(upbeat music) - Hello and welcome to "Prairie Pulse."

Coming up a little bit later in the show, we'll meet North Dakota Poetry Out Loud champion, Maya Tena.

But first joining me now is Fargo Superintendent of Schools, Dr. Rupak Gandhi.

Dr. Gandhi, thanks for joining us today.

- Thank you for having me.

- As we get started, tell the folks a little bit about yourself and your background.

- Sure.

My name is Rupak Gandhi.

I have served as the superintendent for Fargo Public Schools since 2018.

Prior to that, I spent my entire career in education.

I had the good fortune to start as a special education teacher at the elementary level in the Houston Independent School District in Houston.

After serving as a teacher, I have served in a variety of school and district leadership roles prior to taking on this position.

So that included being a high school assistant principal, an elementary school principal, a high school assistant principal and then I spent two years as an assistant superintendent in Colorado Springs prior to taking on the role as a superintendent for Fargo Public Schools.

- Okay, we're here today to talk about a recent report from the National Assessment of Educational Progress Reading and Math Exams.

The report found, I guess, an alarming decline among students during the last two years and the effect of the COVID pandemic maybe.

Can you give us an overview of these findings?

- Yeah, I mean, I think, I think the notion of alarming decline is interesting because the purpose of the assessment as a national reference assessment is benchmarked against students that are taking that test nationally, as well, and then what standards are mastered on a year to year basis, but I think what was discovered from the national assessment that you're referencing, the NAEP, was that there was a decline in student mastery of both English, language arts and in mathematics compared to previous years.

So, students during the pandemic that took the assessment at that point in time and the assessment were not showing as much mastery of the academic content for those standards related to those two content areas.

- So, why do you think this happened?

Is it squarely on the fault of how learning took place during COVID?

- I absolutely cannot say that.

I think, Urie Bronfenbrenner, who is one of the leading child psychologists and his theory of when you look at child development, schools are one part of a child's ecosystem and during the pandemic there were so many different factors that contributed to a change in both the way instruction was delivered, but there's also just the way that students' home environment changed, their parents' environment changed because we were all dealing with something new, which were new conditions, different types of limitations and restrictions and even the delivery of instruction itself.

So, there are correlations, but there aren't causations that I can make to generalize that because there's so many different factors that impact both student health and student academics, as well.

And in this notion, we're only measuring student mastery of English, language arts and math curriculum as they were assessed on the standard, as well, but I think that there's no secret that our students learn to be resilient, they learn to use technology in ways that they haven't before.

They used to communicate using a social platform for their educational needs, as well, so there's a lot of learning that happened, as well.

But when focusing solely in this assessment, education is a dynamic feature that involves relationships that students have with their community, with their teachers, with the content that they're engaging in and all of those things are a factor, so it's hard to generalize just one reason alone why you could have seen a decline in those scores.

- So, within the Fargo School System, what do the assessments look like and are they similar to national numbers?

- Yeah, so use a variety of different assessments in the Fargo systems.

For us, it's really important to understand how we measure our growth as a system.

We have big broad goals of what we want to accomplish for our students, but there isn't just one measure to student success, because student achievement is not just the academic side, it's also the experiences that students get, as well.

So, we make sure that in the Fargo system that we provide students with a wide variety of experiences, both co-curricular, extracurricular, but also supplementary to the traditional academic programs that might only be assessed in the areas of English, language arts and math.

We provide a wide variety of different content areas, but within each content area, as well, we offer formative pieces of information, which is ongoing assessments that you take at the end of a lesson.

We call that a check for understanding or an exit ticket or a daily demonstration of learning.

You have interim assessments that you may take that are teacher controlled.

You can have district control the assessments, as well, to see how you're doing against your neighboring schools, but then you can also have national norm reference assessments and we have a little bit of all of those pieces in Fargo, because data is very critical to be used for the specific purpose that it's supposed to be and you have different types of assessments for different things.

