 Good afternoon. I'm Ron French, senior writer and associate editor at Bridge Michigan, a nonprofit, non-partisan news organization, providing Michigan readers with fact-driven journalism on the state's diverse people, politics, and economy. On behalf of Dean Michael Barr and the faculty and students of the Ford School of Public Policy, it is a great pleasure to welcome all of you to this policy talks event to discuss the profound effects of COVID-19 on the state of education in Michigan. This event is presented by the Ford School in partnership with the Education Policy Initiative, a program within the Ford School that brings together nationally recognized education policy scholars focused on the generation and dissemination of policy relevant education research and is co-sponsored by Bridge Michigan and the University Research Corridor. Today, you'll hear research findings that look at shifts in enrollment numbers, indicators of student learning and qualitative effects of students and families from educators across the state, including Kevin Stang, an associate professor of public policy at the University of Michigan Ford School, and faculty co-director of the Education Policy Initiative. Catherine Strunk, the Clifford E. Erickson Distinguished Chair in Education, and a professor of education policy at Michigan State University, and the faculty director of MSU's Education Policy Innovation Collaborative, a research center devoted to rigorous evidence that improves education policy. And we'll also hear from Sarah Lindhoff, the Leonard Kaplan Endow Professor and an associate professor of educational leadership and policy studies at Wayne State University. She is also director of the Education Research Partnership, a collaboration with Detroit schools and community-based organizations to produce research to inform education policy and practice in Detroit. Following these brief presentations, Dalsa Chapman, who is Michigan Department of Education Deputy Superintendent of Educator, Student and School Support, will share her thoughts and then we will convene for a conversation around the long-term implications of these findings and what lessons can be learned from the unique set of challenges presented by the pandemic. We encourage you to engage and ask questions in the YouTube chat box or tweet your questions to hashtag policy talks. There will be time at the end of the live event for these audience questions, including those received in advance. For now though, please welcome now our first presenter Kevin Stang to kick off this important conversation. Thank you, Ron, for that introduction and for teeing up the topic. And thank you to all of you for joining us. We're going to look at many dimensions of how COVID has affected education in the state of Michigan. I'm going to start off with a pretty high level overview of how Michigan Public School Enrollment has shifted and you'll see it has shifted quite dramatically during the pandemic. This is joint work with Terina Musedik and Andrew Bakker-Hicks and Josh Goodman. And I should provide one disclaimer, which is that we're going to be sharing analysis that uses data from the Michigan Education Data Center, which is at the Ford School, which is obtained through agreement with the Michigan Department of Education and the Michigan Center for Education Performance and Information, and that the results are, opinions are mine and they're not those of the states. And Dr. Chapman will make that clear in her remarks. Next slide, please. So first off, Michigan, like like many states across the country, just experienced a enormous drop in enrollment in its public schools during the first year of the pandemic. So in Michigan, in between 2019 and 2020 fall, we saw a 47, 46,000 student drop in enrollment in our public schools across the state. Just this graph here shows the average enrollment in each grade for the three different grade levels and then separately kindergarten. You can see that the biggest drop is obviously at kindergarten, which experienced something like a 13,000 student drop in this one year, but you saw pretty sizable drops in the other elementary school grades, middle school and then to a lesser extent high school. Just by way of context, you know, Michigan is a state that's been losing population. And so we've been, we've sort of had a longer term decline in enrollment in public schools in the state of about 11,000 students per year. So during the first year of the pandemic, the state's public school system lost four times the number of students as typical or experienced at the client of four times the number as typical. Next slide, please. This aggregate picture really masks important differences across different communities and different students within our state. So in particular, there is a enormous, almost 20% drop among Black kindergartners across the state in this one year. So almost twice the rate experienced by other race ethnic groups in the state. And certainly much greater than has ever been seen prior to the pandemic, which is what you see on the blue bars here. You know, one thing to note is that, you know, again, the largest increase was in kindergarten and the rates for all students across the board, you could see which is sort of the left, the left two bars for each of these categories is much smaller than for kindergarten and actually much more evenly distributed across different race ethnic groups. So this big decline that we've seen really is going to combine two things. It's going to be the effects for students that are would be continuing in school and also for new students. In particular, all kindergartners obviously would be new to the public schools. Okay, next slide. And so what we did was to look at, we sort of looked at the, our data sort of permits us to follow individual students over time and ask among students that were actually enrolled prior to the pandemic, how many return the next year? And that's what this graph shows. So we call that the or the reverse of that is the exit rate. So how many of students that were enrolled in the year before the pandemic were not enrolled in a public school in Michigan, the first year of the pandemic during 2020, 2021, school year. And so you can see that the, you know, the rate, let me just put one, you know, to walk you through one of the numbers here. Prior to the pandemic, the 4% of kindergartners in public schools in Michigan would not come back for first grade and would not sort of be in the public school system the following year for various reasons, families moving out of state, homeschooling, you know, a number of reasons they might not be coming back. But that rate jumped from 4% up to more than 7.5% in the year of the pandemic. So we saw just a huge increase in number of children that were in kindergarten in the public school system in Michigan prior to the pandemic that were not in the school system for first grade. And what you can see is there's a really sharp gradient by age where there's much larger rates of exit from the public schools in Michigan for younger students. So then the question is, well, where do they go? Next slide, please. So a large number of those students were kept home and were homeschooled and not not affiliated with the public school system. So prior to the pandemic, you know, the of the all students that sort of didn't return for first grade, less than, you know, 0.1% of them would have been not returning because they were going to be homeschooled. In the first year of the pandemic, that rate was 2%. So more than half of the increase in exit rates of kindergartners was counted for by homeschool. And you can see that the rate of shifting to homeschool is as much, you know, declines as you get older, as the students get older, the increase to or that the exit for private schooling in the state was also very large, unprecedented large shift, you know, those smaller than what we saw from homeschooling. And that's what's on the