Editor's note: This story was originally published by Chalkbeat Colorado, a nonprofit news site covering educational change in public schools. Sign up for its newsletters here: ckbe.at/newsletters
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The pandemic threw education into turmoil this year, with families, teachers, and students stretched and challenged as never before. Across the state, tens of thousands of students haven’t set foot in a classroom since March 13. Even school districts that reopened wrestled with major logistical challenges and uncertainty.
The pandemic’s effects will continue to be felt through much of 2021. Will school districts reopen and stay open? How will we address learning loss? Will students from low-income families pursue deferred college dreams?
Here are seven education stories we’ll be watching in 2021.
School reopening
Most Colorado students spent December in remote learning as districts large and small closed their buildings in response to a November surge in cases. The biggest question of 2021 will be whether Colorado school districts can bring students back to the classroom and keep them there.
A reopening task force said school is safe and called for modified quarantine rules to keep more teachers in the classroom, more testing and contact tracing, and basic safety protocols.
[ Related: St. Vrain students will return to in-person learning in January ]
But superintendents have also said that when cases in the community rise above a certain threshold — roughly 500 per 100,000 people over a two-week period — quarantines become extremely disruptive and in-person schooling less feasible.
[ Related: Yes, in-person learning is still possible with ‘red’ COVID numbers. Here’s how it looks in one Colorado district ]
State epidemiologist Rachel Herlihy says that much of Colorado is on track to have schools open in mid-January — if the state avoids a post-Christmas surge.
Testing and accountability
Superintendents are pushing for a suspension of standardized testing this spring. They say tests will be logistically difficult to administer, take away from precious instructional time, and won’t yield valid results.
But doing away with tests requires federal waivers and changes to state law, and many education advocacy groups want the tests to be given. They say they need the data to take stock of learning loss.
[ Related: To test or not to test? Colorado educators and advocates divided on CMAS in a pandemic ]
A working group agreed that standardized tests should not be used to rate school or teacher performance this year, but could not agree on whether the tests should be administered at all.
Expect this issue to be a topic of conversation at the legislature. Districts are set to give the ACCESS test to English language learners in January, a move that concerns parents and community advocates.
Learning loss
Teachers and students have struggled with online lessons and technological challenges. The challenges have been particularly hard on students with disabilities and those learning English. And then there are the roughly 30,000 missing students who were expected to enroll in school and didn’t.
[ Related: SVVSD enrollment down 1,105, with large number of those students falling off of preschool, kindergarten rolls ]
Addressing these problems will require more than opening school buildings, as many students have enrolled in remote programs due to health concerns.
[ Related: The empty gradebook: As students struggle with remote learning, teachers grapple with Fs ]
Education leaders say the school system will need to stretch and change to meet these students’ needs in years. Competency-based models, summer school, and intensive tutoring could help, but addressing learning loss will require flexibility, creativity, and money.
Opportunity
The pandemic forced 2020 graduates to make a difficult decision: Attend college under the worst of circumstances or delay enrollment until after it ends.
Counselors and teachers advocated for students to keep their plans intact, but Colorado higher ed institutions, especially community colleges, saw major enrollment drops, with the biggest decreases among low-income students.
At high-poverty high schools, about 33% fewer students enrolled at college compared to last year. Research shows low-income students have a harder time enrolling and finishing college when they delay admission.
[ Related: For students opting out of college this fall, it is a dream deferred ]
There’s no clear picture as to whether the class of 2020 will head to college next year or what resources will be available to them post-pandemic to accomplish their goals.
Vaccines
The arrival of effective vaccines represents the promise of a return to something resembling normalcy, but they may not help with school reopening.
Right now, school staff and child care workers share Tier 2 access with a half dozen other categories that collectively cover millions of people. People in Tier 2 should get vaccinated sometime in the spring. With two doses required for full effect, most educators wouldn’t have immunity until the school year is almost over.
Advocates have called for teachers and school staff to move up in the line so that they feel safer returning to school buildings and so that fewer staff have to quarantine due to exposure, while Gov. Jared Polis has urged people to separate school reopening from the vaccine rollout.
Nonetheless, the state likely will do some additional prioritization within Tier 2, and many people are pushing for teachers to get more consideration.
Leadership
Three of the state’s five largest school districts won’t have a permanent superintendent at the beginning of 2021: Denver Public Schools, Jeffco Public Schools, and the Douglas County School District.
The search process will be particularly fraught in Denver Public Schools, where a new school board will be looking for someone aligned with its vision. In their only evaluation of outgoing Superintendent Susana Cordova, board members described their desire for an “aggressive plan to shift the culture away from the shortcomings of the former ‘reform’ narrative.”
Denver board members aim to hire a new superintendent before the fall, and they’ve promised robust community engagement during the search process.
Reading instruction
Even before the pandemic, just 40% of Colorado students performed at grade level on state reading and writing tests. Legislation from 2019 aimed to get Colorado districts, which prize their local authority, to adopt reading curriculum supported by research and for all early elementary teachers to have training in the best practices.
The pandemic has thrown a monkey wrench into those plans. Many teachers and district leaders say now is the wrong time to require new training, while advocates say the state has already gone far too long without addressing an issue that is so fundamental to children’s academic success.
Reporters Melanie Asmar and Jason Gonzales contributed.
Chalkbeat is a nonprofit news site covering educational change in public schools.
