Learning from International Schools Part II: Outbreaks after COVID-19 Re-openings: The Case of Israel

By guest blogger Nathan Storey*

The summer is over and fall semester is underway across the United States. Schools are reopening and students are back in the classroom, either virtually or in the flesh. Up to now, the focus of discussion has been about whether and how to open schools: in person, using remote instruction, or some mix of the two. But as schools actually open, those with any element of in-person teaching are starting to worry about how they will handle any outbreaks, should they occur. In fact, many countries that opened their schools before the U.S. have actually experienced outbreaks, and this blog focuses on learning from the tragic experience of Israel.  

In in-person schooling, outbreaks are all but inevitable. “We have to be realistic…if we are reopening schools, there will be some Covid,” says Dr. Benjamin Linas, associate professor of medicine and epidemiology at Boston University (Nierenberg & Pasick, 2020). Even though U.S. schools have already reopened, it is not too late to put outbreak plans into place in order to stem any future outbreaks and allow schools to remain in session.

Israel

On Thursday, September 17, Israel’s school system was shut down due to rising positivity rates; 5,523 new cases were recorded in one day prior to the decision, in a country about one fortieth the size of the U.S. The closures are due to last until October 11, though special education and youth-at-risk programs are continuing. The spike in COVID cases reported by health officials centered around children 10 years of age and up. “The government made the wrong decision, against professional recommendations,” COVID commissioner and Professor Ronni Gamzu wrote in a letter to Health Minister Yuli Edelstein and Education Minister Yoav Gallant.

Israel has been a cautionary tale since reopening schools in May. By July, 977 students and teachers were diagnosed with COVID, 22,520 had been quarantined, and 393 schools and kindergartens had been closed by the Education Ministry (Kershner & Belluck, 2020; Tarnopolsky, 2020). At the beginning of September, 30 “red” cities and neighborhoods were placed under lockdown due to spikes. Almost 4,000 students and over 1,600 teachers are currently in quarantine, while more than 900 teachers and students have been diagnosed with the virus (Savir, 2020).

Schools initially reopened following a phased approach and using social distancing and mask protocols. Students with diagnosed family members were not allowed back, and older staff members and those at risk were told not to return to the classroom. It seemed as if they were doing everything right. But then, a heat wave wiped all the progress away.

Lifting the face mask requirement for four days and allowing schools to shut their windows (so they could air condition) offered new opportunities for the virus to run rampant. An outbreak at Gymnasia Rehavia, a high school in Jerusalem, turned into the largest single-school outbreak seen so far, soon reaching to students’ homes and communities. Outbreaks also appeared outside of the Jerusalem area, including in an elementary school in Jaffa. Reflecting on the nationwide spread of the virus, researchers have estimated that as much as 47% of the total new infections in the whole of Israel could be traced to Israeli schools (Tarnopolsky, 2020), introduced to schools by adult teachers and employees, and spread by students, particularly middle-school aged children.

This crisis serves to illustrate just how important it is for education leaders, teachers, and students to remain vigilant in prevention efforts. The Israeli schools largely had the right ideas to ensure prevention. Some challenges existed, particularly related to fitting students into classrooms while maintaining six feet separation given large class sizes (in some cases, classrooms of 500 square feet have to hold as many as 38 students). But by relaxing their distancing regulations, the schools opened students, staff, and communities to a major outbreak.

Schools responded with quarantining individual students, classmates of infected students, teachers, and staff; and when a second unconnected case was detected, schools would close for two weeks. But Israel did not place a priority on contact tracing and testing. Students and staff were tested following outbreaks, but they experienced long wait times to take the test, increasing the opportunities for spread. In the case of one school outbreak, Professor Eli Waxman of Weizmann Institute of Science reported that school officials could not identify which buses students took to reach school (Kershner & Belluck, 2020). Having this type of information is vital for tracing who infected students may have come into contact with, especially for younger students who may not be able to list all those with whom they’ve been in close contact.

