Sylvan Learning Offers Tips For How Parents Can Help Their Children Combat COVID-Related Unfinished Learning

“This profound disruption for a year and a half is one of the most difficult challenges we’ve had in modern education history,” said Susan Valverde, Sylvan Learning chief franchise operations officer. “For some students, that straddles two and maybe even eventually three school years, once this is all said and done. We've existed for 42 years to help families overcome challenges with learning loss. And while this is distinctly different, we're here to support families in all of these recovery efforts, because we all want to get back to where we were.”

COVID impacts are going to affect children in different ways than general learning struggles, and Emily Levitt, Sylvan Learning’s vice president of education, says students’ academic progress before COVID hit will be a huge factor in how they weather this time of school disruption.

EdWeek asked parents and educators about the importance and need for tutoring to allow students to address and make up for disrupted learning. Both groups agreed that tutoring was the solution, but parents had a much different perception than educators did about how behind their children are.

Whereas 62% of educators said students made less progress in seven important subjects during the pandemic than prior to the pandemic, only 24% of parents agreed.

“I think parents generally have yet to really understand how much this has affected their child's education,” Levitt said. “Both parents and teachers would agree that learning has suffered and the kids are behind, so on that common ground, great. But ask those parents how far behind their children are or how long they think the school district is going to take to get their child caught up, and they’re consistently answering three to six months. You ask the teachers who have those same children, and the teachers will say it may require years to get them caught up.”

Although most school districts are back in person this year, Levitt said there are 70 to 100 school districts in the U.S. that started in person and have had to go completely virtual due to COVID outbreaks. So while it's a good idea to step back and take stock of how much learning loss the pandemic has caused, it’s not over yet.

“A lot of states did their regular spring standardized testing in April and May of this year, and what we've seen is students could be anywhere between five and 15 weeks behind where they should be,” Levitt said. “In a regular school year, the curriculum is already tightly packed into 180 or so days. Now schools have five to 15 weeks of content to shoehorn into a year that was already jam-packed, so this makeup time could span years.”

Parents should be prepared to hear the reality: There will be some students who never catch up in a traditional classroom setting. Students who are traditionally affected by the equity gap will suffer at an even higher level.

“Children of color, children from low socioeconomic areas, children who have learning disabilities — they've always suffered when it comes to learning equity, and COVID magnifies that to a great degree,” Levitt said. “We’re going to see a lot of children who have had a huge segment of their schooling that has been abnormal. And I think we need to look at that with a lot of grace and understand that the growth numbers might not be what they were in the past, and that's OK. We just need to have a better understanding of what's a reasonable expectation.”

So what can parents do? In the short term, parents should be reading with their children every day, working with them on their homework and trying to incorporate more difficult subjects like math and science into their daily lives to be sure children are continually learning.

“For parents, communication is going to be their best friend,” Levitt said. “Talk to your child's teacher, especially if your child is young. Make sure you read everything that comes home from the school. Most schools are using an electronic learning management system, so make sure you're logging into that to communicate with the teacher and see what your child is supposed to be working on. A lot of times you can get in there and look at their grades in real time, and you can get a good idea very quickly of where your child stands.”

A concerned parent’s first stop should always be the teacher. Find out why the student’s grades are low or why there are assignments missed. It could be they’re not understanding the material or maybe they’re suffering from anxiety.

“The first thing you have to do is understand the nature of the problem,” Levitt said. “Are they more stressed than usual? Having trouble concentrating? Perhaps there’s an underlying learning disability. There are a lot of reasons why a child might not be performing. Once you understand where the problem is coming from, then you can have a path to fix it.”

Levitt said parents should only wait about six to eight weeks into the school year before approaching the teacher with questions. And with many districts across the U.S. already well into the school year, now is as good a time as any to get to the bottom of any difficulties a student may have.

In the long term, programs like Sylvan’s can help students keep up with classwork and provide personalized lessons to be sure they’re getting the one-on-one attention they need. Sylvan Learning has approximately 10,000 teachers across the U.S. ready to help students.

“One of the things that I love about Sylvan is that we can double or triple the rate of skill acquisition that a child would get when compared to school without tutoring,” Levitt said. “Sylvan can make those skill jumps in just 24 one-hour sessions, whereas a school would take the entire year.”

Tutoring services like Sylvan’s allow parents to find out exactly where their student needs to start learning, and that allows the tutor to build a personalized learning plan to correct COVID-induced learning loss.

With more than 40 years of experience and more than 750 points of presence throughout North America, Sylvan Learning is the leading provider of personal learning for students in grades K-12. Sylvan is transforming how students learn, inspiring them to succeed in school and in life. Sylvan’s proven tutoring approach blends amazing teachers with SylvanSync™ technology on the iPad® for an engaging learning experience.

Sylvan also leads the way with Sylvan EDGE — STEM and accelerated courses — and Sylvan Prep — college and test prep courses. Sylvan supports families through every stage of the academic journey. For more information, visit or SylvanLearning.