Though education has been called the great equalizer, educational access in the U.S. continues to primarily remain a function of socioeconomic status. That fact is crystalized by the education equity gaps that grew even wider during the COVID-19 pandemic. Children of frontline workers — people who work in grocery stores, healthcare, retail, hospitality, transportation, and customer service — were more likely to fall behind in school and lose family members to the disease. That has heavily impacted their emotional and behavioral health.

At the University of Oregon, researchers in the College of Education are finding many ways to close those gaps, through innovative prevention and intervention work in educational, family, and community settings.

“The University of Oregon is leading the nation in its multifaceted approaches to improving education for our children,” said Anshuman “AR” Razdan, vice president for research and innovation. “Our researchers are working on interventions not only in the classroom, but at home and in the community. The College of Education is creating the next generation of prevention and behavioral sciences researchers while simultaneously training the education practitioner workforce.”

Informing Best Practices for Future Health Crises

By sheer circumstance, several faculty were in the midst of conducting four different studies involving 630 families in Oregon and California when the COVID-19 pandemic began in 2020. Laura Lee McIntyre, interim dean of the College of Education, along with Beth Stormshak, a Knight Chair and professor in counseling psychology and human services, were collaborating with Cameron Neece at Loma Linda University on the California aspects of the project.

The group they’re studying is socioeconomically diverse, while 40 percent of participants identify as Latinx, and 30 percent of the families speak Spanish exclusively. Half of the families have children in preschool, and half have children in middle school. Half of the kids in the sample had a developmental delay or disability, while half were typically developing. Of the four cohorts, two had been receiving intervention. The diversity of the sample allows for exploration of the different ways that the COVID-19 pandemic affected children and families.

The pandemic and related school closures created a snapshot in time revealing the weaknesses in societal systems.

“When systems like school, childcare, daycare, or mental health supports are disrupted, it has cascading effects for children, their parents, their teachers, and the whole system,” McIntyre said. “It affects access to basic services. For children at risk for disabilities, the disruption has affected their ability to be diagnosed.

A team including McIntyre and David DeGarmo, a research professor and a prevention science methodologist at the UO Prevention Science Institute, has received a grant from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to look at family mental health and how children are doing in school — before, during, and after the pandemic. DeGarmo’s methodological expertise in data harmonization — combining data from different sources and making it comparable — and advanced statistical methods is especially crucial in pulling together what were originally four disparate data sets.

“This work could have great public health impact and major policy implications by helping us further understand what to do and what not to do during major public health crises,” McIntyre said. “COVID-19 has impacted student achievement and of course has impacted mental health and wellbeing, creating trauma related to the pandemic itself. It has impacted health, causing both acute and chronic issues. And it created financial impact, in terms of loss of jobs and economic hardships. But the impacts have been uneven. We’ve all experienced a COVID-19 impact, but we haven’t experienced it in the same way. The communities that have been impacted more are those that were marginalized already. The pandemic has exacerbated inequities.”

“The communities that have been impacted more are those that were marginalized already. The pandemic has exacerbated inequities.” — Laura Lee McIntyre

In this new era of pandemic recovery, McIntyre said crucial steps include making sure efforts include all members of our communities, not just those who speak English. From years of research, faculty at the UO have developed an impressive toolbox to measure how academic achievement is unfolding. Leveraging evidence-based, school-based mental health and family intervention is a way forward. COVID-19 has taught us that creating resilient systems that can withstand the shocks of health emergencies can’t wait. It has created a sense of urgency to bolster against future disturbances.

“Research suggests that the gaps have widened, especially in math, for children who were lower achieving academically prior to the pandemic. The positive takeaway is that heathy communities, schools, and families prior to the pandemic are going to produce more resilient children and families and schools,” McIntyre said. “The strength of those systems is going to help buffer against some of the negative impacts of school-related closures.”

The Unique Struggles of Dual Language Learners

One growing group of children in particular has seen an increase in educational disparities that existed prior to March 2020. The number of kids in the U.S. who are learning English and another language simultaneously is increasing, but services to help them have not kept pace.

Part of the issue stems from the troublesome practice of grouping all English learners into a homogenous group, ignoring the different cultures and ethnic backgrounds children come from. Dual language learners are often up against the erroneous assumption that language skills learned in one language — grammar, syntax, context — cannot translate to a different language. Our understanding of how language skills broadly transfer from language to another is still limited. Finally, comparing educational attainment of children learning more than one language at a time to monolingual students is just plain unfair, McIntyre notes, yet that is a common benchmarking practice across the U.S. and often results children being both over- and under-referred for special education.

During the school closures and shifts to remote learning, many of the children learning one language at home and English at school were no longer receiving daily exposure to English.

Sylvia Thompson, associate professor of special education, studies how students develop writing skills in more than one language. She seeks to bring nuance to the monolithic “English learners” group through her research, funded by an NIH Exploratory/Developmental Research Grant Award.

