Learning from Outliers: Identifying and Learning from High-Challenge Schools with Exceptional Learning Recovery

This project aims to gain insight into the mechanisms by which schools in highly challenging environments avoided learning loss—or even improved—during the pandemic. Employing an explanatory mixed methods research design to identify and learn from schools with exceptional post-pandemic learning recovery. For the first phase, we used a unique dataset covering multiple levels of school, health, and environmental data, we examine which factors led schools to ‘beat the odds’ when it comes to learning recovery. Results demonstrate that recovery was most prominent among schools with higher populations of Hispanic and LEP students, and those situated in communities marked by higher levels of education and employment. These results also suggest that unobserved factors, such as district and school leadership, teacher quality and capacity, resource deployment, or learning modality choices differentiated recovery outlier schools from less recovered schools. The second phase of the project involved conducting field work in four of the schools identified in the first phase. Findings revealed that school personnel, strong school culture embedded in community, and supportive leadership were crucial in fostering resilience and academic recovery during and following the pandemic.