So, we do on our Fargo Public Schools website, all of our information, our assessment schedule and the different assessments that we take is readily available for any of our stakeholders, but it is pretty wide in scope, so there's a wide variety of assessments that we give.

- You know, what impact are teacher shortages having on schools an scores?

Can you see that in any degree?

- Yeah, I think, just one again, the impact of teacher shortages is gonna be felt through a wide variety of experiences in schools.

I can't directly say that there is a causation without doing a regression analysis for a specific factor in a specific school.

But, obviously, we know that teacher shortages have an impact from an operational standpoint that if you have less teachers, then that means you're gonna have to have more students in those classrooms to be served by the certified teachers that you do have and that can impact relationships to some level.

Does that impact scores?

That just depends on a wide variety of other factors like I mentioned before, as well, but teacher impact or teacher shortages is gonna have an impact on school operations, it's gonna be limiting in the resources that you have and, most importantly, it's gonna be limiting the great professionals that we have and the ability to build relationships with just individuals that are being able to provide students with a certified area of expertise in their content area.

- You know, I was told that it appears that the eighth grade assessments were really impacted by COVID.

Why is that grade so crucial and how do we get kids back on track?

- You know, I would probably have to look at some of the great content area experts in our school district to lean on them to look at why specifically in eighth grade which content area assessments dropped down.

So, it would be speculation.

One of the pieces that I know that initially when I was looking at the data that stood out to me was at the elementary level and as we dived a little bit deeper to that, some of them, you know, again, I don't want to make a generalized statement, but one of the pieces that did stick out that we do know happened at that level was the last nine weeks when COVID first hit North Dakota and we as districts had to adapt to going remote and putting together a plan, those standards weren't covered, especially in the math area and those were the standards that were often, when we were able to dive a little bit deeper and take a look.

On the assessment, those were the standards that weren't mastered were the areas that were supposed to be taught and scheduled for those nine weeks.

The same thing could be the case for the eighth grade assessments.

I would just have to dive a little bit deeper to know that and lean on our teachers and our content area experts.

- I understand the report also found that the pandemic had a disproportionate negative effect on the most vulnerable, who fared maybe the worst.

Can you comment on this and which group of kids might have been most impacted?

- Yeah, I think, you know, we as educational systems are always looking at our most vulnerable students and those could be students that identify with a certain racial demographic marker, they could be students that are on Individual Education Plans, students that are English language learners.

It could also be students that are coming from free and reduced lunch backgrounds.

Now, we know that during the pandemic, switching to remote learning required access to technology.

As a school district and as a state, I think North Dakota did an incredible job.

I believe that it was shared earlier in the pandemic that when we started, we had mover 90% of the families in North Dakota had access to internet.

It is my understanding, I know in Fargo, but I think all of our school districts made sure that 100% of the students had the opportunity to get access if they didn't have that.

Did that happen or not?

That would require individual conversations.

We have over 11,000 students, so if someone wasn't able to take advantage of the opportunities to get access, then that could've hindered their learning.

That could have created some of those pieces.

The pandemic had a different impact on different family dynamics at different times.

So, we had parents that were dependent on their jobs, having to stay home and unable to work and what does that impact mean?

We have students that had to take on other responsibilities, whether it's caring for a sibling that would've been at school, making sure that they're doing that with their own learning.

So, so many different impacts, especially for individuals that didn't necessarily have a stable background, so understood why the content are would not have been the focus, but I would have said that they probably grew during that time in both their character, resiliency and other aspects that are going to contribute to their learning and who they are down the road, as well.

- Do you know were there any differences among schools if some schools reopened to in-person learning earlier than maybe some larger school districts did?

- Yeah, that would just be extremely hard to identify solely because based on when schools reopened or not.

We have changes in scores, we have variants between schools all the time.

That would be a wide variety of factors.

John Haddy is a leading educational researcher that talks about the biggest factors every year.

