestimate true learning loss.
Speaker: As in, they looked at another report from the map in the NWEA and saw they said that they might have not lost any points at all.
Speaker: So actually, they did some advanced formula wrong.
Speaker: And we found that actually there might have been a three point drop.
Speaker: And it's like, wait, what?
Speaker: Like this to me is so wild.
Speaker: Like it still riles me up.
Speaker: Like we're freaking out about three points on a 200 point scale, AKA one or two questions on an adaptive test.
Speaker: That's what all this money is about.
Speaker: This entire thing is rooted on this.
Speaker: This is the basis.
Speaker: What is amazing, if you're looking at that chart of the AMATH scores, it is so deceptively designed because that Y-axis, you would think that the spread in that Y-axis would be 50 points or something like that, right?
Speaker: But it goes from 190 to 195 to 200, 205, and 210 all
Speaker: over about the space of two inches, so that way they can get the little decline on their curve, so you can actually visualize that.
Speaker: If that was a scale that went from zero to 210, it would be imperceptible, imperceptible decline in that thing.
Speaker: Like if we were talking about getting a rocket to the moon, right?
Speaker: Like that 3% would be probably meaningful.
Speaker: That would be valid.
Speaker: That would be like reliable information that we would need to act to correct.
Speaker: But given all of the other doubts about the utility of those three points and what those one to two questions are asking, how they're asking them, are they things that are worth responding to in the first place?
Speaker: Since that is not an exact science, since that's very much a value-driven proposition, and oftentimes we don't have access to what those questions are, how they're phrased, what it is exactly that they're asking and in what way or what might be confusing for students, we just have to take it on face value from...
Speaker: from wherever, from Fastbridge, that this drop is not only meaningful, but it's important and worth acting on.
Speaker: And again, and I'm going to keep ringing this bell, right?
Speaker: The fact is that we're seeding, like we're giving up
Speaker: agency, we're giving up power to the people furthest away from the classrooms to make decisions on our behalf based on data that they control and that we have to pay for, but that they expect us in the classroom to enact changes and curriculum and assessments to answer the
Speaker: not to the kids in front of us, not to parents in the community, right?
Speaker: Not to the goals of, you know, the school district or whatever else, but to their test.
Speaker: In my opinion, this is intentionally hyper complex.
Speaker: I feel like this is all very much buried, both from the design of the graphs to how it's written, to how you find this data.
Speaker: Because if you open up this report and you read the summary,
Speaker: The very beginning of the Illuminate Education report starts talking about how we need to make up multiple months of lost time.
Speaker: They are translating this percentile drop to literally one to three months of learning, which is not rooted on anything.
Speaker: That is not based off an equation.
Speaker: That is not based off of some in-depth study.
Speaker: That is Illuminate Education's opinion of what they describe as negligible to moderate loss.
Speaker: Which, there's something very funny to me about the idea that one month of learning was considered negligible.
Speaker: Like to me, one month of learning is a lot if we were going to measure it in time, which is also absurd.
Speaker: Even if, again, we take the data at face value, you're telling me that in the face of a global pandemic that shut down schools where kids learned online and teachers were scrambling to figure out what the heck to do.
Speaker: I'm sure everyone remembers like March slash April when school shut down.
Speaker: You're like, what the heck is this?
Speaker: That in that whole time period, kids maybe missed one or two more questions.
Speaker: And that's the problem.
Speaker: That would be assumed.
Speaker: It doesn't necessarily mean that we need to be frantic.
Speaker: Speaking of data that is very questionable in how it's presented, I also wanted to call to attention the McKinsey report.
Speaker: which is if you read an article about learning loss, again, we've been joking about using like your control F and searching McKinsey, it'll be in there.
Speaker: Everyone references McKinsey about how terrible learning loss is.
Speaker: Their report pulls from the map, which is the one that most students take, the NWEA map.
Speaker: Essentially, they highlight this one graph in here that shows significant learning loss or risk for significant learning loss.
Speaker: And it's a chart that shows
Speaker: four different lines going across.
Speaker: And the lines are meant to predict a scenario where it's just normal learning, where students are just in class and then the chart goes up and then summer hits and it starts to fall a little bit.
Speaker: The second scenario is 52% learning growth through quality remote instruction.
