New Haven Register (Sunday) (New Haven, CT)
Failing grades, multiplied
During remote learning, F’s quadrupled in city high schools; return to in-person could help, officials say
NEW HAVEN — Students are receiving failing grades at an unprecedented rate this year, according to school officials.
According to data shared by the school district, 657 high school students failed five or more classes in the second marking period of the current school year. The year prior, during the second marking period, 160 students had failed five or more classes, according to the data.
“This time around it’s not about them not having a device,” said Superintendent of Schools Iline Tracey, referring to the district spending early months of the pandemic purchasing laptops for 21,000 students, providing them internet access through facility upgrades and use of hot spot devices so every student could log on to instruction remotely.
The one-year anniversary of when school and city officials closed all school buildings to mitigate the spread of the coronavirus recently passed. The data showing the stark increase in New Haven students receiving failing grades in the first semester
of 2020-21 compared to the year before is an indicator of the toll the pandemic has had on student engagement and achievement, school officials said.
Tracey and other members of her team said they believe students’ social and emotional health is interfering with their academic performance. Although district officials said they have not run any reports to demonstrate a correlation, they strongly suspect the declining districtwide academic performance also is related to more students missing school and feeling disconnected from school. Tracey said the district believes a full one-third of students have missed 10 percent or more instructional time this year.
The data
Also in the second marking period this school year, 214 students in sixth through eighth grades received five or more failing grades on their report card, compared to 25 students with those marks in the same period in the 2019-20 school year, the data shows.
Further, Michele Sherban, the school district’s data supervisor, said 26 percent of middle school students failed at least one class in the first marking period of this school year, a number that grew to roughly 31 percent by the second marking period. In high schools, 37 percent to 38 percent of students failed at least one class in the first two marking periods, the data shows.
According to Sherban, 18.8 percent of students failing five or more courses have individualized education plans — a group that makes up about 15.6 percent of New Haven’s student population according to state data — and 62 percent are male.
The group of students failing five or more classes also includes 17.6 percent English language learners, Sherban said, a percentage roughly equivalent to the district’s overall percentage of English learners.
Some of the district’s bilingual middle schools have some of the highest concentrations of students with one or more failed class in the first semester this year, the data shows. According to school-level data shared with the Board of Education and obtained by the Register, at Clinton Avenue School there are 57 students in grades six through eight who received at least one failing grade in the first marking period. Further, 88 students in those grades received at least one failing grade in the second marking period — or 63.3 percent of the 139 students in grades six through eight.
At Fair Haven Middle School, more than onethird of the 297 students in grades six through eight received at least one failing grade in the second marking period, including 28 students with four or more failing grades on their report card, the data shows.
Impact of reopening
Celentano Middle School had 47 students fail one or more class in the first marking period; 43 failed one or more classes in the second marking period.
But Celentano Principal Grace Nathman said there has been a noticeable improvement in students’ mood and engagement since March 4, when schools reopened for grades six through eight.
“Now that they have returned in-person we see a significant change in their emotional state, as well as work ethic,” she said.
Nathman said an emphasis on student failures obscures the daily triumphs that happen in schools, as well as the efforts students are making to re-engage in education during a pandemic. She said her staff is “relentless” in trying to improve the attendance of 22 of 87 seventh- and eighth-graders with attendance problems this year, and 74 percent of eighthgraders have improved their reading scores from last winter.
“Students returning to school has had a significant impact on student engagement. We have observed a tremendous change for the better,” she said.
‘Upside-down situation’
Board of Education member Ed Joyner, chairman of the board’s teaching and learning committee, said experienced educators know it is essential for students to be in a good mind set before they can learn.
“We can’t teach people that don’t show up and we can’t teach people that don’t pay attention,” he said. “We can’t teach an angry seat, either.”
Dave Cicarella, president of the New Haven Federation of Teachers, said for many students in the district who are failing classes, disengagement from school is the culprit.
“You’d think it’s harder to get dressed and get transportation and move room to room instead of just waking up and turning on a computer, but a lot of time the kids don’t get up,” he said. “Everyone is recognizing it’s such an upsidedown situation with remote learning. We’re having a lot of kids fail, but is it really their fault?”
Cicarella said many teachers are dealing with students who do not feel motivated because of emotional exhaustion, or students with other obligations — such as watching younger siblings or working jobs to support their family.