Before the fall semester began, it looked as if Israel had learned from their previous mistakes. The Education Ministry disseminated new regulations adapted to the local level based on infection rates, and once more planned a phased reopening approach starting with K-4^th grades, followed by middle- and high-school students, who were set to follow a hybrid remote and in-person instruction approach. Schools planned to use plastic barriers to separate students in the classroom. Education leaders were to develop a guidebook to support the transition from in-person to distance learning and procedures to maintain distancing during celebrations or graduation ceremonies.

These precautions and adaptive plans suggested that Israel had learned from the mistakes made in the summer. Upon reopening, a new lesson was learned. Schools cannot reopen in a sustainable and long-term manner if community positivity rates are not under control.

*Nathan Storey is a graduate student at the Johns Hopkins University School of Education

References

Couzin-Frankel, J., Vogel, G., & Weil, M. (2020, July 7). School openings across globe suggest ways to keep coronavirus at bay, despite outbreaks. Science | AAAS. https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2020/07/school-openings-across-globe-suggest-ways-keep-coronavirus-bay-despite-outbreaks

Jaffe-Hoffman, M. (2020, September 16). 5,500 new coronavirus cases, as gov’t rules to close schools Thursday. The Jerusalem Post. https://www.jpost.com/breaking-news/coronavirus-4973-new-cases-in-the-last-day-642338

Kauffman, J. (2020, July 29). Israel’s hurried school reopenings serve as a cautionary tale. The World from PRX. https://www.pri.org/stories/2020-07-29/israels-hurried-school-reopenings-serve-cautionary-tale

Kershner, I., & Belluck, P. (2020, August 4). When Covid subsided, Israel reopened its schools. It didn’t go well. The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/04/world/middleeast/coronavirus-israel-schools-reopen.html

Nierenberg, A., & Pasick, A. (2020, September 16). For school outbreaks, it’s when, not if—The New York Times. The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/16/us/for-school-outbreaks-its-when-not-if.html

Savir, A. (2020, September 1). 2.4 million Israeli students go back to school in shadow of COVID-19. J-Wire. https://www.jwire.com.au/2-4-million-israeli-students-go-back-to-school-in-shadow-of-covid-19/

Schwartz, F., & Lieber, D. (2020, July 14). Israelis fear schools reopened too soon as Covid-19 cases climb. Wall Street Journal. https://www.wsj.com/articles/israelis-fear-schools-reopened-too-soon-as-covid-19-cases-climb-11594760001

Tarnopolsky, N. (2020, July 14). Israeli data show school openings were a disaster that wiped out lockdown gains. The Daily Beast. https://www.thedailybeast.com/israeli-data-show-school-openings-were-a-disaster-that-wiped-out-lockdown-gains

Photo credit: Talmoryair / CC BY-SA (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0)

This blog was developed with support from Arnold Ventures. The views expressed here do not necessarily reflect those of Arnold Ventures.

Note: If you would like to subscribe to Robert Slavin’s weekly blogs, just send your email address to thebee@bestevidence.org. 

Learning from International Schools: Outbreaks after COVID-19 Re-openings: The Case of the United Kingdom

By guest blogger Nathan Storey, Johns Hopkins University*

For much of the summer, U.S. education leaders and media have questioned how to safely reopen schools to students and teachers. Districts have struggled to put together concrete plans for how to structure classes, how much of the instruction would be in person, how to maintain social distancing in the classroom, and how to minimize health risks.

Most school districts have focused on preventing outbreaks through masks and social distancing, among other measures. However, this has left a gap—what happens to these well-thought-out plans if and when there’s an outbreak? While many school districts (including 12 of the 15 largest in the United States) have opted to start schooling remotely, many others plan to or have already restarted in-person schooling, often without detailed prevention and response plans in place.

For those districts committed to in-person schooling, outbreaks in at least some schools are all but inevitable. Community positivity rates within the United States remain high, with some states experiencing positivity rates of up to 5.4% (CDC, 2020), compared to 2.3% in Scotland or 0.8% across the entire United Kingdom (JHU, 2020). The image of students without masks packed into the hallways of a Georgia school have already spread nationwide. It is clearly important to put these plans into place as soon as possible in order to stem any outbreaks and allow schools to remain in session.