Speaker: So someone who wrote this report was like, if you do high quality virtual instruction, then students learn at 52% starting in March, which again, that's not based off anything.
Speaker: That is just an assumption.
Speaker: It's an estimate, an estimation.
Speaker: So then on that little chart, it's a few points lower, it goes up a little bit and then goes back down.
Speaker: The third line is that no growth or loss occurs at all.
Speaker: So this is low quality remote instruction, as in you're treading water.
Speaker: Students aren't learning anything, but they're not losing anything either, which I'm assuming is like worksheets provided online.
Speaker: I don't know that these terms, high quality and low quality instruction are never defined.
Speaker: And then finally, no instruction occurs at all.
Speaker: So there is a line on here that says, hey, school's closed and they never reopened.
Speaker: And the line just goes straight down and no one learns anything.
Speaker: Ignoring the fact that that assumes that you learn everything in school.
Speaker: So much of this is just an entire assumption.
Speaker: Like who, why 52%?
Speaker: Why?
Speaker: Like where, why would we think that it's 52%?
Speaker: And again,
Speaker: Even taken at face value, I would argue that the vast majority of schools in the United States either taught, let's say, with high quality or low quality materials.
Speaker: I don't know what that means, again, virtually.
Speaker: But the difference is a 230 RIT score, which is like an adaptive score, learning occurring.
Speaker: We define what RIT scores is.
Speaker: I don't want to go into that.
Speaker: 230.
Speaker: And the lowest one on here is like roughly a 219.
Speaker: So if we average that, let's say, or even did like a low average, at most they lost 10 points on a over 200 point scale because the RIT again is adaptive.
Speaker: We're talking again a difference between let's say three or four questions, again based off entirely unknown data.
Speaker: That is being translated into saying students lost multiple months of learning because they missed a few questions on the test that they didn't normally before.
Speaker: What is super interesting, too, is you're speaking of the data, of course, that goes from typical in-person and then looks at the various qualities of remote instruction, right?
Speaker: And that's within a 10-point range.
Speaker: But even the lowest one that assumes that there is no instruction, like a kid just falls off the grid, right?
Speaker: Shuts off their brain for what?
Speaker: Like 13 months is what this chart basically goes through, right?
Speaker: Or longer than that.
Speaker: even then it goes from what looks like about a 222 to like a 208.
Speaker: So again, assuming that you've just straight up been gone for a dozen months of instruction, your scores are gonna go down 15 points.
Speaker: And that I think, I don't wanna jump the gun on things, but it's like, man, if the only thing that we're doing in schools is valued by the way that it's measured on tests,
Speaker: That would, you know, this would be frightening in how little it actually impacts these scores.
Speaker: But as we begin to ask that question about like, well, what are we actually losing?
Speaker: Like, what function should schools serve in growing like little human beings?
Speaker: You know, is it the case that those things can be accurately distilled down into that assessment score?
Speaker: Or if you miss a month of school, right?
Speaker: Are you missing out on something else that is just not being captured?
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: That's the value of school.
Speaker: Those things are not being captured on on those assessment scores.
Speaker: And we haven't yet really figured out a way to and I'm not trying to give anyone any ideas, but evaluate.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: Like kind of systematize those things.
Speaker: And this is this has been Susan Engel's point, you know, as a developmental psychologist.
Speaker: And former HRP board member for the quick plug, Dr. Susan Engel, she would make this point in a heartbeat, right?
Speaker: Like we have ways of evaluating curiosity, right?
Speaker: Of figuring out affective, you know, ways that students feel about school, right?
Speaker: And feel about their time in those buildings and how we can, how can we measure those qualitatively and quantitatively and use that data to improve those measures, right?
Speaker: But that's not data that the learning loss folks have access to.
Speaker: That's not anything that McKinsey cares about.
Speaker: All they're doing is looking through this very narrow slit at the tire functions of the eight hour school day plus or minus two hours on either end of that thing or more.
Speaker: And then saying, nope, 10 points on your map tests.
Speaker: using RIT scores.
Speaker: So yeah, like what are we actually losing in that time is going to have to be a conversation that we have as part of this too.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And the only other report I really wanted to draw data on because this was the funniest one to me is so McKinsey pulls from the NWEA data.