right. So the shift to private school, for instance, accounts for 15% of the exit rate for kindergartners. Next slide, please. So one thing that's different when you look at these continuing students is the the patterns of sort of who's leaving is quite different than the aggregate picture that we saw earlier. So overall, for elementary school, about 4% of them would have left the public schools pre pandemic, you know, between years. And during the pandemic, that average was 6.4%. This is averaging across all the grades in elementary school. Though, obviously, we saw some that was concentrated among younger students. But a large, the much largest, the largest rates of exit of increase in exit from the public school is done in the pandemic was actually among white students, and those that are not classified as economically disadvantaged. So that pattern is actually very different than what we saw for when looking at kindergarten enrollment. Next slide, please. So just to summarize, the public school enrollment declined substantially in the fall of 2020, we're still waiting for the numbers for this fall. It was about 3% or 46,000 students in Michigan, which is a similar rate of decline in other states. Michigan is not unusual here. And there was a strong age gradient with 11% decline among kindergartners, and, you know, a large increase in the share of students that aren't returning for first grade among kindergarteners and then sizable increases for the other grades. A lot of that was movement to homeschooling that accounts for the majority of that shift. Importantly, prior attachment to the public school system matters. So kindergarten enrollment declines were concentrated among economically disadvantaged students, and black students declines in other grades for continuing or incumbent students were disproportionately among higher income and white students. So the overall narrative of focusing just on kindergarten, which is the biggest loss is actually this nuance. Just some implications. Next slide, please. So the jury's still out on exactly how this is going to unfold. We're right in the middle of things. And so I hope we'll have a rich discussion of this in the Q&A. But, you know, if students or a large number of them or most of them return, or sorry, remain in these alternative sectors, then public schools are likely to face really severe funding challenges. And particularly for women, potentially challenges for labor force participation. If a lot of these students come back, then there's going to be unplanned shifts in cohort size, composition and students educational preparation are going to create real sizable organizational challenges and staffing challenges. The learning implications depends on the quality of the alternatives. And we'll hear a little bit about that from Catherine. Homeschooling is largely unregulated, and privates are quite heterogeneities. So I think it's a little open question on what the learning implications will be. And there's potential, obviously, for these existing achieving gaps to widen in future years. And also, I think raises challenges for just assessment and assessment of what's going on. So these large and differential changes in student composition across grades is going to raise challenges for comparing outcomes across years. And so even for tracking what's going on. These are just a couple of implications by hope to to dig into more as we as we have the discussion. Thank you. Hi, everybody. Thank you so much for having us today. And thank you to the Ford School for hosting this really great discussion. I'm going to talk for a minute about what we're learning at Epic about learning during the pandemic from the benchmark assessment data that were taken during the 2021 school year. I should say this is a huge team effort. We have an amazing crew at Epic. And this was done by both Brian Hopkins and Tara Kilbride, as well as several of our RAs. Next slide, please. Next slide. Thank you. So I just wanted to give you a little background about why we even have benchmark assessment scores to learn from during the 2021 school year. Under state legislation and the return to learn law that was passed. There was a requirement that districts offered benchmark assessments both in the fall and the spring of the 2021 school year. And the legislation allowed for districts to choose between four different assessment providers. And they also could choose their own locally developed assessment. And I'm going to talk about why that creates a challenge for us in a second. So about 91% of Michigan district provided some form of their benchmark assessment data to the state for Epic to analyze. And about 74% of districts are actually in our analysis for a number of challenges that we faced in getting the data from the districts in a way that was a usable format. I should also say that we worked a lot with medic at U of M and with the Michigan data hubs to be able to access these data in a clear way. One of the things I'm going to show you on the next slide is the way that the students in our analysis this year differed from the state K through eight population and differed across vendors. This is a little bit to Kevin's last point about the implications of enrollment last year for understanding what we can learn about the learning during the pandemic by the benchmark assessment. In particular lower income black and special education students are under represented in our analysis. The report required the report was required to identify the number and proportion of students in the state that are significantly behind grade level quote unquote. That also poses a problem for us in how to learn about these how students fair during the pandemic. I'm going to walk us through that for a second as well. Next slide. Okay. So this is a little bit of a confusing table and I want to just walk us through it for a second because it's very important. The main point here is that what I said earlier students in our analysis differ from the overall population of K through eight students in the state and they differ across the different assessment vendors for benchmark assessments. So what you see on that left statewide column we have about 590,000 Michigan students in our sample. This is about 61 percent of all K through eight students in the state. If you look at that NWA column we see that the vast majority of the students so over 440,000 of them took the NWA map growth assessment and among districts that use the NWA we have about 78 percent of K through eight students in those districts. So again there's never a district that had 100 percent participation rate in their benchmark assessment that we were able to use. If you go down to that student characteristics panel it begins to tell you how the samples differ. So the first row shows you that 62 percent of students in Michigan and K through eight are economically disadvantaged. This is compared to only 51 percent in the NWA sample for the districts that took the NWA. 59 percent in the sample that took the curriculum associates eye-ready assessment and then 47 and 37 percent in the star and DRC districts. Black students were underrepresented in the NWA districts but also especially in the star and DRC districts you can see the five percent of students in those districts that took the assessment were black, one percent in DRC. Eye-ready was overrepresented in black students in part because some of the big urban especially Detroit public schools took the eye-ready assessment. Similarly you can see the variation here in the Hispanic or Latino populations that took the assessment by vendor, special education and English learners. This has implications for how we can understand the analysis that we're about to show you because what we know from the pandemic is that a lot of the students who are less likely to test were also less likely to have positive experiences during the pandemic. They are often lower income, they often live in urban