Closing the COVID Gap at AISD

“Imagine a Zoom meeting with 12 4-year-olds.” That’s how Justin Douglas remembers his son Holden’s first year of preschool in the 2020-21 school year. “Imagine being a 4-year-old who doesn’t even know how to behave in class. They’re just learning that stuff and they were having to learn Zoom etiquette, too.”

Holden is one of 35,000 public elementary school kids in Austin whose first years of education have involved at least some remote learning. And it’s been hard. In 2021, the Texas Education Agency wrote that the pandemic’s impacts “erased years of improvement in reading and math.” Standardized test scores show that six in 10 Austin ISD elementary students aren’t reading at grade level – in other words, 22,000 young Austinites face a risk of reduced literacy or even illiteracy.

That’s a problem because all subsequent learning, including subjects like math and science, is dependent on reading. Research also shows literacy is associated with better health outcomes, higher self-esteem, the development of empathy, stronger moral reasoning, and better memory in late life. Those who don’t read well are less likely to earn a living wage, more likely to be incarcerated, and have a reduced life expectancy.

Teachers begin reading instruction early in our public schools. Ideally, a teacher will be able to sit beside a student, place their finger on a word in a book, and help them sound out the letters.

But that’s not what kids like Holden received. When he returned to in-person classes in the fall of 2021 as a kindergartner, he and his teacher were masked and socially distanced, reducing the personal connection so important to reading instruction. Holden’s parents believe the experience slowed down his early literacy.

“Holden’s in second grade this year and he is catching up to where he needs to be,” Holden’s mother, Lindsay Douglas, said. But test scores show many kids are struggling to catch up. How can Austin’s public schools bridge the COVID gap?

The Novel Coronavirus

In the months leading up to the COVID-19 shutdown, Meghan Buchanan was at work on BLEND, the Austin school district’s online learning platform. She was a member of the district’s Technology Design Team, which was bringing “blended learning,” an approach to teaching that mixes online and in-person instruction, to classrooms across the district.

“I remember it was in January of 2020 and our boss, Erin Bown-Anderson, started talking about what might happen if COVID-19 was a real thing,” Buchanan said. “Like, what this might mean for us, how we needed to be ready to pivot, and how important our work might be. We were already thinking, 'How can we position ourselves to be ready?’”

Two months later, on March 4, Texas’ first case of COVID was announced. Things quickly fell apart. On March 6, the city of Austin declared an emergency and South by Southwest was canceled. On March 13, the last day of school before spring break, Austin ISD canceled classes.

“Immediately – I think this was the same day they made that decision – we started talking about an online hub for resources,” Buchanan said.

The Technology Design Team worked through spring break, changing a blended learning conference that had been planned for March 25 from in-person to online. Two thousand educators attended the conference to see how remote learning works, how to create identity-safe classes online, and how to reach students who aren’t connected to Wi-Fi.

A few weeks later, the district launched the Learning At-Home website. It provided links to curriculum, COVID guidance from the Centers for Disease Control, and support for remote learning and mental health. Each page included a video walkthrough narrated by a district administrator, teacher, or student. “A lot of it was led by teachers, who were like, 'We can do this,’” Buchanan said.

Flipped Upside Down

By April, the reopening of the schools had been postponed repeatedly. Thousands of people across the country were on ventilators and dying. More than a million Texans had lost their jobs. No one knew what would happen next. Educators like Patrick Salinas, then the vice principal of Norman-Sims Elementary, were taking it day by day.

“Education was completely flipped upside down,” Salinas said. “For the moment, it wasn’t about teaching anymore. It was about survival for the majority of our families. It was about making sure that we knew where our students were. I remember thinking, 'We don’t know who is being affected.’ So our number one job was to make sure we were just contacting families and staying engaged.”

