Tennessee test scores dropped in the Nation’s Report Card. A Metro math teacher shares what that looks like in his classroom.

Jeremiah Wooten teaches eighth grade math at Thurgood Marshall Middle School in Antioch. Earlier this year, some of his students participated in the National Assessment of Educational Progress, also known as the Nation’s Report Card.

Last week, the report gave a glimpse of how the pandemic has set back learning for elementary and middle schoolers across the country. Tennessee students scored lower across the board compared to previous years.

But Wooten says the results don’t show learning loss so much as learning gaps.

“For the most part, students did not backtrack,” Wooten says. “We didn’t see students who were on a sixth grade level, pandemic shut it down, and now they’re on a fifth grade level. Instead it’s: they were on a sixth grade level, and they just never learned what they needed to move onto the seventh grade level.”

Most students at Wooten’s school are Black or Hispanic. In Tennessee, those students’ scores were already lower than their white peers in previous years’ assessments. And in many cases this year, they dropped more severely.

Black eighth graders in Tennessee saw a 10-point decline in their average math scores, while their Hispanic classmates’ scores decreased by an average of 8 points. White eighth graders’ math scores went down by 6 points on average.

Wooten says those continued disparities jumped out at him.

“As we plan to fix this and to repair this, I think it’s important to be intentional about making sure those groups that were most harmed are the ones that we prioritize,” he says.

Thurgood Marshall Middle is trying to help students catch up with tutoring and enrichment activities outside regular school hours. But Wooten says some students who need it most don’t have the necessary transportation. The school says it’s looking for opportunities to offer transportation in the future.

On a district level, Metro Nashville Public Schools offers a tutoring program to provide small-group and one-on-one reading and math support. And the summertime Promising Scholars program worked to get students up to speed before this school year began.

Wooten’s doing what he can on an individual level, too. When his class has independent work time, he pulls small groups of students to give more direct instruction on topics where they’re struggling. He says although that technique is more common in elementary schools, it’s helpful for his eighth graders.

“There’s some students who may have missed out on one aspect of geometry, and others are lacking more in algebra. So I can kind of set groups based on what students need work in.”

Wooten also notes that students took the assessment in the early part of this year.

“There absolutely has been growth since NAEP was taken,” he says, “and there continues to be growth throughout this year.”