In a series of case studies, I will examine the experiences of how other countries with similar education systems dealt with outbreaks in their schools and share lessons learned for the United States.

United Kingdom

Schools in England and Wales finally reopened last week for the fall semester, but Scottish schools reopened the week of August 10. Outbreaks in Scotland have been minimal, but a cluster of school outbreaks cropped up in the Glasgow region, most notably at Bannerman High School. Affected schools soon closed for one week following the positive tests, but students who tested positive remained at home in self-isolation for 14 days.

What makes this outbreak notable is that through testing of students and community members, researchers were able to trace the outbreak to a cluster of infections amongst senior managers at McVities biscuit factory, also in Glasgow. Having successfully traced the infections to this source, education leaders and researchers were able to determine that cases were not being transmitted within schools, and put into effect appropriate isolation procedures for potentially infected students and faculty.

Testing and contact tracing were conducted first during the spring and summer months when schools first reopened in the UK, following the national shutdown in March. Researchers (Ismail et al., 2020) were able to determine sources of outbreaks and prevalence amongst students and faculty, finding that transmission was less common within schools, providing crucial information to improve COVID understanding and informing quarantine and school lockdown protocols in the country.

Scotland has put into place a strong contact tracing protocol, coupled with self-isolation, social distancing, and more intensive hygiene protocols. Scientists from England have urged weekly testing of teachers, as well as “test and trace” protocols, but the schools minister, Nick Gibb, instead committed to testing of symptomatic individuals only. Researcher Michael Fischer recently launched the COVID-19 Volunteer Testing Network, hoping to create a network of laboratories across the UK using basic equipment common in most labs (specifically, a polymerase chain reaction or PCR machine) to provide rapid testing. Eventually, as many as 1,000 labs could each do 800 tests a day, providing rapid response to COVID-19 tests and enabling more effective contact tracing and allowing schools to isolate students and staff members without requiring entire schools to be shut down.

Another means of accelerating testing and contact tracing is through group or pooled testing. One scientist in England pointed to this form of testing—in which multiple individuals’ samples are pooled together and tested simultaneously, with subsequent individual tests in the event of a positive test result—as a means of providing quick testing even if testing materials are limited. This could be particularly useful for schools implementing clustered classrooms or educational pods, keeping students together throughout the day and limiting contact with other students and staff.

Through careful and thorough testing and contact tracing, as exemplified by the United Kingdom’s efforts, coupled with careful social distancing and preventative measures, United States school districts in areas with low positivity rates, comparable to those in the United Kingdom, could more systematically address outbreaks, avoiding entire school shutdowns, which can be disruptive to education for students. Preventative measures alone are not likely to be enough to get students and staff through what promises to be a difficult school year. These outbreak responsive systems are likely to be necessary as well.

References

Brazell, E. (2020, April 2). Scientist donates £1,000,000 to massively increase UK coronavirus testing. Metro. https://metro.co.uk/2020/04/02/scientist-donates-1000000-massively-increase-uk-coronavirus-testing-12499729/

CDC. (2020, September 4). COVIDView, Key Updates for Week 33. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/covid-data/covidview/index.html

Davis, N. (2020, August 10). Scientists urge routine Covid testing when English schools reopen. The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/education/2020/aug/10/scientists-urge-routine-covid-testing-when-english-schools-reopen

Duffy, E. (2020, August 19). Scots school closes with immediate effect after multiple confirmed cases of Covid-19. The Herald. https://www.heraldscotland.com/news/18662461.kingspark-school-dundee-school-closes-multiple-cases-covid-19-confirmed/

Government of United Kingdom. (2020, September 8). Coronavirus (COVID-19) in the UK: UK Summary. https://coronavirus.data.gov.uk/