areas, in areas that were harder hit by the economics of the pandemic, by the health issues about the pandemic and so we know from other research that these are the exact students who did even worse during the pandemic and they're underrepresented in our analysis. Next slide please. Okay another challenge about how do we learn from the pandemic? When you have four different assessment vendors you have to do four different analyses you can't compare across the different vendors. This is because every vendor has a different definition of significantly behind grade level and it's also because every vendor tests different things and does it in different ways and so I'm going to focus on the NWA and the curriculum associates associates outcomes for this presentation mostly because they are the largest samples and also because we have the most information about how those students fared would have fared in other years. Next slide please. Okay so here are some results finally. This is the NWA map growth district so you can see in the green you have the fall benchmark and spring benchmark and then the change. This again is for the NWA what they have they define significantly behind grade level which was when they would say that if a student was projected to score not proficient at the end of the year on the end step they would be significantly behind grade level. This is important because it's different from the other vendors and so what NWA does is using a Michigan sample from the pre-pandemic they said if you take a test in the fall based on how you're doing right now how would we expect you to do at the end of the year and then in the spring how would we expect you to do at the end of the year. So we would expect positive changes here and we see that for the most part. In the blue columns you see what we know from the statewide end step data both in 2019 and 2021 pre-pandemic and during the pandemic. The 2021 data again have an under-representation of students who took the test in about the same way the benchmark sample does and so we know that those are probably overestimates of the progress that students made in 2021. What you can see is let's take an example from the top sample in math in third grade in the fall of 2020 we know that about 35% of students who took the NWA math growth assessment in math scored would have predicted would have scored not proficient at the end of the year. This grew to 39% of students who took it so 4% more students scored at the end of the year not proficient than would have been expected. You can compare that to pre-pandemic on the in 2019 and the M step and you see that about 28% of students in third grade scored not proficient on the math M step so that's a pretty substantial difference between 39% and 28%. Similarly in reading if you look at the third grade reading about 29% of students scored below not proficient in the fall and 35% rejected to score not proficient in the spring which is a 6% increasing students and is again higher than the 30% that scored not proficient in 2019. So what we're seeing is that there's actually over the course of the year slower learning growth than we would have expected over the course of the year and students ended up the school year more students ended up not proficient than we would have expected given pre-pandemic trends. Next slide please. Here we see it for the curriculum associates I ready scores and this one doesn't think different you take a test in the fall and it's on the set of standards that you're supposed to know in say second grade or third grade and you take a test in the spring on the same set of standards first to know in second or third grade and you would expect that by the end of the year you would have fewer students who are significantly behind grade level because they've learned something over the course of the year and this is what you see here. We also have a sample from 2018-19 from I ready of Michigan students who took the test so we can compare what that looked like in 2018-19 to the sample that took the test in 2020-21. The way they define significantly behind grade level is if they think you are two or more grade levels behind standards. And what you can see is I'm going to focus on those change columns and again I'll look at third grade math. You can see that about 15 percentage point more more students fewer students were scoring two or grade levels or behind in third grade math. But the delta over the course of a typical school year pre-pandemic in third grade was like a 26 percent difference and 25 percent of kids ended up in third grade ended up scoring two or more grade levels behind in math in the spring as opposed to just 14 percent in the 2019 spring. Same things for reading and so you're seeing across the board that we have much slower rates of growth over the 2019-20 school year than we had in 2018-19. Next slide. Here's a kind of key takeaways and I'm just going to repeat myself for a second but we had a slower rate of learning during the 2019-20 school year than we did in a pre-pandemic school year. We don't know as much about the students though who are non-white who are low income and who are eligible for special education and so we have to assume that this is even probably worse than the picture that we're painting with these data. We do have a report coming out in January early January following up on this one that's actually going to look at the achievement gaps between different race ethnicities, genders, special education students and students with disabilities, etc to be able to understand how the gaps might have changed in the tested sample over the course of the year. But we probably have to kind of realize the equity implications here and I think that those are really critical for us to think about. So one of the main equity implications that I want to bring forward and I think Sarah will talk about this a little bit in the next presentation is that these are, we have to think about the students who are the most impacted by the pandemic and what we can and cannot know about them. And if we make the assumption that what we're seeing here is sort of a best case scenario then we probably want to understand how we can work to accelerate learning for students who are most impacted by the pandemic in the future years. We'd all hope that this year would be sort of a back to normal school year which it hasn't been. And so we have to assume that the students who are probably most impacted last year are being again impacted by staffing shortages, COVID requirements to get schools or classrooms or individual students out of the classroom for a given amount of time. And so I think that we're going to have to assume that we're going to build two years of interrupted learning and how we're going to accelerate students at the end of it. Thank you very much. And I think I'll turn it over to Sarah. Thanks Catherine. Really appreciate being here. Thanks so much to the Ford School for having me. So I'm Sarah Lenhoff. I'm the director of the Trait Educational Research Partnership at Wayne State University. And our partnership is focused on producing research to inform decision making around education issues in Detroit. And we partner with the Trait Public Schools Community District and Charter Schools in Detroit as well as community based organizations to do our work. And we have a lot of areas that we cover but the biggest one is related to student attendance and absenteeism. So that's what I'm going to talk about today. I'm going to talk about the impact of COVID-19 on Detroit families in general as well as how COVID shaped student attendance last year. And the reason why attendance matters is because there's essentially a linear relationship between the number of days students go to school and their performance outcomes on student tests as well as social emotional outcomes. And when students are chronically absent meaning they miss 10% or more in old school days or severely