Deborah Lowenberg Ball speaks with The Detroit News about supporting teachers to help students overcome gaps in knowledge that were exacerbated by the pandemic
Although test scores are lower than before the pandemic, Ball says that does not necessarily indicate learning loss in math.
In 2018, the Detroit Public Schools Community District changed its K-8 math curriculum and had begun to see improved test results across grades, reports The Detroit News. Then the pandemic hit, and two years of remote and hybrid learning with many disruptions ensued. Results from tests taken in spring of 2022 show a sharp decline in math proficiency.
According to data from the 2022 Michigan Student Test of Educational Progress, known as M-STEP, only 10% of the Detroit district’s third-grade students were proficient or higher on the exam, down from pre-pandemic levels of 16% in 2018-2019. For seventh-graders, the percentage dropped from 8.8% to 7.2%.
Detroit is not alone, reports The Detroit News, which also notes statewide math scores on Michigan’s state standardized test were down this year for every grade level compared with scores in 2019 before the pandemic hit.
But Deborah Lowenberg Ball, William H. Payne Collegiate Professor of Education and Arthur F. Thurnau Professor in the SOE, pushes back against the narrative that lower test scores mean students have had learning loss in math.
“They’ve lost school math,” Ball told The Detroit News. “School has a very narrow view of math. It comes down to what we test. It’s not what kids would be doing at home with families,” Ball said. “We don’t know very much about what kids were doing (at home) that is mathematical. We value what is done in school. This is a larger question about what we want kids to do in math.”
Rather than attempting to teach a full year of remedial work, Ball says teachers need real support to truly help students overcome gaps in knowledge.
“You can bundle in layers. Math is taught in a linear way,” Ball said. “It’s going to be helping (teachers) see how they can fill in missed opportunities in a more expedient way…It is time to rethink this. We need to pivot. We can’t do the same things we did before.”
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