Ismail, S. A., Saliba, V., Bernal, J. L., Ramsay, M. E., & Ladhani, S. N. (2020). SARS-CoV-2 infection and transmission in educational settings: Cross-sectional analysis of clusters and outbreaks in England (pp. 1–28). Public Health England. https://doi.org/10.1101/2020.08.21.20178574

Johns Hopkins University. (2020, September 8). Daily Testing Trends in the US – Johns Hopkins. Johns Hopkins Coronavirus Resource Center. https://coronavirus.jhu.edu/testing/individual-states

Macpherson, R. (2020, August 16). Coronavirus Scotland: Another pupil at Bannerman High School in Glasgow tests positive as cluster hits 12 cases – The Scottish Sun. https://www.thescottishsun.co.uk/news/5937611/coronavirus-scotland-bannerman-high-school-covid19/

Palmer, M. (2020, April 1). Call for small UK labs to embrace Dunkirk spirit and produce Covid-19 tests. Sifted. https://sifted.eu/articles/uk-labs-coronavirus-testing/

*Nathan Storey is a graduate student at the Johns Hopkins University School of Education

This blog was developed with support from Arnold Ventures. The views expressed here do not necessarily reflect those of Arnold Ventures.

Note: If you would like to subscribe to Robert Slavin’s weekly blogs, just send your email address to thebee@bestevidence.org. 

Healing Covid-19’s Educational Losses: What is the Evidence?

I’ve written several blogs (here, here, here, here, here, and here) on what schools can do when they finally open permanently, to remedy what will surely be serious harm to the educational progress of millions of students. Without doubt, the students who are suffering the most from lengthy school closures are disadvantaged students, who are most likely to lack access to remote technology or regular support when their schools have been closed.

 Recently, there have been several articles circulated in the education press (e.g., Sawchuk, 2020) and newsletters laying out the options schools might consider to greatly improve the achievement of students who lost the most, and are performing far behind grade level.

The basic problem is that if schools simply start off with usual teaching for each grade level, this may be fine for students at or just below grade level, but for those who are far below level, this is likely to add catastrophe to catastrophe. Students who cannot read the material they are being taught, or who lack the prerequisite skills for their grade level, will experience failure and frustration. So the challenge is to provide students who are far behind with intensive, additional services likely to quickly accelerate their progress, so that they can then profit from ordinary, at-grade-level lessons.

In the publications I’ve seen, there have been several solutions frequently put forward. I thought this might be a good time to review the most common prescriptions in terms of their evidence basis in rigorous experimental or quasi-experimental research.

Extra Time

One proposal is to extend the school day or school year to provide additional time for instruction. This sounds logical; if the problem is time out of school, let’s add time in school.

The effects of extra time depend, of course, on what schools provide during that additional time. Simply providing more clock hours in which typical instruction is provided makes little difference. For example, in a large Florida study (Figlio, Holden, & Ozek, 2018), high-poverty schools were given a whole hour every day for a year, for additional reading instruction. This had a small impact on reading achievement (ES=+0.09) at a cost of about $800 per student, or $300,000-$400,000 per school. Also, in a review of research on secondary reading programs by Baye, Lake, Inns & Slavin (2019), my colleagues and I examined whether remedial programs were more effective if they were provided during additional time (one class period a day more than what the control group received for one or more years) or if they were provided during regular class time (the same amount of time the control group also received). The difference was essentially zero. The extra time did not matter. What did matter was what the schools provided (here and here).

After-School Programs

Some sources suggest providing after-school programs for students experiencing difficulties. A review of research on this topic by Kidron & Lindsay (2014) examined effects of after-school programs on student achievement in reading and mathematics. The effects were essentially zero. One problem is that students often did not attend regularly, or were poorly motivated when they did attend.

Summer School

As noted in a recent blog, positive effects of summer school were found only when intensive phonics instruction was provided in grades K or 1, but even in these cases, positive effects did not last to the following spring. Summer school is also very expensive.