chronically absent 20% or more school days. They have much worse outcomes both academically they're much less likely to graduate and they have worse social emotional outcomes. So we're interested in chronic absence because we know that enrollment and attendance issues were big issues during the pandemic as students were learning online but also because chronic absence is is a useful indicator for understanding student well-being in general and understanding what supports students and families might need. So let's dig into our data you can turn to the next slide. So we administered a randomized survey of DPSCD families at the end of last school year in June 2021. And we were trying to understand how did COVID impact students and their families over this last school year and then we linked their responses to their student's attendance record. So DPS was a great partner in this and I really think Jason Rose the director of research of the district for helping us administer this survey and link those student attendance records. So Detroit had really high rates of chronic absence before the pandemic about 62% of students were chronically absent prior to the pandemic and last year 70% were chronically absent with about 54% in that severe chronic absence category in addition to that over a quarter of students last year missed more than half of their enrolled school days. So an important distinction to make is this is different than the data that were reported to the state last year when students just needed to have two way interactions a week in order to be counted as present. This is daily attendance records so it's comparable to prior years. So we saw similar patterns in terms of student demographics and attendance and student grades but one exception was in 12th grade where about 87% of students were chronically absent in 12th grade last year. So really important you know we don't have the graduation data from Detroit get from this past school year but I'm really interested in what are the potential implications on that really high absence rate in 12th grade for graduation and then college admission. Next slide. So we wanted to look at we know that prior chronic absence is a strong predictor of current year chronic absence. So we wanted to compare you know who are the students who are chronically absent before the pandemic and what happened in that pandemic year last year and you know did students sort of stay in their chronic absence category or did they shift. So we saw about 3000 students about 9% of that population that we have in 1819 and 2021 became not you know weren't chronically absent when they were the year before the pandemic but 21% of those students became chronically absent so they had better attendance before the pandemic and then now they're missing a lot of days and the major explanation for that shift is around internet and computer both access but also just problems with computers. So when we surveyed families we asked them you know what are the challenges to student attendance this this school year and families were saying you know 30 and 34% of them were saying that computer computer issues and the internet were causing problems in logging on to online school. Next slide. We also interviewed families last school year in Detroit and they talked about the intersection between online learning and socioeconomic sort of conditions in their families and employment. So I wanted to share a few quotes from from families that we heard from so one mom told us you know I'm still unemployed I'm still looking for work I'm trying to look for a job on the weekend or maybe a night shift so I can be there for the kids for their online schooling because I'm a single mom I'm the only person they have to help them so this shows how you know being online created these challenges for kind of logging on to school but also intersected with other difficulties of the pandemic for Detroit families. Another mom told us that she was laid off her job because she had to take off work to help her kids with their online learning and then we also heard about the mental health challenges related to online learning and how those disruptions created problems with with academic learning as Catherine just shared with us so you know this mom told us her children are telling her that they can't focus they're having too hard of a time focusing concentrating she said the mental health aspect is difficult for them so something to keep in mind as we move on to the next slide which showed that across the board kind of no matter what the attendance rates were there were really high rates of hardship among Detroit families so across the board you know 50% of more than 50% of families were facing mental health challenges financial challenges and logistical challenges last school year and you know about 65% of families across the board had parents who lost their job or worked less hours last year you know creating more economic instability in addition to that in the severely chronically absent category which again this is more than half the students in the district 13% of those families were evicted last year even though there was an eviction ban so you can imagine how high that number would be had we not had that national ban next slide so I want to pull back a little bit to think about you know we we kind of painted this picture of the COVID challenges last year and they were immense for families especially related to computer issues and getting online for virtual school but our prior research is reinforced by the survey data that shows that there are major socioeconomic differences between students who are not chronically absent and students who have absence issues or who are severely chronically absent so you can see big differences in income where you know not chronically absent students have an average income of 30 around 36,000 versus 18,000 for severely chronically absent students we also see major differences in in education level in employment and I really want to point to these differences in regular working hours or stable working hours this is something that was emphasized in our qualitative research as well where families would share that when they have unpredictable working schedules it makes it challenging to get their children to school and that was sort of exacerbated with the pandemic with children being you know at home having to lock on online next slide so what are the implications of all this you know there are systemic challenges that create barriers to school attendance even before the pandemic and many of those were exacerbated during it so we had high rates of of unemployment and job loss we had instability related to to health you know over 35% of our families lost someone or had someone who was severely sick from COVID this past school year so those those challenges and the kind of inequality built into those challenges creates the conditions where it's really difficult for many students to get to school and and that was mirrored in the in the COVID school year we we know that you know there was this major investment in computers and hot spots in Detroit but we heard from families that it didn't you know those resources didn't always kind of match their needs there were hardware challenges the some of the computers weren't very high quality there were kind of text support issues so you know in a year where we're still seeing kids you know online learning through quarantine and in Detroit we have virtual Fridays through December to mitigate COVID so these issues are still present and we really need to figure out how to better support families through online learning and to you know mitigate COVID to the extent we can so kids are back in school in person and then my last point and I always just think this is so important to think about is how you know schools have a really important role to play here in reducing chronic absence and improving the conditions for school attendance but they can't