Norman-Sims is one of many schools in Austin’s Eastern Crescent that for years has been designated by the state as low-performing. Norman-Sims students are 50% Hispanic, 40% Black, 4% Asian, and 2% white. Ninety-six percent of them qualify for a free or reduced-price lunch. As Salinas made plain to us, Norman-Sims does more than educate students. It helps stabilize their lives. It feeds them.

“We do breakfast and lunch. If the kids stay after school we give them dinner. And when they go home, I know that they’re in multi-generational households. We’ve got families that live in shelters. We’ve got families that, I know for a fact, the parents are working long hours or double shifts. So at that point we were just making sure that basic needs were being met.”

With the kids no longer able to come to school, Norman-Sims began delivering curbside meals. And it wasn’t the only school doing so. Austin ISD’s food services team prepared and delivered over a million meals to students and their caregivers from May through December 2020. As the Learning At-Home website went up, the district also delivered the hardware necessary to make online instruction possible – Chromebooks, iPads, Wi-Fi. It placed wireless routers on 261 of its school buses and parked them in neighborhoods with internet connectivity issues.

“We had a big technology drive-through,” Salinas remembered. “We all talked about how we wanted to be like Chick-fil-A. We put together backpacks, we put together nine-week kits for the kids, we put together their technology, so they had a whole system. They came through the drive-through during their designated time, and we made sure they had everything for online learning. At the same time, we were doing a social media campaign, telling them how to set up their environment so that it’s conducive to learning.”

“I Lost a Lot Online”

The Texas Education Agency made plans to reopen schools in August 2020, and some schools did reopen. Others reopened in September. Austin ISD was one of the last to let students return. It opened on Oct. 4 but at only 25% capacity. Most kids stayed home.

For many students and teachers, that year – when classes were split between in-person and online learners – was the most difficult of the pandemic. Veronica Burke, who works as a dyslexia interventionist in grades two through five at Annie Webb Blanton Elementary, remembers how she prepped before the year began, spending the summer re-creating her lesson plans online, recording videos modeling word sounds, scanning the pages of her lessons, and uploading everything.

But when she started teaching, Burke found that remote learning bogged down the lesson. Kids couldn’t maintain the same level of attention they did in person. She had to take breaks every 10 minutes. She couldn’t sit beside her students to see how they held their pencils or put her finger on the page to help them follow along.

“I lost a lot online,” Burke said. “I had to get creative. I used the annotation tool on Zoom to model how to write the letters, and I would have my students watch that. It was like, 'Okay, we’re practicing these letters today. Here’s how you’re writing your letters. And now you try it. And now, take a picture of it, or have a parent take a picture of it and send it to me.’”

For those at home, success depended to some degree on how comfortable they were with technology. Jillian Griffin’s daughter began third grade remotely in the fall of 2020, never having had much experience with computers.

“She hated it,” Griffin said. “She dreaded it. She was miserable the whole time. She eventually got used to it but, at the beginning, I was having to get up from my desk every five minutes and help her. And it was really isolating. She was not really interacting with the other children.”

Some students did better online than in person, and certainly it was crucial to have the option available – many would have had no instruction at all without it. But most of the parents we spoke with were frustrated by the experience. It was difficult for young students to focus. Renee Sanders’ daughter entered Norman-Sims in the fall of 2020. Sanders would sit beside her to help her through the lesson.

“I work overnight as a nurse and I would stay up and watch the poor teacher that was trying to teach through the screen,” Sanders said. “There would be 23 little faces in 23 little boxes and she had to gather all of their attention, all at one time. You’d have kids that were asleep. You had some that weren’t trying to pay attention. You had some students just looking at a TV. She’d say, 'Let’s take a break, we’ll come back in the afternoon.’ Everybody comes back and it’s turned to 17 boxes, 15 boxes. It was obvious it was going to be a setback for all of them.”

Burke estimates that only one out of five of her students had a parent beside them for the lessons. She saw that it was harder for those without one. Many of these were from economically disadvantaged households, where parents weren’t able to take time off work.

