It's been five years since COVID-19 first closed classrooms, leading to learning loss, especially in math.
When the pandemic hit, Westerville City Schools, like so many other districts in Ohio and across the country, scrambled to adjust to virtual learning. The district got busy providing laptops to students, hooking up Wi-Fi connections and making sure kids who depended on school lunches had something to eat.
“The routine of school was completely disrupted,” said Scott Reeves, assistant superintendent for teaching and learning at Westerville City Schools.
The disruption and months of virtual learning led to what is commonly referred to as “learning loss.” Unable to receive instruction the way they had before, students forgot some of what they learned. Meanwhile, kids who were in kindergarten or first grade completely missed the basics.
“It’s couched as learning loss and learning loss suggests you had something and now you don't have it. They didn't have it,” Reeves said of those youngest students, who are now in grades three, four and five.
“We've seen recovery across the board, but the gaps remain in math."- Vladimir Kogan, professor of political science at Ohio State University
A backslide in math
Stanford University’s Educational Opportunity Project tracks school’s learning loss and recovery from 2019 to 2024, using test scores from third to eighth grades. It shows that by 2022, Westerville students fell slightly less than 1/2 of a school year behind in math.
It was the same story across Ohio and the country, with students losing ground in reading and especially in math.
In general, test scores show Ohio students are mostly back on track when it comes to reading and writing, said Vladimir Kogan, a professor of political science at Ohio State University who has studied learning loss.
“We've seen recovery across the board, but the gaps remain in math,” Kogan said. “And they're there for everybody, all students, subgroups, all districts.”
Kogan said improvements in test scores from 2021 to 2023 show that both individual students are catching up, and that each new cohort is doing a little better than the one before.
Kogan said it’s probably taking students longer to catch up in math compared to English language arts because students fell further behind, and because there’s been more focus on reading. In Ohio, there’s been a major push to strengthen reading curriculum with the science of reading.
“We haven't had the same, I think, level of focus on math,” Kogan said.
Kogan said many non-white students and poorer students fell further behind in reading and writing than their wealthier, white peers. Just about everyone fell back in math.
Now, there appears to be a flatline in math recovery, Kogan said. His research shows test scores didn’t improve much between 2023 and 2024.
“Everybody needs to figure out what to do about math in ways that we haven't been able to figure out particularly over the past year,” Kogan said.
Tracking learning loss
Most central Ohio schools saw improved math test scores overall from 2022 to 2024, while a few seem to still be backsliding. Reynoldsburg had lost about 3/4 of a year of learning by 2022, and according to Ed Opportunity, lost close to 1/2 a year more in the next two years.
Columbus and South-Western are heading slowly in the right direction, but both remain more than 1/2 a year behind where they were before the pandemic.
Meanwhile, Dublin and Gahanna-Jefferson, which both initially slid about 1/2 year behind, are nearly back on track.
And Ed Opportunity data shows Westerville students have not only returned to where they were in 2019, they’re actually performing a little better than the national average.
Recovery strategies
Reeves points to a number of factors for Westerville’s apparent success, but chief among them was a major investment in intervention. The district used its federal pandemic aid money to provide more resources to students and staff.
“We invested it on training. We invested it on summer programming. We invested it on resources,” Reeves said. He said in 2021, the district had a robust summer school program. The school offered transportation and breakfast and lunch to remove any barriers to students attending and made sure the material they learned flowed directly into the next year’s lesson plans.
Westerville also has instructional coaches at each of its buildings who support the teachers in building their curriculum.
Reeves said in addition to those strategies, Westerville has been fortunate to have stable leadership and low turnover in building administrators.
Westerville City Schools has about 14,600 students. Around 35% of those students qualify for free lunch, a marker Ed Opportunity uses to assess poverty. There are also three country clubs in the district, Reeves noted.
“We are able to meet the needs of all of our students and provide them everything they need to be successful,” he said.
Three times a year, Westerville checks to see which students are behind in math. Students who need a lot of extra help are funneled into a support program called Delta Math.
Westerville also uses the Bridges math curriculum, which focuses on developing mathematical reasoning over copying equations off the board.
“Ultimately, it's about building confidence that they are sense makers, that they are doers of math, they're thinkers of math. That's what we want for our students.”- Shane Shoaf, Olentangy Local Schools assistant curriculum director
Changing the way students do math
Olentangy Local Schools, a district that didn’t lose too much ground during the pandemic, but hasn’t quite bounced back yet, started fully using Bridges in its elementary schools this year. Assistant curriculum director for grades five to eight, Shane Shoaf is excited about how it rethinks leaning.
“The heart of that is student discourse and problem solving,” Shoaf said. “Students being very critical of how to solve a problem, different ways to solve a problem, giving feedback to their peers.”
He said Bridges brings consistency to Olentangy’s math curriculum, while still leaving room for the art of teaching.
Shoaf, whose position was created this year to support students’ transition from elementary to middle school, said the district was already thinking about improving its math program before the pandemic. Like everywhere else, mandatory school closures set them back.
Now they’re on a path Shoaf thinks will lead to success.
“As adults you hear often, you know, I'm not a math person. Well, I think our approach is to get everyone to feel confident. It says, 'I am a math person,'” Shoaf said.
Work still to be done
Like Westerville City Schools, Olentangy Local Schools has a system to identify students who need extra support, as well as a program to catch them up. Both districts were also early adopters of hybrid schedules during the pandemic, which they credit with keeping students from falling too far behind.
Of course, both schools admit there’s still work to be done. There will always be students who need extra help.
When it comes to math specifically, Shoaf said, “Ultimately, it's about building confidence that they are sense makers, that they are doers of math, they're thinkers of math. That's what we want for our students.”
