Improving Pandemic Recovery Efforts in Education Agencies

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In the wake of instructional challenges faced over the past two school years, districts across the country are currently making important decisions about which interventions and strategies to implement to aid with COVID recovery. Understanding which interventions work best for students, and how to best implement them, is critical as we collectively move forward.

Researchers from AIR's Center for Analysis of Longitudinal Data in Education Research (CALDER), Harvard's Center for Education Policy and Research, and NWEA are partnering with a coalition of districts across the country to help determine which COVID recovery interventions are working (or not working), which students they are helping, and why. We aim to maximize the potential of this research to practically inform each district’s recovery efforts, as well as offer insights to the larger field.
 

Objectives

1. Learn how various recovery strategies (e.g., summer enrichment programs, Saturday school, tutoring, etc.), implemented in different ways, are affecting student achievement in districts across the country;
2. Provide rapid and practical feedback to practitioners in participating NWEA school districts so they can make appropriate adjustments to those strategies; and
3. Inform the field more broadly about the efficacy of district efforts to help students recover academically from the COVID-19 pandemic.

These data are important to gather now, as recovery from the pandemic will likely be a multi-year process. Moreover, this project affords participating districts the opportunity to determine how well their recovery efforts are working in the moment and which students they are benefitting, and, when appropriate, make mid-year adjustments to their recovery strategies. 

For more information, please visit https://caldercenter.org.