Tutoring

By far the most effective approach for students struggling in reading or mathematics is tutoring (see blogs here, here, and here). Outcomes for one-to-one or one-to-small group tutoring average +0.20 to +0.30 in both reading and mathematics, and there are several particular programs that routinely report outcomes of +0.40 or more. Using teaching assistants with college degrees as tutors can make tutoring very cost-effective, especially in small-group programs.

Whole-School Reforms

There are a few whole-school reforms that can have substantial impacts on reading and mathematics achievement. A recent review of our elementary school reform model, Success for All (Cheung et al., 2020), found an average effect size of +0.24 for all students across 17 studies, and an average of +0.54 for low achievers.

A secondary reform model called BARR has reported positive reading and mathematics outcomes for ninth graders (T. Borman et al., 2017)

Conclusion

Clearly, something needs to be done about students returning to in-person education who are behind grade level in reading and/or mathematics. But resources devoted to helping these students need to be focused on approaches proven to work. This is not the time to invest in plausible but unproven programs. Students need the best we have that has been repeatedly shown to work.

References

Baye, A., Lake, C., Inns, A., & Slavin, R. (2019). Effective reading programs for secondary students. Reading Research Quarterly, 54 (2), 133-166.

Borman, T., Bos, H., O’Brien, B. C., Park, S. J., & Liu, F. (2017). i3 BARR validation study impact findings: Cohorts 1 and 2. Washington, DC: American Institutes for Research.

Cheung, A., Xie, C., Zhang, T., Neitzel, A., & Slavin, R. E. (2020). Success for All: A quantitative synthesis of evaluations. Manuscript submitted for publication. (Contact us for a copy.)

Figlio, D. N., Holden, K. L., & Ozek, U. (2018). Do students benefit from longer school days? Regression discontinuity evidence from Florida’s additional hour of literacy instruction. Economics of Education Review, 67, 171-183. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.econedurev.2018.06.003

Kidron, Y., & Lindsay, J. (2014). The effects of increased learning time on student academic and nonacademic outcomes: Findings from a meta‑analytic review (REL 2014-015). Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Education, Institute of Education Sciences, National Center for Education Evaluation and Regional Assistance, Regional Educational Laboratory Appalachia.

Sawchuk, S. (2020, August 26). Overcoming Covid-19 learning loss. Education Week, 40 (2), 6.

This blog was developed with support from Arnold Ventures. The views expressed here do not necessarily reflect those of Arnold Ventures.Note: If you would like to subscribe to Robert Slavin’s weekly blogs, just send your email address to thebee@bestevidence.org. 

Extraordinary Gains: Making Them Last

One of the great frustrations of evidence-based reform in education is that while we do have some interventions that have a strong impact on students’ learning, these outcomes usually fade over time. The classic example is intensive, high-quality preschool programs. There is no question about the short-term impacts of quality preschool, but after fifty years, the Perry Preschool study remains the only case in which a randomized experiment found long-term positive impacts of preschool. I think the belief in the Perry Preschool’s long-term impacts conditioned many of us to expect amazing long-term impacts of early interventions of all kinds, but the Perry Preschool evaluation was flawed in several ways, and later randomized studies such as the Tennessee Voluntary Prekindergarten Program do not find such lasting impacts. There have been similar difficulties documenting long-term impacts of the Reading Recovery tutoring program. I have been looking at research on summer school (Neitzel et al., 2020), and found a few summer programs for kindergarteners and first graders that had exceptional impacts on end-of-summer reading effects, but these had faded by the following spring.

A little coaching can go a long way.

Advocates for these and other intensive interventions frequently express an expectation that resource-intensive interventions at key developmental turning points can transform the achievement trajectories of students performing below grade level or otherwise at risk. Many educators and researchers believe that after successful early intervention, students can participate in regular classroom teaching and will continue to advance with their agemates. However, for many students, this is unlikely.  For example, imagine a struggling third grade girl reading at the first grade level. After sixteen weeks of daily 30-minute tutoring, she has advanced to grade level reading. However, after finishing her course of tutoring, the girl may experience slow progress. She will probably not forget what she has learned, but other students, who reached grade level reading without tutoring, may make more rapid progress than she does, because whatever factors caused her to be two years below grade level in the third grade may continue to slow her progress even after tutoring succeeds. By sixth grade, without continuing intervention, she might be well below grade level again, perhaps better off than she would have been without tutoring, but not at grade level.