do it alone so social sectors and government agencies across students educational ecosystems have a really important role to play in reducing barriers to school attendance and creating additional pathways to student success that was true before the pandemic it's even more true now and we've seen some evidence that you know we can coordinate with city governments with health departments and other social service agencies to provide students and schools with what they need we I think this research really reinforces the importance of continuing and building on that work in the years to come so my last slide is just a thank you to our partners and our funders and encouragement to visit our website we love your feedback on our work thank you so much thank you to our panelists Dr. Stein Dr. Strunk and Dr. Lienhoff very humbled and thankful for this opportunity just to reflect on the on the findings on the research that was conducted here in the state of Michigan yes we we have been in the trenches we have had to push through and are still pushing through the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic and very specifically on our children reflecting on the data presented by Dr. Stein in terms of the decline in enrollment four times what our general trend has been over the last several years is concerning and so we do actively have through contact here at the state level we are concerned and we would like to know where are the students have they chosen to matriculate or to move to another state or are these children in our communities and not being educated at all so that's of grave concern and that is a focus that through our state agency and our resources that we would want to support our local education agencies with in addition to that focusing very heavily in my reflection on the data that Dr. Strunk presented regarding benchmark assessment many have stated that students have lost learning the opportunity to learn was interrupted you can't lose what you did not have and so if you did not have that opportunity to learn because of the pandemic we have moved forward here in the Michigan Department of Education to put together resources which are continuous not just the one and done through the division that I oversee the division of educator student and school supports we are really advocating for our local education agencies to be involved with our accelerated learning initiative because as Dr. Strunk presented the rate of achievement was slower in addition to that the data that she presented also indicates that we did not have a full scope and sequence of all students at all grade levels in all demographic groups to know where we truly are so through the supports that are being put together and pushed out through the Michigan Department of Education strong focus on accelerated learning many are asking how can you accelerate you accelerate by meeting the student where they are in focusing through standards through content driven standards on how to move them forward and that is what we have been doing lots of support and this is not just initiative germane to the state of Michigan we have collaborated with chiefs across the nation through CCSSO and others and we are definitely on the right track in supporting our educators and our students the data that really tugs at the heart is what Dr. Lienhoff presented as a result of the survey and the findings associated with the Detroit public community school district as she reported attendance or the lack thereof being chronic or severely chronic was very high even before the onset of the pandemic so we do know that we have a lot of work across the state to address chronic absenteeism and how we do that is focusing on student engagement making sure that our families are engaged by supporting and educating our parents on in this moment during the pandemic after the pandemic how we can support them to better support their children as learners and we would not leave out our educators and so it is the responsibility of us as the state agency to make sure that our educators are being developed professionally so that they can help move forward the learning that has been not lost but interrupted so that they are well equipped to move our young people forward here in the state of Michigan so I would collectively say that as a state in this educational realm we need to yes focus on support through acceleration we also need to make sure that we are supporting the mental health of our parents students and educators and it takes the village right so this should be a an all hands on deck everyone involved and most of all it should be done through equitable means it our data should not be showing at the rate it is of the impact of those that are economically disadvantaged but the data talks right it speaks and so we do need to collectively unite and make sure that there is equitable access to connectivity to learning to support for all of our students and those are my reflections and at this time we will turn it over to Mr. French thank you Dr. Chapman and thank you for all the panelists it's fascinating at times depressing information that we're hearing today about the challenges that our schools are facing and our students and families are facing I know there's a lot of talk over the past few months about infrastructure about what we need to do with you know the federal level that they know about all the how we could spend money on infrastructure well I think that that I think what this presentation brings to light for me even more than has in the past how education is infrastructure too that we need to to consider it that way and fund it and figure out how to make things work as best we can just as much as we need to fill the potholes on our roads we're going to open up for questions here soon and so if you have any questions start asking them and but I'm going to start with a few questions on my own if I can Kevin if we can go to you first when you talk about kinder gardeners and are there if in businesses if you lose a customer you often don't get them back and I'm wondering if you are aware of any historical parallels when students left publics the public school system in this sort of level and whether they returned and in the same same breath I guess whether any states I know we don't have good data yet for Michigan but are there states out there that have any indication yet this fall as to whether the especially like the kindergarten numbers whether they're bouncing back you know I let me answer that the second question first and I actually let me take the opportunity to just thank the other the panelists for the the great sort of presentation and Dr. Chavin for your bringing it all together and I think you know I think reminding us that I particularly you know our work you know at very high level and people are just numbers and actually and highlighting that sort of Sarah's point really brings home or Sarah's work really brings home that like these numbers are families and communities and students and children and they're learning so so to answer your question Ron I think I am not aware yeah I mean I think we're so kind of waiting I'm not aware of sort of even early kind of evidence that's coming out from other states that would really be able to answer like how much of this is persisting versus bouncing back I mean I've seen some news reports that have suggested that things aren't getting better this current year and I think there's been you know obviously a movement back towards more in-person instruction but there's just been a lot of uncertainty and around that that I think maybe keeping some some parents holding back so I don't have a great answer I guess what I do know is I think in this kind of gets to to Dr. Chapman's point is I think there are what I take away from our work is that there are just many reasons why families are somewhat disengaging from the public school system their own personal circumstances the circumstances