What will it take to support a decade of uncommon progress in learning?

When I had my first child, I was overwhelmed by the job of getting him from infancy to adulthood. A friend offered a focusing goal: be the best parent you can be for a year. When his first birthday rolled around, I asked her, “what do I do now?” She said, “do it again.”

The pandemic caused unprecedented drops in students’ test scores and growth in educational inequity. Regaining the ground that was lost and eliminating disparity in learning outcomes is a big, overwhelming, job.

Clear goals can make that job more achievable. As we enter a new year, it is time to turn attention from analysis of drops in test scores to the goals leaders need to set and achieve moving forward.

The goals that will move students forward need to outpace the past rates of progress.

If the student learning growth rates typical of the decade before COVID are repeated over the next 10 years, fewer students in the class of 2032 — the students who were in kindergarten when the pandemic shut down schools in the spring of 2020 — will achieve proficiency than the class of 2019. In 10 years time, there will be more disparity in outcomes, and schools won’t have caught up.

(Projections are based on an aggregate of state test scores and NAEP data from the ten states with the most students.)

Education needs a decade of unprecedented growth. To advance outcomes and eliminate disparity, overall student proficiency needs to grow at 5 times the pre-COVID rate (2.5% points per year vs. 0.4% points per year). Proficiency for students of color, students in poverty, multilingual learners, and students with disabilities needs to grow at 7.5 times the pre-COVID rate (4% points per year v. 0.47% points per year). And, these rates need to hold steady every year for the next 10 years.

These rates of progress are not entirely unprecedented in recent history. For example, in Tennessee, 48% of schools saw these levels of progress in any given year between 2017–2019. But only 3.5% of these schools demonstrated these rates of progress two years in a row.

Those of us who support educators and teachers need to focus on figuring out what it takes to help more schools achieve stronger learning gains — and what it takes to help them “do it again.”

That won’t be easy. Much is unknown about how to sustain this kind of progress multiple years in a row — let alone for a whole decade.

But we do have some evidence to guide the effort. We know:

1. Materials matter: What students learn is governed by the tasks we ask them to complete. Supporting teachers in using high-quality materials can transform instruction — like swapping coloring sheets for science labs.
2. Leadership matters: There is more variation in access to critical instructional resources between classrooms in a single school than between schools. Equipping principals to lead instruction well is the key to ensuring that the quality of education students receive isn’t contingent on which classroom they’re assigned to.
3. Relationships matter: Attending to relationships during content instruction is crucial to student engagement, but conversations about the effect of relationships between students and their educators tend to happen outside the context of core instruction. Helping educators attend to relationships in the classroom can support students getting the most out of instruction.
4. Educators matter: The way leaders support teachers shapes the way teachers support students. For teachers to foster a strengths-based culture that reminds students what they are capable of and honors the value of their efforts and achievements, leaders must ensure that teachers are working in such an environment themselves.

None of this is new. These are the same fundamentals that have always mattered. However, policy efforts have rarely focused on the levers most closely connected to instruction. A coordinated effort to systematically support these fundamentals could lead to the kind of uncommon progress that students need.

A generation is on the line. The class of 2032 is in 3rd grade now. The children in this class are talented and capable young people who will lead our future. It is time to be ambitious. It is time to use what we know to support a decade of great progress for students.

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