Education
Pandemic took heavy toll on student achievement in Broward, Miami Dade schools, tests show
Remote learning during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic took a heavy toll on student achievement, according to state test results discussed by the Broward County School Board Tuesday.
Although the results of the tests taken last spring weren’t used to determine if children progressed to the next grade, they showed challenging times lie ahead in getting children — many of whom have not been in a classroom in over a year — caught up academically.
Of particular concern were high school algebra results. Only 23% of Broward County high school students achieved a satisfactory score of 3 or higher. That’s down 19 points from the 42 percent levels of 2019.
“I can’t even come up with the right adjective to describe them,” said Board Vice Chair Laurie Rich Levinson. “This was a 19% drop from the last time students were tested during the 2019 school year.”
Broward middle school students taking algebra 1 also had a big drop in their test scores, with only 70 percent scoring a three or higher in the standardized tests, down 21 points from the 91 percent metric in 2019.
Miami-Dade high schoolers fared only slightly better in algebra 1, with 32% achieving a satisfactory or better score, down 8 points from 40 percent in 2019, according to the results released at the Broward meeting Tuesday.
Miami-Dade middle school students also had a significant drop in algebra 1, with 71 percent scoring 3 or higher, down 17 points from the 88 percent in 2019.
The results of the Florida Standards Assessment and the End of Course exams were released by the district in late July, but the School Board only publicly discussed them Tuesday.
Officials said the poor performance was not unexpected, particularly in math because so few students — less than half — returned to in-person learning last school year. Educational experts say math is taught best with face-to-face visual instruction.
For this reason, School Board members, particularly Rich Levinson, are urging the Broward Teachers Union to agree to allow cameras in their classrooms so children who must quarantine due to COVID-19 exposure can see lessons. The hold-up on allowing classes to be filmed is due to the union’s objection to mandating camera equipment the district recently purchased.
But, board members said Tuesday they would be amenable to using their authority to at least require teachers to use their laptop cameras to broadcast their lessons to quarantined students.
“I don’t care what’s used; there has to be a visual for students,” Rich Levinson said.
Officials were troubled, too, by the results in science, where only 36% of eighth graders received a satisfactory score on the assessment — a 7-point drop from 2019.
“It pains me tremendously,” said Daniel Gohl, Broward’s chief academic officer.
Science is also assessed in fifth grade, and results shown Tuesday reveal only 40% of those tested passed.
The achievement gap between white and Black students, white and Hispanic students and male and female students didn’t change much, but officials said that is no real reason to celebrate because overall performance suffered over the two years among all demographics.
“In 2020-2021, achievement gaps decreased as overall performance decreased,” officials wrote on the slide presentation showing the results.
Still, minority students and those whose first language is not English continued to suffer the most academically, according to the test results.
For example, only 18% of third to 10th grade English-language learners achieved a satisfactory score or higher on the English Language Arts test, with 82% scoring below satisfactory or inadequate. In 2019, 21 percent scored 3 or higher, while 79 percent scored below satisfactory or inadequate.
School Board Chair Rosalind Osgood urged her colleagues not to rely too much on the results as the district gets back to all in-person learning, saying the impact of the pandemic should not be underestimated.
“We have to be realistic,” she said. “The pandemic will have a long-term negative impact on education for a variety of reasons.”
Osgood said remote learning had a disproportionate impact on Black, English-language learners, students with disabilities and LGBTQ students.
“We had a pandemic. It impacted our lives in ways that we couldn’t imagine,” she said.
District 1 Board Member Ann Murray said the results also likely reflect that many of the students who had been learning remotely took the tests solely because they were required to. Many had been out of the classroom for a year and a half and did not try to pass the tests.
“Many of the students came in and just Christmas treed the exam,” she said. “Have we thought about that?”
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