By Dale Chu
Last week, the Collaborative for Student Success—in concert with the Center on Reinventing Public Education and Edunomics Lab—launched EduRecoveryHub, a one-stop online resource spotlighting promising practices for pandemic recovery. From accelerating learning to using data to drive decision-making, the new platform calls attention to innovative and noteworthy practices from states and school districts across a broad range of topics. These approaches will be reviewed by a national panel of experts to better understand how effective they are as interventions and for helping to get our students back on track.
In light of the unprecedented infusion of federal resources, the timing of the EduRecoveryHub is impeccable. At the same time, it underscores the need in the present moment for reliable and valid data to help guide the development and implementation of these practices. Many states have now gone two years without assessment data, and the threat of a third is looming as they wrestle with capacity-related challenges tied to Covid. The concern is that states and districts will eventually begin navigating the recovery process without the clear and objective information afforded by annual testing.
Case in point, one of the many things we that we don’t yet have a firm grasp on is the quality of emergency virtual learning during the pandemic. With all of the questions swirling about its efficacy and how districts have responded thus far, we still have just a superficial sense of how virtual instruction could and should work in America’s schools. My colleague Jocelyn Pickford has a nice write-up over at Curriculum HQ about how Alaska and Baltimore have leveraged recovery funding to smartly adapt using virtual learning, yet I can’t help but wonder what states might be missing without assessment data as a check on their strategies and ambitions. Our schools are needlessly plowing ahead with blinders on; our educators, students, and families deserve far better.