of the school and the district their employment situation the child care centers are closing like all of those factors are kind of underpinning some of the patterns that we're finding and and so I think there are many reasons sort of why families are disengaging and so I think reengaging families in the public system is going to require many different strategies and you know and there might be different sort of strategies that are going to work in different communities depending on the particular circumstances there so that's kind of a non-answer but that's the best I can do for now no that's that's okay that's okay you're being honest about the limitations of what you're working with at the moment and I appreciate it a speaking of limitations I think Catherine spoke to that a little about that with her data I love how her caveats were about as long as the data presentation and I know that's tough to deal with Catherine can you give because I think a lot of a fair number of people on listening here are very familiar with education data and with schools in general and I'm wondering if you have a sense because again this year isn't exactly a normal year either um how long is it going to be I'll ask it like a like like the layman that I am how long is it going to be before we know the real effect on learning from the pandemic I'm going to look at my magic eight ball and shake it for a second and see what I come up with you know I I don't know I think a lot depends on what happens this year so one of the beauties of having a standardized achievement test like the m-step that's repeated year after year on the same set of standard is that we can get a snapshot at the end of each year about how students are doing on standards in michigan and each grade level and of course and we didn't have that in 1920 for obvious reasons and we had a limited look at that in 2021 there was legislation from the legislature again this year that it requires benchmark assessments to occur again this fall and spring and next fall and spring epic is partnering with mde to continue studying these districts that took the benchmark so hopefully we'll get a trajectory over time and be able to understand if there was an increased learning gain this year relative to last year and next year we'd hope to see an even greater increase in learning gain there's a couple of concerns though so standardized tests can only measure so much they can't measure what students are learning that are not on the test they can't measure things that we want kids to learn in social sciences every year science you know all the other subjects that are very important um the social skills we've all heard from educators this year that kids are coming back very different than they were pre-pandemic in terms of their ability to be in the classroom and social skills and those are things that we won't know from the kind of quantitative data that we all are working with and and sarah your your your research on on chronic absenteeism in detroit is is so compelling it just tugs at my heart I'm wondering if if you can speak for a minute about what you've what you know either from from surveys or from from just being in the field what is it that parents need that schools can actually provide that would would would help the situation well i think the answer to that is a little bit different if we're talking about virtual school versus regular school so um if you would ask me that question two years ago I would have said you know the we've talked to you know dozens and dozens and dozens of families and we've done this survey research and um we've talked to attendance agents and others in the school district and transportation is always the number one thing that parents ask for and today is a barrier to school attendance you know I came into this research for the covid you're thinking that transportation wouldn't be that relevant but we had a lot of students in in dps who were still going to school in person for at least part of the year last year or we're going to learning centers in school buildings they were they were you know in virtual education at school buildings so transportation was still a relevant concern last year that's a big one I think um you know as we saw in the in the socioeconomic data that I shared just kind of comparing this those severely chronically absent students versus not to me that really points to there being something distinct between the students who are kind of just over their chronic absence threshold and who you know probably if they go to school a few extra days through student engagement initiatives like delsa was talking about through you know programs that you know focus on you know really enticing instructional material and you know that kind of thing could really help those students but more than half of the students are way over that right they're missing 36 days or more a school year and so you know programs like that you know evidence from other places evidence from Detroit suggests that those aren't the kind of things that are going to kind of close that gap it's really going to require you know major investments in like social social supports in you know using DHHS workers to support families make sure that they have their basic needs met make sure that students have access to schools close to home I mean that that's part of what creates this transportation problem is that many students in Detroit have to go really far away from home to access the school and so you know I think it's it's complex I think that there's going to be multiple solutions that need to be added together to make some real progress thank you and Dr. Chapman I know that you're you're not technically on the panel okay but I'd love to ask you a question if that's okay you mentioned accelerated learning is something that that is as a focus this year and completely understandable but talk to me like like the non-professor that I'm not that I'm not that I'm not that I'm not that I'm not that I'm not that I'm not and and and and and and and well if if you can do accelerated learning this year why don't you do it every year what what's the do what what what's different I believe that it is now very much intentional it's intentional but with it being intentional just like our educators across the state had to learn how to teach virtually had to learn how to set up the google classroom if you will we cannot expect that our educators are going to just naturally acclimate to that and so that's why we have worked very hard to basically put together a framework of support so that we're not just suggesting that they accelerated but we want them to know how to accelerate it in that and that has been the focus and we have had more than we could have imagined to jump on board with that because we are a local control state accelerated learning is not something that we can mandate but we have been doing very strong reach out to districts to support them as we move that forward perfect thank you very much that I appreciate that explanation we have a few audience questions and I'm going to throw this out to whoever wants the months to jump in first audience question is specifically looking at the impact this has had on I would say 11th and 12th graders you know it says what about the effects on high school students particularly factors like dropout rates FAFSA completion and enrollment and post secondary education how can districts or the Department of Education or for that matter policy at the legislator level what can they what can it be happen to help those kids who have really struggled this in the past 18-19 months now again and I this is probably just the teacher in me and coming to the State Department with nearly 30 years of experience at a local district level I was in a district at the onset of the pandemic and our kindergarten students and our juniors and seniors were of a heavy focus once again it's all about intentionality so rather than school