What Parents Can do About the COVID Slide

https://www.laparent.com/what-families-can-do-about-the-covid-slide/ from L.A. Parent, published July 2, 2020 by Cassandra Lane

Mathnasium has created a program that targets the critical skills students may have missed during the quarantine. 

Responsible parents don't let summer go to waste. That, for a long time, has been the thinking among parenting experts. And so, instead of the carefree summers of our own childhoods, we parents squeeze little more than a "free" day or two in between sports practices, well-curated family vacations, "meaningful" camps designed to advance our kids' learning and tutoring sessions to fend off the dreaded "summer slide" - that research-backed phenom in which kids can lose two to three months of learning while school's out. 

Full disclosure: As a journalist, I have penned articles to arm parents with the tools to combat "summer brain drain" - a term that turns lovely summery imagery into scary abstractions. My mission was to inform, but in light of what we've all just experienced - that sudden flinging of our kids into distance learning while we were all at home together, worrying about the coronavirus itself - I'd like to offer my deepest apologies. As a fellow parent. 

My household struggled mightily with distance learning, and after much hairpulling, my son (a seventh-grade honor student) admitted that he simply was not motivated. His teachers weren't updating his grades the way they did in "real school", and while he missed being able to see his teachers and classmates face to face, there was no way he was turning on his camera so that they could see him virtually. Meanwhile, as assignments piled up and some teachers held regular Zoom meetings while another (math!) held none, my husband and I worried that our son was falling behind. In this age of information overload and mounting parental anxieties about education quality, we weren't alone. 

And it turns out the pandemic, indeed, created not only the learning gaps we feared, but gifted us with a new name as well. 

The new slide in town

"What they're calling it is the 'COVID Slide'. Oh, yeah, it has a name", says Candice Lapin, founder of The Ladder Method, an academic coaching company in based in Los Angeles and Orange counties and now virtually. 

A conversation about math learning loss with John Bianchette, Associate vice president of education and traning at Mathnasium, reinforced my fears about my son and his peers. "The COVID Slide will have a  tremendous negative impact on students and result in a significant math learning loss," Bianchette says. "Preliminary projections indicate students may lose up to an entire year's worth of growth due to school shutdowns if steps are not taken,"Mathnasium has created a program that targets the critical skills students may have missed. "The only way to reverse this trend for students is to work on mathematics, but those efforts must be strategic," says Bianchette. "If a lack of learning stems from a lack of direct instruction, then you must make certain students are receiving the support they need."

My talk with lapin was more reassuring. The Ladder Method, which coaches students from public and private K-12 schools and colleges, including students with learning differences, uses assessment data to craft its curriculum, and I assumed Lapin would beam a laser on all the ways in which my family would need to make up ground lost due to the COVID Slide. However, within a few minutes, some of my anxieties began to quell. 

Lapin is also the author of "Parenting in the Age of Perfection: A Modern Guide to Nurturing a Success Mindset," and she has a knack for leveling with parents about educational realities while also encouraging us to ease up on ourselves. "I want parents to know it's not just their kids who were ha ving a hard time," she says. "There's a lot of quilt, there's a lot of shame, questions about who's being impacted the most. Some parents are saying, 'I shouldn't complain because there are all these other kids who don't even have internet access.' Yes, for some people, it's really profound, but all kids are being affected by COVID Slide. 

"There is the equity issue, but then layer on top of that any kind of learning difference or the fact that some kids develop at a gentler place or need to sit in front of the teacher to be engaged. It was very hard for those kids to engage via Zoom. They started to drift. And then there were those kids who just, due to lack of internet access and other issues in the home, didn't even get to show up for class. I like to think of it as an equal opportunity leveler. No one was spared." 

The disheartening education gaps between children attending schools in low- and high-income neighborhoods have been apparent for decades, but COVID-19 spotlighted just now unequal our education systems, and economic realities, are. 

Addressing these digital and economic divides, State Superintendent of Public Instruction Tony Thurmond has been giving public updates on how his Closing the Digital Divide Task Force is working with corporations, schools and community leaders to ensure all students have access to computers and the internet. While many students in local public school districts already had school-issued iPads, others did not. And not all schools and teachers were set up to immediately switch to online learning. 

"Though we are making progress, we still have a lot of work ahead in order to ensure all our students are connected and able to learn," Thurmond said in a recent press statement. "Affordable computing devices and internet are not only necessary for distance learning but also for lifelong success."

You can find the entire article by clicking https://www.laparent.com/what-families-can-do-about-the-covid-slide/ from L.A. Parent, published July 2, 2020 by Cassandra Lane