Speaker: NWEA, the map creators also have their own publication, which features the exact same data.
Speaker: It's where the chart comes from the McKinsey report.
Speaker: What's interesting about this one is the one that we link to basically shows like, again, like very, very, very minor differences in scores over time, basically the exact same data.
Speaker: But since we've published this, there have been updated charts.
Speaker: So a lot of these folks have walked back previous statements.
Speaker: They've also rebranded.
Speaker: So it's no longer learning loss.
Speaker: It's unfinished learning.
Speaker: which sounds a lot nicer, but it's really rooted on the exact same thing.
Speaker: The data didn't end up being nearly as bad as they predicted it was going to be.
Speaker: It actually was much higher.
Speaker: In some cases, we looked at one where the scores were higher than the previous year.
Speaker: Even in the state of a global pandemic, students actually had higher test scores than they did the previous year, which really makes you question, why are we focused so much on this?
Speaker: The whole point that we're trying to make here is that there's much ado about nothing.
Speaker: we're talking about differences that are so small, but yet have massive ramifications because of how this has been both, um, narratively driven into a sense propagandized, um,
Speaker: The Department of Education has been highly rooted in this.
Speaker: Again, not to sound conspiratorial, but most of these testing companies lobby the government and say, hey, this is an equity problem.
Speaker: Students need to do better.
Speaker: The achievement gap is getting worse.
Speaker: And it's sold on this idea of we need to help students that are most vulnerable.
Speaker: But as we know, as educators, focusing on standardized testing does not help students who are most vulnerable, that it actually hurts students that are there.
Speaker: And we have a large research database that demonstrates that, in my opinion.
Speaker: So earlier, I had mentioned Operation Reverse the Loss, which is the Department of Education's new initiatives to invest in solutions to the learning loss problem.
Speaker: Essentially, in order to get money through the American Rescue Act, states have to invest 20% of their funding to explicitly address issues of academic loss.
Speaker: And you can find the link in our handbook.
Speaker: It's from Future Ed.
Speaker: They've documented what every single state has done and where their money has gone.
Speaker: And you'll find things in there like summer reading and math camps, intensive programs, a lot of adaptive learning software, promoting concepts like learning acceleration, creating new screening measures, so taking even more tests.
Speaker: I know we're taking an additional math test this year, so now the kids have to take even more tests.
Speaker: PD programs focused on addressing learning loss.
Speaker: So although there are states investing in social-emotional well-being and trauma-formed education,
Speaker: But unsurprisingly, it seems like the vast majority of funding is going towards this explicit problem.
Speaker: And I can't say this enough because I feel like I'm losing my mind, but we're talking about one, two, or three questions on a test.
Speaker: It would maybe be different if we were saying like these kids failed half the test and it's like a national panic, but it's not.
Speaker: This is a very minor problem.
Speaker: And I think honestly, it's just rude and making more money for testing companies.
Speaker: So basically, I think what we're getting at as Human Restoration Project when it gets to this is one, we're connecting the financial industry to the learning loss narrative.
Speaker: We are trying to provide educators with the knowledge and the tools to recognize that they are not going crazy.
Speaker: This is not rooted in fact.
Speaker: This is not nearly as meaningful as we say it is.
Speaker: The data itself that we're pulling from doesn't even make any sense.
Speaker: But when we're focused on things that were lost during the pandemic, I mean, at the time of writing this report, we were at 600,000 lives.
Speaker: I believe we're much higher now.
Speaker: Due to COVID, people have died.
Speaker: You know, that affects personal relationships, our mental health.
Speaker: Learning online is...
Speaker: for some an improvement, but for many, it was a struggle, especially when it comes to social connections and all those things that kids like to do.
Speaker: We did our 100 Days of Conversations initiative where we collected and we're about to publish the data of I think 107 different conversations with young people and adults.
Speaker: And almost universally, students said, hey, what I didn't like about the pandemic was I didn't get to go to school dances.
Speaker: I didn't get to hang out with my friends.
Speaker: I didn't get to
Speaker: Like take my driver's test to get my license.
Speaker: I didn't get to eat out anymore.
Speaker: Like things that are the social experience of being someone in school.