counselors and student advocates focusing on what we would consider consider normal activities districts across the state have had to partner with educational organizations such as MCANN or those agencies that thrive and focus and key in on our juniors and seniors we need to be making sure that there are community efforts on FAFSA workshops you know as a community across the state what are we doing but we also I would strongly say would need to work with our post-secondary institutions so that there can be some flexibility as it relates to the college admissions process our students should not be penalized for us being in a pandemic and we have to creatively support them and prepare them to not only to be college ready but opportunity ready thank you this may be a question for Sara but but anyone jump in another question from the audience is there a need for a larger federal role in improving urban school districts such as Detroit Grand Rapids Lansing Flint and could it be a it says could it be a more neutral role such as including physical infrastructure to take pressure off those districts overall budgets and I know there's a lot of of COVID relief money particularly in some of the urban districts so maybe that refers to some of it but but Sara do you have any thoughts on that well my first thought is yes for sure more more money means better outcomes for kids in general in schools so yes I you know I know in Detroit we're we're about to embark on major you know facilities upgrades and a multi-year facility strategy many of our buildings need major repairs especially in light of COVID and knowing that we need upgrades to you know air filtration and other systems like that so I think those sorts of things seem like great investments especially now given given what we know about COVID you know and I also think that the the federal money is a really important opportunity for districts to try things that they normally do not have the funds to try to to kind of create proof points that can motivate state lawmakers to invest in those sorts of things so that you know worth that's what we're talking about and what's happening and DPS right now is they're really working to innovate around attendance this year you know doing a bunch of new initiatives to see what works and we're you know partnering with them to evaluate them so that we can say okay these are the things we need to scale and we need extra investment to to do them for more students thank you and this may be a question for Catherine but if it's not uh Catherine just pointed somebody else um do what what do we know about how districts have accounted for the provision of services for students with disabilities in the ELL do we know what's happened during the pandemic with that we we know a little bit but not a lot at least as far as I know in DELSA maybe you have a better sense what MDE worked closely with CEPI and EPIC during the pandemic to put out a survey that districts had to answer each month about the kind of modality that they were using to instruct students but also any special services they were providing to special populations of students including students disabilities and English learners so we know that there were a number of districts I mean I would say probably a majority of districts if I remember the numbers correctly that we're saying they are providing extra services to students with disabilities and to English learners fewer for English learners than for students with disabilities but that's probably reflection of the population in the state we don't know as much this year about if districts are providing anything extra service-wise to students with disabilities or English learners and I think it's a pretty important and a very very important question to understand how are we making sure that we're not only accelerating learners for general education but how are we accelerating learning for special education and English learners Can I add to that? One finding I didn't share was that the increased exit rates from public schools were much much smaller for students that were identified as English language learners or special ed than typical and to me to me actually what that says is you know schools are just such public the public schools are such a lifeline for students that have those needs right and that I mean there was no increase actually in exit rates for English language learners and because they don't have a choice right they don't you know the private schools don't sort of provide those those services nearly as well I mean that's my interpretation or those aren't even an option for many families homeschooling resources maybe are not also appropriate for students have those special needs and same thing for students with broader set of special education needs and so what I mean what I interpret that is meaning that you know these these schools are really a lifeline for those services and that those are not available sort of more broadly in in on you know out there outside of schools even more critical that you know these schools are supported that's a very good point here's a here's a very important question very timely unfortunately from Michigan it's about mental health and so I'm going to throw this out and whoever whoever feels comfortable talking about it I'd love to we I'm sure we'd love to hear from about it what should school districts be putting in place to support the greater emotional needs of our students to process this pandemic and and everything they've been living through and how and and related to that how realistic is it for schools to take on this burden anyone want to take a shot at that I'll start it's it's realistic for every district across the state run if it's embraced it is our reality it's not something that we can set aside there are many that believe that that's not the school's responsibility that's the family or that's the home responsibility however I go back to say it takes a village and many times the structures the supports that are intentionally put in place at the school then engage and help to educate the caregiver at home and so when it's intentional and it's embraced it it it it will be beneficial we talked about funding I would strongly recommend for the funding that has been provided to us by the federal support that we have there should be heavy investment in in mental health it's very important and not only run the mental health of our students but also support for our educators themselves so important but the key thing is is that it has to be acknowledged or recognized and then embraced Dosa is your department seeing any indications of increases in mental health stresses I don't know how you how to phrase it but but among staff are you specifically asking at the school level or from within the state agency itself now I'm thinking of the school level with okay yeah yeah I've no doubt you're stressed I just wanted to make sure I understood what you were asking Ron well seriously yes there there has been an in this that it has not just been an increase for the 2021 school year at the onset of the pandemic the stress was there and it just increased over time okay good but there was a question I had to follow up with but with Sarah if I could ask quickly up well when you when you look at the absentee rate absenteeism rates in Detroit and I'm sure this is right your fingertips is it seems shockingly high but for public's point of view I have no idea if that's a normal type of rate for for urban low-income public school systems is is is Detroit out of the ordinary for around the country Detroit's out of the ordinary so the average chronic absence rate across the nation is around 10 to 15 percent for urban school districts it's more like 25 percent and in Detroit for the past decade it's been around 50 percent so much higher even than other urban school districts we've our prior work has shown how kind of environmental correlates are are kind of create the conditions