He does meta analysis that impacts during achievement and there's so many different of impacts during achievement, so to be able to attribute just when a school opened or when in-person instruction resumed to the relationship with the test scores would be, I think, would be creating a correlation that could or could not be the case.

- Well, every school district maybe did it differently.

Can you talk about what the transition was like for Fargo when you kind of went back to in-classroom learning?

- Yeah, I think in Fargo, our process was we created a COVID-19 instruction plan committee that met with local health officials.

The committee consisted of parents from all age levels, staff members from different parts of organization and local health and we looked at data impacting Cass County, we looked at epidemiological, I guess, implications of bringing students back at different levels based on what was happening within our community and we made different decisions accordingly, so in Fargo, there were times where based on a two-week data trend, we were implementing something and that could change or it didn't change, as well.

I think for every school district that was impacted by the pandemic, it looked different because we had a change in instructional model that institutionally we had been incorporating for years, if not decades or almost even hundreds of years, which was your traditional aspect of at least that in-person instruction and we, in a very short time, adapted to use technology to provide remote options, to provide hybrid options where we changed the scheduling of students or how many students are in a class at a time, while also maintaining the health and safety needs of improving how we keep classes cleaner, how we make sure that sanitization practices have been improved.

So I commend every educator across the nation for going through that in that short period of time because we have to change our behaviors to be able to change the way that we work.

- Can you comment a little bit more?

You said it a little bit, how remote learning was not necessarily the same across, especially the nation or the State of North Dakota or Minnesota and the factors that impacted this.

I mean, what were the things that had to happen to help remote learning because they said it wasn't equal.

- Yeah.

And, you know, that's not the goal.

I mean, in education, we're not trying to be equal, we're trying to be equitable, which is giving every child what they need to be able to successful and the reality of the situation is that no two learners are the same.

So, even with an in-person instruction, an individual might do a really great job of being able to retain information in a sit and get model where the teacher is speaking for 15 minutes and they're taking notes and then being able to be assessed on that, whereas another learner might need something very different.

They might need more visual cues, they may need more auditory supplements.

They may just have a different kinesthetic learning modality where they need to be more active to be able to content that same mastery.

The challenges with remote learning are no different, too, and the same with the expectations for parent, communities and students, as well.

In a K12 school system, you have students that can range anywhere from four years old to 18 years old and two models of remote learning are synchronous and asynchronous.

Asynchronous means self-paced, self-controlled, you do that on your own.

Synchronous means that you have a live facilitator there with you during that same moment in time.

Districts have to make independent decisions for what age group are we gonna use what model for what amount of time, what does content delivery look like, what technology do we have at our disposal that we can lean on and then also what are the family dynamics that we serve.

Are we gonna have parents that are gonna be able to be there to support students or are there gonna be students that are working independently and then how do we make sure that the opportunity we provide for one student is equitable for a student that might not have the same background or family dynamic or have other barriers such as language, technology access or otherwise.

So it's always gonna be varied, but it should be varied because equal is not the goal.

It's really being equitable to make sure that every child has what they need.

- So now that, well, I'm gonna say that the pandemic is essentially over or we are where we are right now.

Are teachers, administrators doing anything to try to rectify the declines in reading and math or is it just teaching just moves on or is anything specific that you're looking at to address these issues?

- You know, it's a hard question to answer yes or no and are they doing anything differently because teaching is moving on, but teaching has always been doing something differently for the kids that didn't learn.

I think, you know, when we look at an assessment as an end goal, then we're saying that that's the only standard that we're measuring academics by and that's just really not fair to teachers because learning involves so much more than just the retaining of an English standard that's on a standardized assessment, that's use for benchmarking, not really as an end goal.

I view more of academics and education like health.

There are multiple factors that impact my health and during the pandemic, we didn't call it a virology loss, we didn't call it an immunology loss, just like we don't necessarily, in my opinion, it doesn't need to be a learning loss because, yeah, there was a loss in learning as measured in some assessments in a certain way, but there was also a learning gain in other areas, specifically around social and emotional development, which to some level, with the loss of relationships, there was a gain in what you're able to do, connectivity, technology wise, some skill set that students have.