But what if we knew, as the evidence clearly suggests, that one year of Perry Preschool or 60 lessons of Reading Recovery or seven weeks of intensive reading summer school was not sufficient to ensure long-lasting gains in achievement? What could we do to see that successful investments in intensive early interventions are built upon in subsequent years, so that formerly at-risk students not only maintain what they learned, but continue afterwards to make exceptional gains?

Clearly, we could build on early gains by continuing to provide intensive intervention every year, if that is what is needed, but that would be extremely expensive. Instead, imagine that each school had within it a small group of teachers and teacher assistants, whose job was to provide initial tutoring for students at risk, and then to monitor students’ progress and to strategically intervene to keep students on track. For the moment, I’ll call them an Excellence in Learning Team (XLT). This team would keep close track of the achievement of all at-risk and formerly at-risk students on frequent assessments, at least in reading and math. These staff members would track students’ trajectories toward grade level performance. If students fall off of that trajectory, members of the XLT would provide tutoring to the students, as long as necessary. My assumption is that a student who made brilliant progress with 60 tutoring sessions, for example, would not need another 60 sessions each year to stay on track toward grade level, but that perhaps 10 or 20 sessions would be sufficient.

 The XLT would need effective, targeted tools to quickly and efficiently help students whose progress is stumbling. For example, XLT tutors might have available computer-assisted tutoring modules to assist students who, for example, mastered phonics, but are having difficulty with fluency, or multi-syllabic words, or comprehension of narrative or factual text. In mathematics, they might have specific computer-assisted tutoring modules on place value, fractions, or word problems. The idea is precision and personalization, so that the time of every XLT member is used to maximum effect. From the students’ perspective, assistance from the XLT is not a designation (like special or remedial education), but rather time-limited assistance to enable all students to achieve ambitious and challenging goals.

XLT, would be most effective, I believe, if students have started with intensive tutoring, intensive summer school, or other focused interventions that can bring about rapid progress. This is essential early in students’ progression. Rapid progress at the outset not only sets students up for success, in an academic sense, but it also convinces the student and his or her teachers that he or she is capable of extraordinary progress. Such confidence is crucial.

As an analogy to what I am describing here, consider how you cook a stew. You first bring the stew to a boil, and then simmer for a long time. If you only brought the stew to a boil and then turned off the stove, the stew would never cook. If you only set the stove on simmer, but did not first bring the stew to a boil, it might take hours to cook, if it ever did. It is the sequence of intense energy followed by less intense but lengthy support that does the job. Or consider a rocket to the moon, which needs enormous energy to reach escape velocity, followed by continued but less intense energy to complete the trip.  In education, high-quality preschool or tutoring or intensive summer school can play the part of the boil, but this needs to be followed by long-term, lower-intensity, precisely targeted support.

I would love to see a program of research designed to figure out how to implement long-term support to enable at-risk students to experience rapid success and then build on that success for many years. This is how we will finally leverage our demonstrated ability to make big differences in intensive early intervention, by linking it to multi-year, life-changing services that ensure students’ success in the long term, where it really matters.

References

Neitzel, A., Lake, C., Pellegrini, M., & Slavin, R. (2020). A synthesis of quantitative research on programs for struggling readers in elementary schools. Available at *www.bestevidence.org. Manuscript submitted for publication. *This new review of research on elementary programs for struggling readers had to be taken down because it is under review at a journal.  For a copy of the current draft, contact Amanda Neitzel (aneitzel@jhu.edu).

This blog was developed with support from Arnold Ventures. The views expressed here do not necessarily reflect those of Arnold Ventures.