Continued Pandemic Impacts on Student Outcomes in North Carolina and the Role of School Resilience

• In Event: Sunday Roundtable Session 7:45 am
  In Roundtable Session: Unequal Impacts of COVID-19, Reopening Operations, and Recovery Efforts on Student Outcomes Across Four States (Table 30)

Abstract

As we enter the fourth school year since the initial COVID-19 school closures, research on students’ academic recovery and re-engagement with school is mixed and contradictory. Dire early reports, showing learning loss and disengagement, were followed by more encouraging data in 2021-22, showing learning recovery as students returned to in-person schooling. However, the most recent data paints a less clear image of recovery with evidence of continued chronic absenteeism and stalled growth on test scores. The research literature on disasters suggests that schools and districts will show different levels of resiliency, leading to recovery occurring with different degrees of success and at different rates.

Prior research by the authors on pandemic impacts in North Carolina found large negative impacts on attendance, grades, and grade retention in 2020-21 with large disparities in outcomes. In 2021-22, our prior work shows considerable recovery for grades and grade retention but continued increases in chronic absenteeism. Data for 2021-22, also illustrates narrowing gaps in the pandemic impacts though some gaps persisted. This study aims to increase our understanding of the status of student academic recovery and re-engagement by providing updated data for 2022-23 on a range of student outcomes in North Carolina and by identifying whether there are school and district level differences in “resilience” across outcomes.

In this study, we use statewide data provided by the North Carolina Department of Public Instruction (NCDPI) on all students in NCPS, including traditional public and charter schools, from the 2017-18 through 2022-23 school years. The outcomes of interest in these data are attendance, course grades, and grade retention as well as test scores from before the pandemic. The data cover more than 1.5 million students spanning kindergarten through the end of high school each year.

We descriptively compare outcomes in the pandemic school years (2020-21, 2021-22, and 2022-23) to the pre-pandemic school years of 2017-18 and 2018-19. Building on these descriptive analyses, we use an interrupted time series analysis with separate indicators for each year of the pandemic (2020-21, 2021-22, and 2022-23) to estimate the average impact on each outcome. To create measures of school level resilience, we add school specific fixed-effects, school specific time trends, and interaction terms between school specific indicators and the indicators for each year of the pandemic. The coefficients on the interactions between the school specific indicators and the pandemic years estimate the average impact of the pandemic on the student outcome in question for students in a specific school in each year.

Preliminary results show growing differences between outcomes in the patterns of recovery or continued impacts and differences in the degree of recovery across subgroups. At the school and district level, we identify a set of schools that appear to have greater recovery/resilience than other schools. We explore differences in characteristics as well as policy and practice at more and less resilient schools. This information will help policymakers and educators as they continue to target resources to schools and students most in need of supports.

Authors

• Sarah Crittenden Fuller, University of North Carolina - Chapel Hill

• Kevin C. Bastian, University of North Carolina - Chapel Hill

• Tom Swiderski, University of North Carolina - Chapel Hill

• Camille Noel Mikkelsen, University of North Carolina - Chapel Hill