Summer officially started on June 21, which means the last day of school for New York City students was June 27. But what will the summer school break season mean for area kids who, according to recent test scores, are suffering academically?
The National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) found that New York State’s fourth and eighth grade students have fallen behind on their reading and math scores. New York saw its most pronounced drops in fourth grade math scores, where students average a score of 227 out of 500: “lower than their average score in 2019 (237) and…not significantly different from their average score in 2000 (225),” NAEP summaries show.
“The percentage of students in New York who performed at or above the NAEP Basic level was 66% in 2022. This percentage was smaller than that in 2019 (76%) and was not significantly different from that in 2000 (66%).”
Pandemic-related learning loss
The National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) conducted the nation-wide student test assessments for the NAEP. “We are observing steep drops in achievement, troubling shifts in reading habits and other factors that affect achievement, and rising mental health challenges alongside alarming changes in school climate,” NCES Commissioner Peggy G. Carr claimed in a statement.
“The mathematics decline for 13-year-olds was the single largest decline we have observed in the past half a century. The mathematics score for the lowest-performing students has returned to levels last seen in the 1970s, and the reading score for our lowest-performing students was actually lower than it was the very first year [this] data [was] collected, in 1971.”
The COVID-19 pandemic is pointed to as having a devastating effect on children’s learning abilities. NYS Comptroller Thomas P. DiNapoli noted that because the state was hit early by COVID-19, schools moved quickly to using remote learning, but remote learning was a luxury that not all students were able to use in New York, or the world. COVID-19-related lockdowns and disruptions led to a global learning loss; at one point during the pandemic, 94% of the world’s student population was subject to school closures.
“It is critical to understand the extent to which learning progress has changed since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic,” the authors of an analysis of evidence on learning during the COVID-19 pandemic wrote in the journal Nature Human Behaviour. “We use the term ‘learning deficit’ to encompass both a delay in expected learning progress [and] a loss of skills and knowledge already gained. The COVID-19 learning deficit is likely to affect children’s life chances through their education and labor market prospects. At the societal level, it can have important implications for growth, prosperity, and social cohesion.”
A problem Black kids need to solve
Yet even before COVID, educators had found that students have been less interested in learning. Academic knowledge has been separated from people’s everyday ideas about how to live, so when school’s out, learning tends to stop. That’s a problem Black kids need to solve, say local educators.
Sam Adewumi attended Brooklyn Technical High School and later returned to his alma mater to work as a teacher for 12 years. Now Adewumi operates CAS Prep, a tutoring program that teaches academic fundamentals to first through sixth graders. CAS Prep also has a Test Prep Program that prepares seventh and rising eighth grade students for the Specialized High School Admission Test (SHSAT) and helps high school students practice for their Regents examinations. Adewumi said CAS Prep students are best prepared when they’re part of the test prep program for at least a year; students need that amount of time to familiarize themselves with formal academic assessments.
Many parents are not even aware of what the academic tests require, Adewumi said. One recent student took an assessment at CAS Prep and scored 15 out of 57. His mother was shocked; she claimed that her child was a “level four student.” Adewumi explained to her that those levels have nothing to do with potential test performances. “…those levels just give you a pathway to let you know that your child has the fundamentals. But a test like the SHSAT is geared to test students at a higher level—it’s the same concepts, but the level of questions [is] deeper and more challenging.
“You can regurgitate information for months and your child will get a four on the state tests because it’s just the same information you’ve been regurgitating for months. As opposed to on the SHSAT where you’re not going to find the same question across four years’ worth of tests.”
Most students are able to meet the demands of the higher test assessments, the CAS Prep founder assured, it’s just that most kids don’t get the support they need so that they can take on that kind of academic challenge.
Adewumi believes in having students work beyond the grade levels set for them. Just because your child is in fourth grade it doesn’t mean that they should only work toward completing fourth grade tasks. Once those tasks are completed, children should familiarize themselves with being able to work on materials designed for higher grades.
“We have to be able to accelerate students to beyond the grade level that they’re in. For example, eighth grade students learn algebra, or that’s when they get into algebra deeply. They need to be doing that in seventh grade and be comfortable with it in seventh grade so by the time the eighth grade class comes, it’s not something that will be a challenge for them.”
Adofo Muhammad, the principal at Brooklyn’s Bedford Academy High School, said his students have maintained a high level of math and reading proficiency because the school administration gives kids programs designed to engage them. The school ranking and review site Niche.com placed Bedford Academy High School as No. 178 out of 2,878 high schools on its list of “Niche Standout High Schools in America.” The website said the school has “87% of students [who] are at least proficient in math and 95% in reading.”
“Our summer bridge program really is based on English and math,” Muhammad told the AmNews. “There’s a STEM-based program that we institute, and we have what we call a male empowerment and female empowerment program––which is really character education––where they set long-term goals and aspirations. We let the children figure out what they want to do, what college they want to go to, what majors they might get into. And then they kind of draft a long-term process—a long-term plan—and look at how to implement that.”
All of this work takes place in the summer and continues into the school year. Muhammad said it’s the school’s way of “acclimating students to our norms, our values, our demands, and our non-negotiables.
Muhammad is not opposed to the summer break, he told the AmNews, “as long as the students have some summer program, whether it be academic intervention services, or any other program that can kind of sustain some level of competency in certain areas that they had difficulties in.”
Reading for fun
When NCES released the nationwide student test assessments, NCES Commissioner Carr noted that a dearth of readers is one reason for the lowering of student academic scores. “Reading for fun is strongly associated with higher achievement,” Carr said. “Yet fewer students, especially lower-performing students, are reading for fun compared to a decade ago. Aside from its academic effects, reading opens the mind and the heart to new ways of seeing and thinking about the world. Many of our young people will never discover latent passions or areas of interest without reading broadly on their own time.”
Adewumi agreed that reading and learning have to be part of every student’s makeup. He said he’s on board with the idea that students need their summer breaks, “but not necessarily a break from learning. I think maybe it’s on us as parents and community groups to think about what are the different ways we can give students a break.
“The whole issue of social emotional learning and being aware of where students are emotionally and mentally is important, right? But I don’t think that means that they don’t need to continue to learn. I think you can do both—you just diversify your activities.”