Speaker: That is the thing that students struggled with.
Speaker: they didn't really talk about, hey, it was really hard to take the test this year, or I really don't get math anymore.
Speaker: Math is just an enigma to me.
Speaker: It's probably the same as it always has been.
Speaker: So if we are focusing instead on, at the start of the school year, on saying, oh my goodness, test scores have gone down.
Speaker: We need to fix this learning loss.
Speaker: Here's the PD I just did.
Speaker: Here's all this test prep material.
Speaker: We are ironically,
Speaker: causing the same problem that students are saying that they have, which is loss of social connection, because those activities destroy that.
Speaker: Yeah, I think one thing that I have definitely noticed in my students this year, especially my seniors, you know, my sophomores, I don't know if it's a resilience thing or whatever, they've just, they've been as disrupted, right?
Speaker: But my seniors, I think, heading into their senior year, they're
Speaker: they're going to be grateful to be done with the herky jerky, you know, all of this stuff.
Speaker: They're, they're kind of, they're kind of fed up with it.
Speaker: And, and the thing that I see in them is not like, like they don't know as much, right.
Speaker: Or they weren't able to cover as much in their U S history class last year, and now they're unprepared, but their perspective on how schools should be and their, their role as learners, I think has, has been changed for the worse.
Speaker: I think that this,
Speaker: The class of seniors that I have, I love them, but they have a very transactional view of how education should work, in part because we really failed to invest in, you know, call it high quality distance learning or digital learning or whatever.
Speaker: We've had digital learnings forever, right?
Speaker: And it has been, it can be high quality if you pair it with
Speaker: A coherent digital pedagogy.
Speaker: And that was the failure.
Speaker: Okay, we tried to, we tried, we tried to reinvent school online, and then bring it into kids bedrooms, you know, in those traditional power structures, those, you know, those behaviorist systems, etc, just just didn't translate.
Speaker: And so the ways that we tried to mitigate it not working was to double down on the transactional kind of model, right?
Speaker: Like school as this checklist, you check in, you get these points, you do whatever.
Speaker: And kids, I think they still have that view a little bit because we didn't invest in the digital pedagogy that meets them in their bedroom and sees that as an opportunity, right?
Speaker: And doesn't see it as a barrier to...
Speaker: to schooling, um, but views, you know, what can we do today with you that moves the ball forward with something in your life?
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: And then maybe how can we make math a part of that?
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: But start with students first.
Speaker: Now, when I, I think I was at least marginally successful in doing this with my remote students who now I see in person in the building, uh, now this year and, uh,
Speaker: It was pretty incredible because it's the first time I've been able to see a lot of them face to face.
Speaker: But, you know, those are some of the strongest relationships that I was able to build last year because the in-person environment came with so many barriers and hurdles and sanitation policies and so much anxiety around it already that.
Speaker: My online cohort just didn't have.
Speaker: So those are kids that feel free, even now, coming to me in person and talking about things, talking about their experiences last year, really as a meaningful and impactful thing and how we grew as a community of people all experiencing this trauma together.
Speaker: And that's a thing, too, that I think we failed to really meet in this transition back into school is that that learning loss narrative can end up being a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Speaker: If all students end up hearing is that, you know, that that online learning was bad, that I didn't learn what I didn't do what I should have done, that, you know, school failed, that et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
Speaker: Like they they adapt that.
Speaker: But again, if we had flipped that to be something more positive and we could say like, hey, how did we survive during this time when a lot of people did not?
Speaker: How can we come back and again, borrow Young Zhao's framing of this, like how can we take the lessons of the pandemic and build back better instead of beat kids over the head with this deficit narrative from day one?
Speaker: I mean, the purpose of this is to contextualize this, to understand what's going on, because there is an ability to push back against it.
Speaker: We'll talk about the how in a lot more detail in the next podcast, but understanding this stuff gives you the tools to recognize that you can push back and there is a plausible argument on why we're doing this.
Speaker: It's not just a gut instinct.
Speaker: It's real, just like all the other things involving progressive education, like ungrading and restorative justice, et cetera.
Speaker: It's not just it feels bad, there is something actually wrong with the current system.
Speaker: That's what we're trying to contextualize here.
