Fort Worth schools see spike in student failure rates during COVID-19. How bad is it?
The number of Fort Worth middle and high school students failing a class in the first grading period this fall was up 57% over the same period last school year, according to statistics released by the district at the request of the Fort Worth Star-Telegram.
The number of students failing a class during the second grading period was up 30% over last year. The raw number of students failing a class went up from the first grading period of this year to the second, from 18,022 to 18,539, according to the statistics.
The trend is a troubling indication of the toll COVID-19 has taken on academics. District officials attribute the increase in failure rates to the shift to online learning. Some teachers say part of the problem is that they can’t hold students accountable when they don’t show up for virtual classes.
“I’ve got kids that are ghosts, that I’ve never seen,” said a Fort Worth high school English teacher, who agreed to speak on condition of anonymity.
In an emailed statement, Cherie Washington and Raul Pena, the district’s chiefs of schools and student support, said starting the school year with all students in virtual instruction and then following with teachers and students working both virtually and in person created an environment that neither teachers nor students had ever experienced. District officials are working to engage with in-person and virtual students and offer social and emotional support to students and their families, according to the statement.
The district has assigned teams to contact families and students who have struggled to keep up with school work or stay in contact with their teachers, the school chiefs said. The district is also revising academic plans for the spring semester to give students better opportunities to succeed this year, they said.
Fort Worth teachers point to the problem
Eight teachers from five different schools in the Fort Worth district told the Star-Telegram they’d noticed an unusual number of students failing their classes this year. Teachers pointed to an array of possible causes, including life disruptions brought about by the pandemic, a lack of motivation among students and parents’ inability to make sure their children participate in remote classes while they’re at work.
But perhaps the biggest problem teachers identified was the district’s online learning model, which allows students to be counted as present even if they don’t participate in class.
The district gives students two options for virtual classes: students participate in live online classes with their teachers and other students, or they complete school work on their own time without attending live sessions. The district’s policy states that teachers should count students as present if they had any contact with them that day. That contact could include seeing the student in an online class or receiving an email or text message from them.
The English teacher who described some students as ghosts said the option that allows students to skip live online classes makes it nearly impossible for teachers to hold students accountable.
The teacher said she’d noticed a marked uptick in the number of students failing her class this year. Even in a normal year, some percentage of students fail her class, she said. And some of her students’ lives have been so upended by the pandemic that they can’t focus on school work, she said. But she thinks many take advantage of the fact that teachers have no way to force them to participate in class. She has students with grades in the single digits because they have barely done any work all semester, she said.
“They are literally doing nothing,” she said.
Some of the teacher’s failing students came back to school in person after starting the year virtually, she said. In many cases, their parents sent them back to school after learning how poorly they were doing remotely, she said. Others realized themselves that there were too many distractions at home for them to be able to stay on task. The students who have come back to school seem happy to be there, and most do better once they return, she said.
Virtual and in-person learning collide
Celia Lehman, a seventh grade English teacher at Riverside Middle School, said she’d noticed the uptick in students with Fs this year.
“Yes. Definitely,” Lehman said. “Very much so.”
Last year, about 24% of Lehman’s students failed her class, she said. This year, a little more than half of her students are failing — of her 137 students, 70 have Fs, she said. It isn’t that difficult to pass her class, she said. Students who show up and participate generally do fine.
Lehman agreed that virtual learning makes it harder for teachers to hold students accountable. But the problem isn’t limited to her remote students, Lehman said. She has remote students who have 100s in her class and in-person students who are nowhere close to passing, she said.
Like many teachers, Lehman teaches in-person and remote students at the same time in the same online format, with some students logging in from her classroom and others participating from home. Because her in-person students do all their work on a screen rather than with pencil and paper, it’s harder for her to monitor what they’re doing from a distance, she said. If she walks over to an in-person student’s desk to make sure he’s on task, she’s cut off from all her remote students.
There are also internet issues, she said. Many of her students have siblings who are also in online classes, and often, their internet connections aren’t up to the task. Her virtual students come and go from her class constantly, she said. Some of those students may log off intentionally, she said, but she thinks most disappear after losing their internet connection. Those disruptions mean students miss chunks of her lessons, which makes it harder for them to do their assignments later, she said. Spotty internet service can also mean students think they’ve submitted an assignment through Google Classroom, but the submission never went through, she said.
“It’s a whole new world,” Lehman said.
The trend of more students failing classes this year has not played out in Fort Worth elementary schools. Teachers theorize that may be because a larger percentage of elementary students come to school in person, limiting the negative effects of online learning.
Uptick in failure rate seen elsewhere
The problem of more students failing in upper grades isn’t limited to the Fort Worth school district. In the Houston area, officials in several school districts told the Houston Chronicle last month they’d seen a surge in the number of students failing their classes. School officials in Los Angeles, Chicago and suburban Washington, D.C. have reported similar trends.
Ale Checka, a 7th grade English teacher at Fort Worth’s Applied Learning Academy, said she’s noticed the problem in her school, but she’s largely managed to keep it in check in her own class. Checka said she’s more aggressive about attendance than most teachers. If a student doesn’t show up for an online class, she calls or texts parents and asks the students’ friends to call or text the student to ask where they are.
Checka said her principal has also given teachers the flexibility to run their classes in the way that works best for students. For her, that means all students participate in live online classes, she said. It’s common knowledge among teachers that allowing students to work independently, not part of live online classes, doesn’t work well, she said.
Kathryn Krodell, a U.S. history teacher at Paschal High School, is in her 32nd year of teaching. She’s never seen so many students failing her class, she said.
A big part of the problem is motivation, Krodell said. In any class in any year, there will be “reluctant learners,” she said. In a normal year, proximity is a good tool for motivating those students. Teachers move around their classrooms and check on students as they work on assignments. When Krodell spots a student who is off task or having a hard time concentrating, it’s easy enough to walk over, check on what the student is doing and offer face-to-face encouragement, she said.
But that doesn’t work this year, Krodell said. Most teachers find it difficult to form personal connections with their remote students, she said, and it’s harder to check on in-person students from a safe distance. The district has given teachers several online interactive tools they can use to work with their students, she said, and those help. But they can’t replace the tools teachers have relied on for years but have lost to social distancing, she said.
“It’s just no substitute for that hands-on, in-person instruction,” Krodell said.
As teachers continue to work with students online and in person in the spring semester, they’ll find more ways to connect with students and keep them on task, Krodell said. But ultimately, she doesn’t think the problem will go away until a COVID-19 vaccine is in wide distribution and social distancing is no longer necessary, she said.
Stephanie Delgadillo, a science teacher at Riverside Middle School, said she has also noticed an abnormal number of students with Fs in her class this year. In each of her classes, she has three or four students who have never shown up or turned in any assignments, she said.
Delgadillo said many of her virtual students’ parents work during the day, so they can’t be home to make sure their children show up for class. She also knows there are students with technology issues that make it difficult to connect, although she’s tried to reach out to students who are missing to make sure internet access wasn’t the problem.
The students Delgadillo worries about most are the ones who seem to have disappeared, she said. The school has tried calling those students’ parents. In some cases, school staffers have gone to their houses, she said.
“It’s not that we’re not trying to pursue and get them. It’s that they’re just not getting online,” she said. “It’s hard, because there’s only so much we can do.”
This story was originally published December 23, 2020 at 5:00 AM.
