Rising up:
Stories from the pandemic

2021 | Written by Faith Schantz, Report Editor

Minika Jenkins Chief Academic Officer, Pittsburgh Public Schools

As the Chief Academic Officer for the Pittsburgh Public Schools, Minika Jenkins heads the Office of Curriculum and Instruction. In March 2020, she was one of the top administrators charged with figuring out how to keep students learning and teachers teaching after school buildings shut down.

Jenkins began talking with other members of the executive cabinet to brainstorm, troubleshoot, and plan, in online meetings that stretched from early morning into the night. During those exhausting days, she worried about staff. “Trying to understand what they were going through and understanding how to address their needs in this environment was challenging,” she says, especially when “their personal situations at home could fluctuate at any time.”

By the end of the 2019-20 school year, the district had provided families with work packets for students to complete for the last three months of the year without reopening buildings. That summer, Jenkins brought teachers on board to adapt the curriculum for hybrid learning, which she and others expected to begin in September. Along with finding ways for teachers to navigate instruction for both in-person students and students who attended online, what they would actually teach was an issue. All students had missed two months of class time, and some had missed much more. Jenkins did not want, say, a 4th grade teacher to think, “I can’t teach my kids 4th grade material because I need to cover all these 3rd grade standards. If you do that, you keep your kids behind.” Instead, she says, “We wanted to focus on depth of information and not trying to cover so much in a year.”

The virtual learning curve

Before the pandemic, the district had begun using a framework called “multi-tiered systems of support,” to help teachers identify students who needed more help, and to provide that help more quickly and intentionally. The new curriculum guides created in response to the pandemic attempted to make the range of learning needs teachers might face in their classrooms more explicit. One way that was accomplished was by stating the prior knowledge students would need in order to meet a current grade-level standard. For example, in order to “review elements of an effective argument”—a 9th grade literacy standard—a student would already need to know how to “determine a central idea of a text.” By providing essential content that supports a grade-level standard, teachers could see where they might need to supplement. The guides also offered resources for English Language Learners, students receiving special education services, and students who needed enrichment, with both in-person and online tasks.

By the fall of 2020, “The curriculum was set,” Jenkins says, “but we really had to articulate for teachers what that meant.” When buildings remained closed, contrary to expectations, interventions for students who needed more support had to be rethought. “We know that one-on-one works, but how do you make that work in an online environment?” she asks. Another strategy is to form small groups for students to work on particular concepts and skills, but not every teacher was familiar with it. Now they were being asked to figure out how to group students online. Administrators tried to recruit teachers to work with students individually, particularly English Language Learners. Few wanted to tutor students after an already stressful school day.

Before the pandemic, Jenkins had seen other districts using technology to “augment and transform” learning. Pittsburgh hadn’t reached that point. To move learning into the virtual environment, “We’re taking a textbook and putting it online, we’re taking a worksheet and putting it in a Word doc,” she says. “Those are just substitutions from the typical classroom.” Even so, many teachers struggled to use the technology. Given the steep learning curve, she says, training and technical support continued throughout the year.

Another challenge was gauging how students were faring in the virtual environment. A modification to the district’s learning management system, Schoology, allowed teachers to monitor how students moved through assignments. They could also track whether and how students were using supplemental programs, such as Reading Horizons, but Jenkins says that often depended on students’ familiarity with navigating a program online. The district gave students the Panorama Social-Emotional Learning survey it has administered in the past, and results were “pretty consistent” with previous years, she says. However, many teachers reported their students weren’t engaged, and a number of students didn’t show up at all. The administration provided professional learning opportunities to help teachers make online lessons more interesting, as well as ways to support students who’d been traumatized.

Looking back, looking forward

Early this fall, the Mid-Atlantic Regional Educational Lab at Mathematica presented the school board with an analysis of the results of remote instruction. Their analysis showed that most grade levels experienced some growth in scores on the NWEA MAP test in reading and math, which the district had given in certain grades during the 2020-21 school year. The analysis also showed that many more students failed courses in 2020-21 compared to 2019-20, especially those who were chronically absent (missing 10% or more of the school year), and those with higher levels of economic disadvantage. Students who had been chronically absent missed many more days of school compared to the previous year. (See the executive summary for more discussion of these indicators.)

When she looks back on the year and a quarter, Jenkins says the pandemic “helped us realize our need to change and prepare for the future” with a greater sense of urgency. Educators and community members already knew that settled ways of doing things weren’t working, she says. Now, we’ve been “accelerated into that change.”

Currently, the district faces staffing shortages, declining enrollment, funding shortfalls, and the search for a permanent superintendent, among other pressing issues. Whether and how the lessons of the pandemic can be used to transform education at the classroom level remains to be seen. Still, the resilience Jenkins witnessed gives her hope. “In spite of all the hard work, many people kept working,” she says. “They didn’t give up. Students didn’t give up. Parents didn’t give up. …And I think that that spirit to keep fighting and to keep pushing is what makes us better.”