Speaker: So the last two things I wanted to highlight is how the narrative and framing can affect how we treat students and how they feel.
Speaker: The first one I wanted to call out
Speaker: is the stereotype threat, which is typically attributed to Claude Steele.
Speaker: He wrote the book Whistling Vivaldi, which is an incredible book.
Speaker: The stereotype threat is essentially the risk of confirming your own negative stereotype because you're perceived to have a lack of abilities.
Speaker: So, for example, one of the first studies in that book talks about that they brought in many students, I think it's 54 students, with strong ACT, SAT math scores.
Speaker: They were in really high calculus courses.
Speaker: These are students who test well in math.
Speaker: That is their skill set.
Speaker: They had two groups.
Speaker: They had a group that they told the students, hey, this might show gender differences in math ability.
Speaker: And then they told the other group, hey, this test is explicitly designed not to show gender differences and math ability.
Speaker: And for students who were told, hey, there might be a gender difference here, overwhelmingly, male students did better.
Speaker: But when the group was told explicitly, hey, this test does not show any gender differences designed not to, it was roughly the same between men and women.
Speaker: And they repeated this experiment over and over and came to the conclusion that female students, when told of this measured gender difference, there's a perceived cultural norm that men are better at some subjects than women.
Speaker: Which is obviously not true.
Speaker: But when that cultural norm is kind of pitted against you, you start to feel a lot of anxiety, you feel like you might need to overthink questions, you feel like you're not gonna perform well, you feel like, oh, this test might be like not designed for me, etc.
Speaker: And you psychologically do worse.
Speaker: And that's shown when you get rid of that explicit narrative.
Speaker: They did the exact same thing.
Speaker: This book is so interesting, by the way.
Speaker: I love this book.
Speaker: They did the exact same thing with white and black athletes in terms of this concept of sports intelligence through golf.
Speaker: I'll just briefly summarize this one.
Speaker: They basically brought in different golf players, like high-level golf players who were black and white.
Speaker: And they gave them different ways of taking this test.
Speaker: And they told like one group, hey, this measures natural ability.
Speaker: Hey, this measures sports intelligence.
Speaker: They had one group take a like a demographics question before they did the test.
Speaker: They had another group that it was just like general sports performance and they didn't collect the demographic data until after.
Speaker: people mirrored the cultural stereotypes.
Speaker: So like when, for example, they were told that this measures sports intelligence, white athletes had better scores than black athletes because of like the perceived verbiage of sports intelligence, which is defined as the ability to think strategically during an athletic performance.
Speaker: Or, for example, when folks were given a survey beforehand about demographics and being a golf player, and when people took that demographic quiz beforehand, white athletes did better.
Speaker: When people took the demographics question afterwards, it was about the same.
Speaker: It's all based around this idea, this threat of, hey, if I know that this stereotype exists about me and I feel like it's going to be a thing, then I might underperform because of that anxiety and narrative and centering that idea.
Speaker: This connects to the learning loss narrative because in media framing of learning loss, there's a stereotype threat against those of marginalized backgrounds.
Speaker: This whole narrative is primarily centered on schools that already were struggling through school report cards, etc.
Speaker: And that typically affects those of marginalized backgrounds the most.
Speaker: teaching your class and you are centering this idea of learning loss and saying about how much was lost and you constantly reference this and you say hey you know we got to make sure we improve test scores this year they weren't great uh everybody lost learning you might
Speaker: I guess inexplicably or unintentionally end up making those students perform worse, especially if you bring in, I hope you wouldn't do this, but if you were bringing in the data itself, it's going to talk about marginalized communities.
Speaker: It's going to talk about absenteeism rates.
Speaker: It's going to talk about inequality and inequity.
Speaker: So recognizing the fact that narrative can have threats.
Speaker: The other one that we highlighted was the Pygmalion effect, or also called the Rosenthal effect, which is basically where they took a group of elementary school teachers and they, it was through Harvard University, these Harvard University researchers came in.
Speaker: They told these elementary school teachers, hey, we designed this cool new test, and it's going to identify who the spurters are.
Speaker: So the students that are really go-getters, that are academically talented, socially talented, these are just great kids.
Speaker: And they had all these kids take this fake test, and the researchers took all this data, and they chose...