Keisha Redd-Hannans, assistant superintendent in the district, said the administration does not view students and families as being to blame for the decline in academic achievement.
Further, the number of failing grades are “not because of a lack of trying by our staff” although they must “face reality,” she said.
Nijija-Ife Waters, president of the Citywide Parent Team, said she believes it’s inappropriate for any student to be receiving a failing grade during the pandemic. She also said she believes the district is using student achievement as an excuse to reopen schools during a pandemic.
“No kids should be failing if the district focuses more on finding ways for kids to excel remotely,” she said.
New policy
According to a memo released to teachers, failing grades will be entered numerically as 50 as the lowest marking period grade, in the second semester in high schools.
In an email, Tracey said the timing around the implementation of the new policy and the increased number of students failing classes is coincidental.
“It had nothing to do with that since the grades were just released,” she said.
Cicarella said the new policy around numerical grades is not universally popular among his members. He said some teachers view it as a way for students who do not make an effort to end up with a grade roughly similar to a student who makes an effort but struggles with the material. However, although teachers contractually assign grades, the district is able to set the grading policy that teachers must follow.
Metropolitan Business Academy social studies teacher Leslie Blatteau said she does not penalize work if it is turned in late. Per district policy, she assigns students letter grades, but she said she does not ever want to create a situation where students feel as though they’ve “lost their chance” at academic success.
“I think we have an imaginary ‘real world’ that we use to punish students, when in reality adults get support and multiple chances to show they can do something all the time,” she said. Blatteau said she sets deadlines for work, but if a student misses the deadline they have the opportunity to communicate with her an action plan for making it up to demonstrate they can accomplish the objectives of her course.
Helping students
District officials said they could not provide current information on how many students are on track to graduate this year compared to prior years. The district also said it could not provide a number of how many students were at risk of being retained at their current grade level for another year.
Gemma Joseph Lumpkin, chief of youth, family and community engagement for the district, said a plan to reopen high schools on April 5 will make a tremendous difference for many of the students she and her team work with who are disengaged from school.
“There is a substantial number of students who did extraordinarily well last year with attendance and performance, and we can see those students are not doing well in either areas now,” she said. “We have children who were at 95 to near 100 percent attendance rates who are now down to 60 to 70 percent and lower.”
Joseph Lumpkin said it is especially significant for ninth-grade students who made a transition to high school this year but have not had in-person classes yet.
“There clearly are students who in school circumstances will do better than in remote,” she said.
New Haven school officials also are creating plans on how to use federal aid grant money to help with learning recovery. Tracey said she did not have specifics on what sort of programmatic interventions the district would implement or whether summer school offerings would be scaled up.
“Summer school is being planned,” Tracey said. “It also depends on how many teachers will participate. A survey will be sent to gauge this.”
Blatteau, the Metropolitan Business Academy teacher, said she believes teachers have an opportunity to be encouraging to students during an extremely vulnerable time to support their lifelong learning. She said that, although it is likely many students are experiencing some level of “learning loss,” it does not mean students have missed out on learning that information forever.
“The entire world has been upended, so there are going to be obstacles with this,” she said. “I think we have to look at the long view that human beings learn for their entire lives. There is some ‘learning loss’ happening now, but this claim our students are ruined for the rest of their lives because they survived a pandemic is (viewing the situation through) too much of a ‘deficit lens’ and not a strength-based lens.”
Blatteau said there will be opportunities for students to recover academically. She said it is important for students to feel safe and cared for in schools and by teachers, especially now.
“I try to be as realistic as possible, but supportive and hopeful, too,” she said.
Larry Conaway, a board member who is also a recently-retired principal of the district’s alternative high school, said students will need more opportunities for engagement. He said he hopes the district’s phased-in approach to returning to schools will reflect positive academic results in the remaining two marking periods.
“We’re not in a good place, and we’re moving to get to a better place,” he said.
On Thursday, the state State Department of Education also announced the launch of a task force to develop a statewide approach to educational recovery and acceleration. The AccelerateCT Education Task Force will have five subgroups focusing on issues such as family engagement, social and emotional well-being and summer enrichment.
“This time around it’s not about them not having a device.” Superintendent of Schools Iline Tracey, referring to the district spending early months of the pandemic purchasing laptops for 21,000 students