The COVID-19 pandemic, coupled with political and social unrest, has deeply disrupted the lives and learning experiences of most students. It has created an urgent need to address long-standing opportunity gaps and has highlighted the importance of providing resources that support student achievement, social-emotional learning, and physical and mental well-being. This urgency for action to address the impacts is valid, but it has also created a noisy environment of potential options of what might be best for students. It’s critical, now more than ever, for decisions to be grounded in solid research.

Using a national sample of kindergarten to eighth grade students from Catholic and public schools who took MAP Growth assessments, we examine achievement growth over time between sectors.

Researchers interviewed parents whose children participated in a three-week structured kindergarten transition program designed to promote parental involvement in school, reduce students’ chronic absenteeism, and increase children’s readiness for kindergarten. Interviewees expressed that participating in the program yielded benefits for themselves and their children, and proposed various ways that adjusting the program could better meet the needs of all stakeholders. Parent suggestions were synthesized into multiple implications for practice and substantiated by current relevant literature.

In this webinar offered in partnership by the Alliance for Excellent Education, NWEA, the National Urban League, and Unidos US, learn about new NWEA research on academic trends of students during the past school year compared to a more typical school year, what these findings suggest about widening education inequality, recommendations for states and districts on how to use recent federal aid to transform education for historically underserved students, and the perspective a a district leader on what their district is doing to support students as they return to school.

This report examines the academic impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on Black, Indigenous, and people of color (BIPOC) students, with the goal of documenting achievement trends to provide leaders and policymakers with evidence to guide action to address educational inequities for BIPOC students.

Among the many ways in which schools are being transformed by the COVID-19 pandemic, the change in kindergarten enrollment is likely to have important consequences in classrooms across the nation. Because the academic and nonacademic skills students develop in their preschool and early elementary school years are foundational to important longer-term outcomes, understanding these changes and finding ways to effectively support our youngest students’ learning is critical for educators and leaders. Drawing on recent research, we offer four timely considerations for district, school, and classroom leaders.

In this SAGE perspectives blog, Angela Johnson shares some key findings from NWEA research exploring how school shutdowns impacted student achievement at the start of the 2020-21 school year.