“When we started out virtually that year we put out messaging: Make sure the kids have a dedicated space, that they’re not working in bed all the time, they’re not in the living room with the TV on,” Burke said. “You could tell the parents who took the time to create a space for them and had their materials. And then you had the kids who were at the kitchen table being watched by a grandparent. Or the kids who sometimes were like, 'My mom had to go to work,’ and they’re there – by themselves.”

The Covid Gap and MAP

One of the first things Gov. Greg Abbott did when COVID hit was lift the requirement that schools administer the State of Texas Assessments of Academic Readiness test, known as STAAR, which had been scheduled to begin in April of 2020. For the next two years, educators and lawmakers in both parties asked the governor to continue allowing schools to skip the STAAR. He made it mandatory again in 2021.

When the STAAR results came out that summer, they showed that the pandemic had reversed years of improvement in reading and math. The kids who had attended classes remotely performed the worst. The Texas Education Agency and educators on the ground acknowledged the reality – COVID had hurt learning across all student groups. More particularly, it had deepened a learning disparity that had existed in economically disadvantaged communities for decades. The COVID gap had arrived.

Meanwhile, another test, different from STAAR, was appearing in schools. It had been approved by the Texas Legislature in 2019 as part of a landmark education bill – House Bill 3 – that emphasized the importance of early literacy. HB 3 required, among other things, that schools across Texas screen children for dyslexia in kindergarten and first grade. The test to administer the screening was called Measures of Academic Progress, or MAP Growth.

STAAR and MAP are sometimes conflated, but they’re quite dissimilar. STAAR is administered at the end of each school year, takes a whole day to complete, and is meant to determine how well students have learned that year’s lessons – or, in educator parlance, whether kids are on grade level. STAAR is a high-stakes test for students, teachers, and entire school districts. If a school’s STAAR results are poor multiple years in a row, it can be forced to shut down. It is criticized in some quarters as poorly designed and biased, and as encouraging educators to abandon a well-rounded curriculum to instead teach to the test.

MAP is different. It’s a test taken by 11 million kids across the country at the beginning, middle, and end of each school year and is meant to be completed in under an hour. MAP uses adaptive technology – like a video game – to make questions progressively harder or easier, depending on whether a student gets an answer right or wrong. Kids can’t ace the test. Half of its 50 questions will be answered incorrectly by every child, regardless of their aptitude.

Susan Diaz and Jennifer Abramson of AISD’s Academics Department told us that MAP can provide information on many things in great detail: where an individual student is in relation to their peers, what knowledge they’ve gained and lack, how teachers compare to one another, how schools and districts are doing. The data can be broken down – disaggregated – to examine the performance of kids from different demographic groups.

“The beauty of it is that we can get a much better pulse throughout the course of the year as to whether our instruction is sticking – and how can we tweak it,” Abramson said. “There’s a lot of implications that spin off of it at a programmatic level. How are our dual language students doing? What does it say about our students that are receiving special education?”

When AISD began testing with MAP in 2021, it set goals for students from the earliest grades through high school. For third-graders, the district vowed to raise the percentage of students able to read at grade level from 35% in June of 2021 to 50% at the end of the current school year, and 60% by August of 2026. The goal was similar for math: to raise the percentage of students performing at grade level from 43% in June of 2022 to 50% this year, and 60% by June of 2026.

However, MAP results over the last two years demonstrate that the progress of third-graders in both subjects has been stagnant. The most recent results, released in January, show that 44% of AISD third-graders, who entered kindergarten at the start of the pandemic, are reading at grade level or above. That’s just 1% better than the beginning of the year. The numbers in math are similarly bad. MAP shows that only 35% of third-graders are performing on grade level in math, up from 33% at the beginning of the year.

When the test results were released, district leaders identified three general takeaways. First, obviously, third-graders are not learning fast enough to reach the district’s goals. Second, students experiencing poverty are doing worse than their peers across the board. Third, African American students are doing worse regardless of their economic status.