Thompson said her research has found four distinct groups of English learners: one doing well across all indices used to look at writing, one doing poorly on all indices, and two groups in the middle: one stronger in fluency (how much they wrote) and one stronger in accuracy (grammar, syntax, correct use of language rules. Knowing which group a child belongs to helps teachers provide more individualized help.

“Providing additional instruction doesn’t necessarily mean an extra teacher; it’s about looking at school systems and deploying the resources they have differently,” she said.

For example, Thompson suggests, teachers shouldn’t wait until state benchmarking tests are administered to try to catch students up.

“Early intervention is effective, and it reduces the numbers of kids who struggle. A lot of emphasis and resources are put in third grade because that’s when students first take an accountability test,” she said. “Rather than put in the resources in earlier grades to build a solid foundation, schools wait until third grade and try to play catch up. It’s those approaches that make it seem like there are fewer resources than there are.”

From her research, Thompson said that children who are provided with just six weeks of intervention can catch up to where they should be. A short period of intensive instruction is often enough to build the foundational skills they were missing.

“If you don’t take the time to do that, they’ll struggle their whole career. Early intervention is effective, and it reduces the numbers of kids who struggle,” she said.

What Absence Taught Us

Teachers and education researchers learned a lot about what children need from their schools and wider communities when those buildings sat empty. Inequities that existed before the pandemic were exacerbated. The most notable chasms affect those with language and learning delays and disabilities, and in particular, dual language learners.

“During the pandemic these kids are facing less support,” said Stephanie De Anda, an assistant professor of communication disorders and sciences. “These kids during the pandemic not only were not receiving in-person instruction, but they are also often the children of the parents who are the frontline essential workers. These families had less access to computers and the internet at a time when many services to support children with language and learning disabilities were moved online. I sadly continue to hear stories of parent loss and death in the Latinx community. This trauma only adds to the challenges in mitigating existing disparities.”

De Anda said the pandemic shifted her research from a focus on language delay to helping the children’s families navigate the crisis. With a Rapid Acceleration of Diagnostics (RADX) award from NIH, De Anda and her fellow investigators, including principal investigator Leslie Leve, launched “Oregon Saludable: Juntos Podemos,” (“Healthy Oregon: Together We Can”). The project deploys “promotores” — bilingual, bicultural people who have been trained to help families have trauma-informed conversations, combat misinformation, answer questions, and connect them to resources — into communities around the state.

De Anda said that the promotores model, while developed to help underserved Latinx communities access health resources, can be applied in other situations as well.

“We train these folks who are bilingual, bicultural, who identify as Latinx themselves to serve their own community through trauma-informed interviews. We can use this promotores model for other public health needs coming out of the pandemic, such as addressing the gap in language access for children or answering questions about healthy bilingual language development,” De Anda said.

De Anda’s other research, funded by a prestigious NIH K23 career development grant, tracks a group of toddlers and young children who are Spanish-English bilingual, some of whom display language delays. The pandemic has made gaps in educational attainment wider for these children and has increased barriers to access special education services. Like Thompson, De Anda advocates for measuring bilingual children against bilingual peers, not monolingual ones.

“We need measures that are bilingual from the beginning. Bilinguals might code switch and drop words they know or mix their speech in a variety of ways. That’s expected,” De Anda said. “They’re building an integrated system, so they need measures that reflect that system. Our hope is help mitigate over- and under-diagnoses of learning delays in these children by incorporating what we learned in the pandemic.”

Checking on the Family

As any teacher would tell you, what happens at home trails children to school like a shadow. Arguments between parents, sibling squabbles, or power struggles invariably affect how kids show up each day and how much they can learn at school.

Beth Stormshak, a Knight Chair and professor in counseling psychology and human services, developed the Family Check-Up Online app to help parents improve their relationships with their children and support mental health and behavior. The Family Check-Up Online provides content and support for mental health and wellness asynchronously, which allows for providers to serve more families in systems where few resources are available to support child mental health. The app is backed by more than 20 years of research with thousands of culturally and socioeconomically diverse families, with grants from several federal funding agencies, including NIH, the Institute of Education Sciences (IES), and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

“The COVID-19 pandemic created a mental health crisis for children and families. Lack of service providers in communities, long waitlists for mental health care, and shortages in school staff have led to overwhelmed systems of care,” she said. “The Family Check-Up Online was designed to provide schools with a solution for supporting mental health by improving interactions at home and providing support to parents.”

“Changing the home environment and improving parent-child relationships impacts student mental health and learning at school.” — Beth Stormshak

Stormshak has several research projects in progress that focus on middle school-aged students who have experienced significant mental health issues and anxiety due to COVID-19 — a number as high as one in four kids. In this context, the Family Check-Up app is being used to support mental health providers in middle schools to use the app to help students and their families.

During the height of the pandemic, Family Check-Up was available free of charge to anyone who wanted mental health services for their children ages 2-17 in Oregon. College of Education doctoral students in counseling and school psychology delivered the intervention remotely.