for school attendance things like poverty unemployment crime health disparities and those things are also more challenging in Detroit than in other places so you know in some ways it's it's not a huge surprise but at the same time you know even compared to cities like Cleveland for instance were much higher than that so so there's there's still a gap to be made up and and work to be done for sure and Catherine a quick follow-up with you I know we've spoke a few times about the excellent work your your team does looking specifically at the sort of data that has come out of test data this past year from a parents point of view when when they see scores from for their individual student or for for their individual school would would you recommend they take that with a bit of a grain of salt this year more than than normal absolutely I think it's really important to thank you Ron for bringing that up we've talked about it before I know you know the the test taking rate was very different across different districts and even across different schools within districts and so while there was no waiver this year from the federal department of education on m steps or on benchmarks districts did different things to encourage or not students to come in and take it and students who are learning remotely were not expected to come into a school building to take a test and so that means that in certain districts there was like an eight to 10 percent testing rate and other districts it was more like 90 percent and so as a parent what I do is I think about if I have a test score for my child and I do I have two fourth graders who took the test in third grade last year and is able to look and say what proportion of the standards did they know by the end of the year as measured by the m step but I wasn't going to try to take the district as a whole and say let's compare it to district x y or z because we don't know who took the test in each district perfect we have time for one more question it's a really good one and I'm hoping to hear just a little bit from each of you on this but I'm going to have a buzzer here for for anyone who talks more than 90 seconds how about that when you when you think of all of everything schools have been through and the way they really had to just like build this plane while it's in the air in some situations what changes in the education system that have come out of the pandemic do you think might remain for years to come Kevin let's start with you and then we'll work around the horn here sure actually I'm going to go back to one of the first questions which is was about your high school students and their transition to call potential transition to college that's an area that I actually work a bit more in so I think what we what we have seen is a I think a greater appreciation for the challenges of like standardized testing as determining college admissions I think we've I think developed a greater appreciation for the importance of financial barriers and inequities in that to college access and so Michigan has made a number of changes that have addressed some of those challenges and institutions around Michigan have addressed some of those challenges and and as have institutions and states around the country and I think some of that's not going away I think there's sort of a greater emphasis on making college more affordable and appreciation for making the access to aid more easier to to get so in Michigan we have a really important free college plan for students that were on Medicaid when they're in K through 12 that we've made some progress in making it sort of easier to access and and that's happening around the country and I think that's a I think that's something that's probably not going away I mean in the and I say that in a good way so maybe this is ending this this discussion with some positives right I think an appreciation for for those challenges and changes in policy do accommodate them I think is is one area where I hope is is not going away yeah yeah I think we can all agree on that Sarah you have any thoughts yeah I mean I think that I think that COVID has created a real interest in digging underneath the hood about what's going on with students and their families and has forced this kind of deeper relationship between the home and the school that was always there but I think often at policy researchers and at policy makers try to pretend that it doesn't exist right they kind of pretend that they can just if they do everything right in the school building then all the other social ills will be taken care of and I think COVID is just a spotlight on the fact that that's not how society works that's not how people work children learn throughout their entire experience at home at school outside and so you know to put it in Kevin's words I think to me it's a it's a positive thing to take away from this moment that there's been a spotlight on that connection and it's you know an opportunity for schools to be innovative about how they you know support families across their their lives and and you know just help students succeed Katherine what do you think Well I want to say on the optimistic perspective but I'm not sure that I can I'll build a little bit off of what Sarah was talking about I think that one of the good things is I think parents and communities have gotten more involved so I think that they have realized sort of the importance of school not just for academic learning but for the general health of the child over and of the community to be honest and so I think that's become great and I think that's good that we have a greater understanding of that I do worry that we're going to see extended staffing shortages that are going to emerge from this so the data aren't really in yet that are in nationally aren't showing the kind of huge decline in staffing that we were worried about initially but we are seeing some serious shortages in Michigan across the state and in specific parts of the state and I worry that this is not making education look like a more fun place to be at the end of the pandemic so that's a concern I have and the second one is on virtual education so I think that we've seen this year districts are more willing to go virtual for a day or for a week than they would have been maybe two years ago and not all kids learn well that way and so I think we need to think a lot about if we're going to really continue to rely on remote instruction as a regular part of our school year Dr. Chapman you want to bring us home? Sure I actually this is I actually started a journal and I called it Pandemic Positives so this is a really good for me to be able to in our discussion today reflecting on what Sarah and Kevin shared there are some positives that have come out but also coupling that with the concern that that Catherine has in what is really really a focus right now here at the department is the teacher shortage we have been successful in being able to share a proposal with our legislators specific to teacher recruitment and retention and I believe that is is going to be one of the pandemic positives as we get that support so that we can make this great state of Michigan an opportunity to continue to move the education profession forward innovation in the classroom yes that is coming to play and I don't believe that that is going to change many are still asking when will we get back to being normal I will conclude by saying this is our new normal and we must grace in it all work together and move forward well thank you and thank you to all our panelists for just a really engaging in time in the conversation and to our audience for posing just just fantastic questions you know this is this this topic is a passion of mine as it is for all of you on behalf of the Ford School I also welcome you to stay tuned to their website and social media pages for more information about upcoming events at the Ford School thank you very much and have a good evening