Speaker: 20% of those students at random to be spurgers.
Speaker: There was absolutely no data involved in this.
Speaker: They are just like, these 20% are spurgers.
Speaker: And they took it back to the teachers and said, yeah, these are the spurgers.
Speaker: These are the successful ones.
Speaker: These guys are great.
Speaker: They did so well on the test.
Speaker: And they checked in with these teachers throughout the year.
Speaker: There were two things that they found.
Speaker: First off, the students that were identified as Spergers, especially at younger age levels, like first grade, second grade, drastically outperformed students on tests, like unbelievably doubled their score on tests versus students who are identified as non-Spergers.
Speaker: And they did narrative.
Speaker: They would go around and talk to the teachers and say, what's the behavior like of these Spergers?
Speaker: And the teachers were talking about how they were going to be more successful.
Speaker: They were curious.
Speaker: They were interesting people and just how awesome they were.
Speaker: And then the researchers would ask them about the students who were not Sprueters.
Speaker: And then they would say, oh, you know, that kid, you know, I don't know if they're going to make it.
Speaker: They're not really that great.
Speaker: And interestingly enough, if one of the non-spurs was doing really well, they wouldn't describe them in positive terms.
Speaker: They would say like, oh, it was really unexpected.
Speaker: They're really unique.
Speaker: It's weird how they're able to do this without being identified as such.
Speaker: It was almost like a negative.
Speaker: And the researchers attributed that to the fact that when teachers saw that these certain students were spurters, they maybe gave them more one-on-one attention.
Speaker: They were a little more friendly.
Speaker: They were more affirming.
Speaker: They felt like maybe the reason why younger learners were more susceptible is that when you're younger, you tend to be a little more like malleable.
Speaker: So it's like, hey, the teacher's paying attention.
Speaker: attention to me, this is cool.
Speaker: And because you got paid more attention to you tend to learn more for the test and you tend to be like a happier kid because the teachers pay attention to you and working with you and doing cool stuff.
Speaker: Whereas everyone else feels left out.
Speaker: That to me is just so fascinating because there's so many different ways that you can go with that.
Speaker: There is such an interesting, again, like that affective domain of this thing, because in the bottom of that page 31, it says, the researchers asked teachers about the behavior of their pupils.
Speaker: They consistently noted the spurters had a better chance of being successful and happy later in life, as well as being more curious and interesting than other children.
Speaker: So that is, it's kind of interesting to pit at the beginning of this 90-minute episode.
Speaker: I had mentioned, you know, the apocalyptic tones in which, you know, the New York Times, like the Fordham Institute or whatever talks about the impact of learning loss on education.
Speaker: incomes over the lifetime of the child and of the hit in billions of dollars to national GDP, et cetera.
Speaker: And that's based off of extrapolation from two or three points in the score data that we've been talking about, et cetera.
Speaker: But here it's the case too, that's like just the way that we treat kids, right?
Speaker: can have a immeasurable impact on what being successful and happy, more curious and interesting, or just the way that I guess you perceive those things.
Speaker: And, and God, isn't that so interesting, too, to think that there's there are ways that we can impact
Speaker: the future growth of kids in a very positive way that isn't tied at all to what is getting measured on those assessments course and it is instead tied to the ways that we structure our classroom to value groups of learners
Speaker: And if we can, you know, put a value on those kids that are perhaps in struggling or underserved, you know, communities, then I wonder what, you know, the emphasis on putting the money into the things that are going to value those socio-emotional and those qualitative things could do.
Speaker: instead of just going towards that test prep software.
Speaker: Again, right, there's the opportunity cost.
Speaker: There's that trade-off associated with what we do with those funds and the outcomes for these kids.
Speaker: Are we gonna use that money to pursue narrow test scores?
Speaker: Are we gonna use them to expand the child's experience of this return to school and deal with the trauma of the last 18 months?
Speaker: Exactly.
Speaker: I think it centers the idea.
Speaker: I mean, I guess,
Speaker: credit where credit's due, using the words unfinished learning instead of learning loss is a more positive framing of this.
Speaker: And it's going to affect how people view the concept.
Speaker: But there are better ways that we can view learners about the previous year that approach this from an even more positive attitude.
Speaker: And this isn't to be confused with like toxic positivity.