Setting Kids Up for Success

Children thrive in learning environments that are affirming of their identities, supportive of their needs, inclusive of all learners, welcoming, consistent, and safe. Yet the use of exclusionary discipline practices — such as suspension or expulsion — can transform the learning environment from a place of support to a place of harm. And public data shows that harm is disproportionately dispensed to students of color, students with disabilities, students living in poverty, and students struggling academically.

With a grant from the Institute of Education Sciences, Rhonda Nese, assistant professor in special education and clinical sciences, and her team are helping middle schools replace harmful exclusionary discipline practices with instructional and restorative alternatives to improve educator practices, student social and behavioral problem-solving, and student-teacher relationships. Through implementation of their model, The Inclusive Skill Building Learning Approach (ISLA), Nese and her team have refined and improved their service delivery and intervention content with input and guidance from students, educators, and district leaders.

Since ISLA is a school-based model of prevention and support, the pandemic has had a profound impact on the ISLA team’s research. The move to online schooling pushed the team to think critically about their work and how they could best support the learning community. The team pivoted their focus to supporting educators build and sustain relationships with their students in the online classroom setting, helping educators set up virtual learning expectations and routines for their students, and connect with students and families in need. Nese and her team also became much more vocal in their advocacy for mental health services, community connections, and supports for historically underserved and minoritized groups. As such, the team maintained strong connections with their research partners and completed a quasi-experimental study of ISLA in middle schools across five Oregon school districts. Findings on the impact of ISLA have shown improvements in classroom engagement and school safety, and reductions in the use of exclusionary discipline.

“When a negative interaction happens, we need to identify what happened, why it happened, what we need to do instead, and what we need to do to support children as they develop the skills needed to be successful in and out of the classroom,” Nese said. “Thinking instructionally when it comes to students’ behavior aligns with our approach to academic learning. If a student thinks 2+2=7, we wouldn’t kick them out of class. We’d try another teaching strategy to help them understand the equation. The same goes for learning pro-social skills. We don’t punish skills into children.”

“If we want students to learn respectful behavior, we must teach it to them, model it for them, provide them opportunities to practice, celebrate them when we see them doing it, and provide feedback and guidance when they need more support.” — Rhonda Nese

Shoring Up Schools

Not only has the pandemic affected how and what children learned in the past few years, but it has affected how teachers teach, as well. Teaching best practices evolve over time even in the absence of global crisis; the pandemic has provided a sort of real-time experiment on how the best laid plans can change.

Kent McIntosh, a Philip H. Knight Chair of special education, studies how schools sustain effective practices. With funding from Institute of Education Sciences and the National Center for Special Education Research, McIntosh and his research partners are evaluating the conditions, tools, and implementation strategies that help schools maintain effective practices in the face of crisis. The project, which looks at more than 500 schools, began prior to the pandemic and has been extended so the researchers can use the laboratory of the historical event.

“In March 2020, everybody went home, and nobody had a plan of what to do,” McIntosh said. “With all the pivoting, there was no planning ahead, no ability to see what it would look like, and the remote learning rollout was really weak. Teachers were suddenly faced with the question of what classroom management looks like when the classroom is a screen. With all of the work managing the transition, many teachers stopped doing effective things that were challenging in the context of remote learning. Now we’re in a place that brick-and-mortar schools are open. What things are still working?”

McIntosh said the process of evaluating best practices takes time, and that the effects of the pandemic on learning should be treated as generational rather than a minor blip in time. Like much of the other research being conducted in the College of Education, the results are applicable beyond the pandemic. Learning how teaching teams sustain effective practices throughout and beyond the COVID-19 pandemic can only make schools nimbler in their responses to future crises and more supportive of students and teachers as people.

The Research-to-Practice Gap

But the work of building resilient school and community systems requires more than a one-time research effort. The multitrillion dollar CARES Act authorized in 2020 by the U.S. Congress provided funds for school ventilation systems, ensuring at-home computer access, and more. But the needs of schools and the children they serve are ongoing.

It’s a common refrain of the scientific community that, while more research is always needed, it’s critical to also translate findings into actionable steps in communities and schools. critical. Unfortunately, it’s often difficult to get funding for studies that involve implementation and dissemination of results.

“They’re not considered innovative at that point,” McIntyre said of the novelty obsession that has created the research-to-practice gap. “Sometimes what we need is money to scale up and permeate knowledge and skills among community practitioners in schools.”

The College of Education at the University of Oregon has dual missions in this regard: research education itself to develop knowledge, as well as translate that knowledge into practice.

“We know what works. We need to produce a workforce that can deploy these behavioral health interventions. We need funding for clinicians to go out in work in communities. Grants accomplish a narrow set of specific aims, and it can be difficult to ensure findings from grants are scaled up and sustained. Funding from philanthropic efforts can help bridge the sponsored research to implementation and impact at community level, as evidenced by the Ballmer Institute for Children’s Behavioral Health,” McIntyre said. “We create maximum impact when research and practice are tied together. We’re training the next generation of education scholars, but also prevention scientists and educators.”

— By Kelley Christensen, Office of the Vice President for Research and Innovation