“Our students benefited from our communities doing everything they could offer,” he added.
Snyder said that it’s going to take “intentionality” to get the eighth-grade math scores back to where they were before the pandemic hit.
“As we look at the data and as people recover — and we see this in some other studies — we know that the gap can be closed. Obviously the more time and runway we have the more thoroughly we can close that gap,” he said.
Losing years of education in mathematics is a national loss that happened across all school systems, he said. Snyder said that math is “relentlessly cumulative” and builds on concepts from the previous year.
“So we know that all students nationally suffered learning loss during this pandemic and I really think that for us as a nation, it is incumbent upon all of us to be honest about those losses and make sure that we’re doing our best to accelerate out,” he said.
“We know it’s important for every community — and that would be parents and students and teachers alike — to really understand what those gaps are and then focus on closing them. So it’s going to take intentionality to close those gaps, but with intentionality, we can close them,” Snyder said.
Despite the losses in mathematics, Snyder said that “if Catholic schools were a state, they would’ve been the highest-performing state in the union.”
According to an NCEA press release, more than 90% of Catholic schools held in-person learning for five days a week during the pandemic. Only about 56% of public schools did the same, the press release says.
The press release says that the Nation’s Report Card data shows that Catholic schools “are near the top in learning outcomes for students receiving free and reduced-price lunch, demonstrating the system’s commitment to underprivileged students.”
“We’ve got to teach, and we have to get kids growing at the rate they were growing before and that takes acceleration, that takes work. But I can certainly say for us at NCEA, it is our top talking point when we’re working with our membership, that we understand that we need to grow our way out of this and we’re completely focused on that,” Snyder said.
Joseph Bukuras is a journalist at the Catholic News Agency. Joe has prior experience working in state and federal government, in non-profits, and Catholic education. He has contributed to an array of publications and his reporting has been cited by leading news sources, including the New York Times and the Washington Post. He holds a bachelor’s degree in political science from the Catholic University of America. He is based out of the Boston area.