Overserving the Underserved Kids

Austin ISD has, for the last two years, reemphasized early literacy throughout the district, as has Texas as a whole. District leaders had nurtured a modest hope that doing so would bump up MAP scores. So December 2023’s results shocked the system. After taking them in, administrators announced what they described as an intensive intervention in 20 of the district’s 78 elementary schools, most of them in the economically disadvantaged neighborhoods of the Eastern Crescent.

A big part of the intervention is the simplification of the district’s teaching and math curricula, to make it easier for kids who have fallen behind to grasp and for less-experienced teachers to teach. A team of executive directors, coaching specialists, and early learning specialists has visited the priority schools one to three times per week since the beginning of the year, training principals on the new curricula, mentoring teachers, and establishing open lines of communication.

Assistant Superintendent of Elementary Academics Mary Ann Maxwell told us the goal is to put the district’s weight behind the priority schools. And she provided a handy mantra for the plan. “What we want to do here is to overserve our traditionally underserved students,” Maxwell said. “What we’re talking about is not exact equality of services for everybody, but differentiated support. It’s equity, not equality.”

Maxwell described a recent training session at Josephine Houston Elementary in Southeast Austin: “All the teachers were there, the administrators were there, any instructional staff on the campus was there. We provided the training and it was very active. The teachers practiced the strategies in this low-risk environment so that they were ready to take them back into the classroom. And you know, sometimes meetings like these from the district can, for a teacher, seem like an imposition. But they said it felt supportive. We’re hearing that the teachers really appreciate the engagement.”

As part of the intervention, AISD is ensuring that each priority campus uses the same curricula and instruction methods, so the MAP data that comes at the end of the year will be more reliable. Assistant Superintendent LaKesha Drinks said they’ve adopted an easy-to-teach early literacy curriculum called “Talk, Read, Talk, Write.” The curriculum uses phonics, an instruction method for beginning readers that teaches the relationship between letters and the sounds they represent.

Drinks said “Talk, Read, Talk, Write” has been shown to work well for emerging bilingual students and those from economically disadvantaged households. She knows the curriculum from her years as the principal of Guerrero Thompson Elementary but has learned in meetings with teachers that many are unfamiliar with it. To her, this demonstrates a root cause of the COVID gap – the replacement of veteran teachers during the pandemic with inexperienced ones. Over the 2020-21 school year, AISD records show the district lost 762 of its teachers. The next year the number was 1,254. Many who left had taught in low-performing schools.

“We have mostly novice teachers at our most struggling campuses now,” Drinks told us in a conversation at Houston Elementary in February. “Here at Houston, they have 15 new teachers this year, out of 47, with 13 of them in their first year. As a former principal, if I had two new teachers I’d have three veteran teachers that would kind of adopt the new teacher. But a lot of our older teachers that had health concerns retired during the pandemic. That means that we just don’t have some of the peer leaders that you normally would have at these grade levels.”

Along with training principals and teachers on the simplified curricula, the district is seeking a deeper connection with the families of struggling students through its network of parent support specialists. There are approximately 70 parent support specialists in the district who help coordinate a huge number of services – food assistance, mental health care, tutoring, and financial help with rent and utilities among them. Research shows these kinds of support have a direct impact on students, particularly those from economically disadvantaged households.

Melinda Zamora has worked as a parent support specialist at St. Elmo Elementary for the last five years. She said her first goal is to make parents comfortable receiving services, so that collaborations with teachers can begin. “We want to make sure that parents know that at any time they are welcome to share any kind of story that they may have,” Zamora said. “And once we build on those relationships, on that foundation, it encourages them to keep wanting to come back. And every story is going to be different. I have a parent and she just told me today that she has applied for her citizenship and now she’s looking forward to taking the ESL class to learn more.”