Speaker: We're not saying that like
Speaker: If you just treat all students super well that they're all going to be hyper successful.
Speaker: There's a lot more to it than just that.
Speaker: And there are students that need additional help that you're going to need to identify, like students, for example, on an IEP that are really struggling that need additional supports.
Speaker: That's fine.
Speaker: It's really ultimately just if we're approaching the school year saying, hey, we need to catch up and that's all we ever talk about, we shouldn't be surprised when our students struggle more.
Speaker: Instead of acknowledging the adversity and how they overcame it and how valiant they are and how they pushed through it and how they made this work and really celebrating the fact that school continued during a global pandemic, all these teachers banded together and made it work.
Speaker: And
Speaker: for the most part, even though it was quite messy originally, uh, I, I didn't see a lot of just complete chaos.
Speaker: Uh, people got through it, um, over time and there were a lot of positives.
Speaker: A lot of kids actually did better online.
Speaker: Uh, like they preferred socializing online.
Speaker: They liked the asynchronous elements.
Speaker: There are things that schools have adopted from this that they want to keep.
Speaker: Like some of them have developed like half days or more virtual days.
Speaker: They've established better PD for online learning to reach more learners.
Speaker: So instead of going, oh, my goodness, look at all this learning loss, we need to dial it back and go, quote unquote, back to basics, which we've repeated that ad nauseum for every single decade.
Speaker: We've gone back to basics, which is code for go back to hyper standardized, quote unquote, rigorous learning.
Speaker: Instead, we can make a school year that starts with hope and wonder and reimagination, reinvention.
Speaker: learning from what we just went through, reestablishing those connections and changing education for the better.
Speaker: It's not a lost narrative.
Speaker: It's something that we're actually gaining and changing and capturing.
Speaker: So if this is going to be the first part, right, where we're kind of talking about the what and the why part, in the next conversation that we'll have about this, we'll actually get to
Speaker: the latter half of the learning loss handbook, where we are actually going to address, like, how do we change that narrative?
Speaker: And how do we, you know, grab on to those assets that we do have?
Speaker: How do we recognize our losses?
Speaker: And how do we push forward
Speaker: to change education for the better.
Speaker: Because we have some tools and some templates and some activities that you can do both with yourself for like a personal reflection, you know, on what we've lost, what we've missed out on, what we'll do differently, but then how to bring those conversations in with your kids too.
Speaker: So again, like refocus on values and refocus on what kids missed out on,
Speaker: and how you can work to bridge that gap and address, again, the trauma that we've all been through of this last 20 months that has fallen disproportionately upon some people more than others for a variety of reasons.
Speaker: But thinking about how we can listen to kids, how can we actually start to address what is lost?
Speaker: How can we practice creative noncompliance?
Speaker: and push back against the inhumane structures that may be built up in place instead of this.
Speaker: And then we'll kind of talk about some resources too that you can use to extend above and beyond all of this.
Speaker: So if you've made it this far, I mean, thank you so much for the time.
Speaker: It's not very often that we do sort of a loosely formatted thing like this, but if you like it, certainly let us know.
Speaker: This might be something we can do more of.
Speaker: If you hate it, on the other hand, you want a tighter, more scripted kind of thing, let us know that too.
Speaker: But thanks for sticking around.
Speaker: One more thing too.
Speaker: If you stayed along this long, we are in the middle of our funding drive.
Speaker: So if you are listening to this in September 2021,
Speaker: You could give to us right now, get a bunch of donor gifts.
Speaker: We're trying to reach a goal to continually produce these kind of resources because honestly, it's a lot of work.
Speaker: There are a lot of sleepless nights trying to look at graphs and charts.
Speaker: So if you want us to keep doing that, whether or not you like us and you think this is really interesting analysis, maybe you don't like us and want us to keep looking at graphs and data.
Speaker: That's up to you.
Speaker: But we really would appreciate your support.
Speaker: It goes a lot.
Speaker: Thank you again for listening to Human Restoration Project's podcast.
Speaker: I hope this conversation leaves you inspired and ready to push the progressive envelope of education.
Speaker: You can learn more about progressive education, support our cause, and stay tuned to this podcast and other updates on our website at humanrestorationproject.org.
