Despite COVID’s disruptions to education, states should track students’ “skip-year” academic growth in 2021 as it blendsequity and accuracy in the process of measuring school quality, according to a new report.
Having this data will better equip state and local education leaders to help students recover from COVID-era learning losses, says by the Data Quality Campaign, the Alliance for Excellent Education and the Collaborative for Student Success.
Suspending 2020 statewide annual assessments was unfortunate but understandable given this unprecedented disruption in education,” Jim Cowen, executive director of the. “Having growth data next year will be crucial for understanding how school closures affected student progress and what supports they will need to get back on track.”
Because schools lack data for the 2019-20 school year, states can measure “skip-year” growth rather than year-to-year growth.
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The approach, which is used in a handful of states, combines data from two years ago and the current year to develop a picture of student progress.
While skip-year growth might be a departure from business as usual, it’s a definite consideration for states, districts, and families right now,” President and CEO Deborah Delisle said.
The lays out the following reasons for using skip-year growth:
- It can be disaggregated by student group.
- It works with different types of growth models, including percentiles and value-added approaches.
- It works with models that use multiple years of assessment data.
- Skip-year growth provides the same critical insights into school quality and student learning as year-to-year measurements.
“The COVID-19 pandemic has disproportionately affected vulnerable students who struggled even before this crisis closed schools for months,” Delisle said.“Growth data gives parents, educators, and school leaders information about how these students are learning during this unprecedented time.”
91心頭’s offers complete coverage of the impacts on K-12.