Deputy Superintendent Patricia Rodriguez told us that the district wants to take a holistic approach to the kids it serves. “It’s the whole child, right?” Rodriguez said. “It’s their attendance, it’s how they feel welcomed in the school, how they’re part of a family in the classroom – all of that. And that exists in some of our schools, but we want to duplicate it so it’s not just a culture somewhere in the district but it’s a culture across the entire district.”

Is It Working?

District administrators believe the MAP test scores from the end of the school year will demonstrate how well the intervention is working. They are cautiously optimistic after seeing midyear results from second-graders that demonstrate improvements in reading, though not math. Regardless of what the scores will show, educators like Patrick Salinas, who was hired as principal of Norman-Sims last year, are thankful for the support. “I’ve got counselors, I’ve got parent support specialists, I’ve got mentors, I’ve got reading buddies. Everyone’s working in unison. And I am seeing that we are moving to the right place. I feel like it’s happening.”

Salinas is known for constantly emphasizing the importance of early literacy. “My teachers know that building a culture of literacy and making sure that every kid is reading on grade level is our main thing,” he said. “We need to be hyper-aligned as a campus when it comes to early literacy. And the biggest thing for that is phonics – getting reading comprehension early.”

Lindsay and Justin Douglas’ son Holden entered Norman-Sims as a second-grader this year. They say that his beginning-of-year MAP scores showed he was behind on reading, but that the results from January seem to demonstrate that the phonics instruction is working. “We are just one sample kid, but he has responded to the phonics big time,” Justin Douglas said. “They’re doing a ton of that at Sims, where they’re breaking the words apart, and using their fingers to count the syllables, and stretching the words.”

Lindsay Douglas speculates that some of the improvement may have come from a shift in how their son was given the middle-of-year test. “The first time he took it, he was on a computer and there was a whole class full of kids, and they all do it independently – there’s not a teacher sitting beside them. The second time, they pulled some of the kids who scored low into a small group with a teacher that was sitting right there, watching to see if they didn’t take their time or didn’t take the test seriously.”

Testing remains a fraught issue among parents and educators, especially after the TEA recently redesigned the STAAR test and moved it online, something that experts say will lower the scores of economically disadvantaged students who are less familiar with computers. However, many of the other disruptions connected to the COVID era seem to have abated. Teacher turnover is decreasing after AISD handed out raises at the beginning of this school year. And, of course, the kids are back in class.

“Up until last year, we were still saying, 'Oh, are these COVID kids? Did they do kindergarten at home?’” Veronica Burke said. “But now, since the kids came back, it’s easier. They do better. They learn faster. I feel like the gap is getting smaller.”

For many of those we spoke with, it took an effort to dive into the memories of the COVID years, recent as they are. It was as though they had put them out of their minds. When they returned to speaking about the present, they expressed astonishment that Austin’s public schools made it through the pandemic. For parents, the experience has produced a renewed reverence for teachers, schools, and public education in general.

“I couldn’t express the gratitude I feel for how well the staff at Norman-Sims has adjusted,” Renee Sanders said. “They’ve done a really, really good job. And I’m glad the kids are back in school, but you know what? COVID allowed me to open up my eyes to what really happens, and the struggles that the teachers and the students have.”

The sense of a break with the past, of renewal and recommitment, was also palpable in our conversations with administrators. “We’re at the beginning of a new era,” Susan Diaz said. “Our superintendent is new, a lot of the leadership team is new, and many of the teachers are new. So we’re just coming together and thinking about ways to improve. How do you change an entire system? Part of it is about belief and behaviors. We have to believe that our kids can meet the goals.”

Diaz and Jennifer Abramson have spent their entire adult lives in education. They are at the tail ends of their careers and could, if they wanted, be making plans to retire. “And yet, here we are,” Abramson said. “And here we will continue to be. Because we are very much determined to help stabilize this district and prevent the constant upheaval. The kids deserve some consistency.”