Indicators 2025: Understanding and addressing Pennsylvania's achievement gaps

Yahoo

18 hours ago

Jun. 28—WILKES-BARRE — Jill Avery-Stoss, president of The Institute, said gaps in academic achievement are widely recognized and have complex causes.
"They arise from a combination of personal, systemic, and structural factors," Avery-Stoss said. "They also result from disruptions such as the COVID-19 pandemic.
The Institute's Education and Workforce Development Task Force recently completed a study exploring the achievement gap — the trending disparity in academic performance across different student populations. It suggests that some students have fewer chances to succeed in school than others.
Avery-Stoss said achievement gaps are most evident when comparing various groups, such as boys and girls, students from lower-income and higher-income households, and individuals of different racial or ethnic backgrounds. Such comparisons must also be considered carefully because people rarely fit neatly into one category.
Avery-Stoss stated that overall access to education across the Commonwealth is considered above average compared to national benchmarks. Still, the achievement gaps between Pennsylvania student groups are among the country's largest. In some cases, gaps may occur in schools with fewer resources than other schools. In other cases, however, gaps emerge among students who attend the same schools.
"The pandemic also contributed to the issue," Avery-Stoss said. "Students lost a great deal of learning time — particularly in math and reading — and many faced the additional challenge of limited internet access. They also took fewer tests, which complicates understanding about how much help is needed and where it is needed most."
The Pennsylvania Department of Education published a research brief with Mathematica to analyze the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on young learners in the state. The study explored academic proficiency rates among students in grades five through eight, using a predictive model to adjust for factors such as assessment participation rates, test administration timing, and instructional modes.
The findings show that in math and language arts, grade six seems to have experienced the highest predicted impact from the pandemic, and the predicted pandemic impacts were consistently larger in math. The numbers in math proficiency impact range from a loss of 12 to 15 percentage points. In English language arts, the numbers range from a loss of 7 to 12 percentage points.
The brief also found that students from vulnerable backgrounds and in fully remote learning environments had lower assessment participation rates compared to their peers, and that the overall academic proficiency across the state was reduced in 2021 due to the pandemic. Negative academic impacts were evident across most student groups, and even more so for vulnerable groups that had lower proficiency rates prior to the pandemic.
Avery-Stoss said that although the academic environment plays a key role in student outcomes, research shows that education alone is not the primary cause of the achievement gap. Solutions must extend beyond traditional schooling and require coordination between policymakers, educators, and communities to tackle structural, economic, and historical inequities.
"Recommendations for closing the achievement gap involve access to high-quality preschool programs, culturally responsive teaching, inclusive curriculum, establishment of community partnerships and programs, and data-driven policy change," Avery-Stoss said.
Reach Bill O'Boyle at 570-991-6118 or on Twitter @TLBillOBoyle.