The Persistent Narrative of Learning Loss in the Face of Genuine Student Needs by Hannah Lewis

The Persistent Narrative of Learning Loss in the Face of Genuine Student Needs

by Hannah Lewis

Teachers, how tired are we, as we navigate this year’s standardized testing sessions, of hearing about learning loss? If you are like me, the term triggers clenched teeth and rolled eyes. So when I saw this PBS segment earlier this month about how parents’ perceptions of their children’s grade level performance were not “accurate,” I thought, Oh, a new angle to stoke alarm about how doomed this generation of children are academically…

Does this mean that I don’t care about my students’ learning, or about how accurately parents understand their children’s academic performance? I like to think not. I tend to hold my students to what I consider to be quite high standards, and to dialogue regularly and specifically with parents and caregivers about students’ performance. 

So what’s my beef–what’s our beef, perhaps–with this language? 

The fact of the matter is, my issue is twofold. 

Academics at the Expense of Social-Emotional Needs

First, the kids are not alright, and that should be the primary focus of everyone in education or who works with children in any capacity. In March, the CDC released a report that, in my mind, painted a much grimmer picture than any set of test scores I’ve ever seen. One in five teen girls has experienced sexual violence in the last year. Three in five felt “persistently hopeless.” One in four seriously contemplated suicide. And LGB teens reported similar concerns. Make no mistake: these statistics should alarm us all. 

I have always hated that old saying we hear so often in “trauma-informed” professional development sessions: “You have to Maslow before you can Bloom.” I don’t believe that’s true. Many of our students experience ongoing trauma, chronic stress, homelessness, food insecurity, and other obstacles; they are still capable of learning. That said, when students are so persistently traumatized and sad, I am not sure that reading remediation programs and math drills are the best solution for their mental, emotional, or academic progress. 

Reading and writing are incredibly powerful tools to leverage for social and emotional healing. At the WPCTE HOPE through JOY conference, one of the most powerful sessions I attended, Dr. Richard Koch’s “Trauma-Informed Teaching is an Act of Love: Building it in Our Classrooms,” explored how to ignite students’ enthusiasm for writing through authentic and mindful writing opportunities. Not once do I recall Dr. Koch mentioning students’ grade levels or career readiness–but of course, students who are enthusiastic about writing, and who associate writing with positive self-perception, will engage with it more and will get better at it, by whatever arbitrary metrics we choose to use to assess them.

What Even is a "Grade Level"?

And that arbitrariness is my second complaint. When we say students are reading at a second-grade level or a tenth-grade level, these numbers really don’t mean anything. Half of U.S. adults read at or below what we consider a sixth-grade level. This information raises the question, “Why do we expect seventh-graders to read better than their parents?”

Obviously (at least I hope it’s obvious!) I’m not suggesting that students who reach what we consider to be a sixth-grade reading level are done learning. Rather, I just want to point out that this categorization is random and arbitrary and reflects little. To develop students’ reading levels, we should introduce them to high-interest, rich, engaging texts that they will approach with curiosity and work to understand. Instead, what we too-often do when faced with a deficit-remediation model is drill students with passages that mean little to them and standards-aligned questions for them to answer correctly or incorrectly. My preference would be to engage them in authentic conversations about characters’ dilemmas, how they navigate the world, and what the author of a text is suggesting about life. 

It’s easy to see these complaints and say that I’m just a disgruntled teacher who wants to accept students’ abilities as just being what they are and not push them to achieve more. That couldn’t be further from the truth. 

As I wrote back in June of 2021, when WPCTE read Dr. Gholdi Muhammad’s Cultivating Genius for book club, “I’m trying to reframe my thinking slightly to instead consider how to leverage students’ diverse experiences of this past school year to cultivate genius.” Cultivating genius does not mean holding children to arbitrary “grade level” standards and framing their current levels as “deficient” if they don’t meet that arbitrary standard. Neither, however, does it mean that students should not be challenged. 

This year, some of the work I’ve done to engage students in meaningful ways that have allowed them to leverage their diverse experiences include:

• Code-switching lessons that require students to read in dialect and reflect on their home languages and dialects and the privileges they enjoy or don’t enjoy as a result 
• Free-writes on high-engagement topics such as their perceptions of entrenched wealth in society, their opinions about the impact of nature on their lives, etc. 
• Class discussions that connect difficult rich readings like Their Eyes were Watching God, The Scarlet Letter, The Crucible and A Raisin in the Sun–to name a few–to their own lives, experiences, and values
• Poetry lessons that challenge students to define, reexamine, and redefine what qualifies something as a poem, considering American Sign Language, concrete poems, spoken-word poems, and ars poeticas as examples

When it comes to how parents see students' progress, I don’t spend a lot of time talking to them about the “grade level” at which their child reads. Of course, if I notice their child is struggling with the coursework, I point it out; they generally already know. But what I have tried to do this year, and what I will continue to do, is to talk to parents specifically about how their child is doing socially (yes, even in eleventh grade; and, yes, even at a cyber school); how their child is handling the workload and stress of the school year; how enthusiastic their child is about their coursework; how engaged their child is in class discussions; and what they and their child might need from me to facilitate student learning. 

I hope that this kind of dialogue is more fruitful than a conversation “correcting” parents’ perceptions of their child’s “grade level performance” might be.