All of the things are transferrable skills, so the goal of an educator is to ask yourself the same questions that we call our PLC questions, which is who learned today, who didn't, what am I doing differently for those that did and what am I doing differently for those that didn't and that was the same before the pandemic, it's gonna be the same afterwards and that's our job.

- Yeah, can you talk about how stressful the pandemic was on teachers and how they're coping with it now?

- Yeah, I mean, I think the pandemic had an impact on everyone and it impacted everyone very differently because I think whether it's personally or professionally, the way that we were accustomed to our daily routines and habits, our workplace and even the way we lived our lives, that changed and it changed on the decisions that we made, it changed on the guidance that we received from the city and the community.

So, I think stress, if we're defining stress truly to be a new burden that we didn't account for or that we didn't plan for, then it impacted everyone in a certain way, but it also was probably different for individuals, no different than probably how pandemic impacted journalism, impacted media, it had an impact on everything that we did.

- In retrospect, could things have been done differently?

Of course, things could always be done differently, but, you know, what would you have done different with the pandemic as far as teaching kids or getting them back in classrooms?

You know, I don't know if I'm able to answer that question any differently than I would tonight about what would I have done differently about today because as an educator, my job is to really focus on, you know, was I able to serve as many students as I can today.

Knowing that systemically with a lot of different factors at play, there's some students that benefited from the educational system delivered during the pandemic and there's some students that didn't.

So, I wouldn't want to do anything differently from the students that were able to learn and be successful.

I'd want to do everything differently from the students that weren't and that's no different from the students that are in person today that are not learning, as well.

I'd want to do everything differently tomorrow if I could.

- Is teacher retention and teacher pay still big issues for you and the district?

- I think they're big issues across the nation.

I don't know if they're necessarily paired together.

I think we have to look at the root causes of teacher retention, teacher recruitment, which is independent of retention and then also teacher pay.

I think all deserve and are worthy of very independent conversations, but I would not associate that teacher recruitment and retention as just a factor of pay.

- What is the best thing about your job and being an educator?

- The ability to serve our community and serve our students.

One of the pieces that I love doing is sitting down with our cabinet team, our senior leadership team in Fargo Public Schools and visiting with our students because, you know, as an educator, you get to learn and grow every single day and to be able to serve students, that's joy that's just hard to fulfill.

I mean, I know many parents know the joy of just being able to love your children on a daily basis, whether they're at their best or not at their best.

To be entrusted, to be able to do that for all the parents in the Fargo School District is just and honor that will never be taken for granted.

- And teachers deserve everything they get.

If people want more information, where's the best place for them to go?

- We are very communicative and we try to put as much information readily accessible as we can.

Our website is the primary place, fargoschools.org or fargo.k12.nd.us.

You can find information broken out by our departments that have different functions within our school district.

An about us page that shows you everything from a quick fact sheet about a basic overview to even more detailed information, including our strategic plan, how we used the data that you referenced today, along with several other data points to really measure our performance as a system and how students are growing.

All of that information is readily available there.

- Okay, well, Dr. Gandhi, thank so much for joining us today.

- Well, thank you very much, I appreciate it.

- Stay tuned for more.

(upbeat music) Poetry Out Loud is a high school program that encourages students to learn about poetry while they master public speaking skills and build self-confidence.

Maya Tena from Bismarck High School was the 2022 North Dakota State Poetry Out Loud Champion.

- (speaking foreign language) Spanglish by cultural systems, scientific lexicographical, intertextual integrations, two expressions existentially wired.

I am mostly involved in the music programs.

I play tenor saxophone and my favorite thing to do is jazz, because the improvisation that goes with it, everyone shows their uniqueness in it and it's fun because you're really going off the page and that's what I like, kind of like with poetry, you have to interpret what the author was trying to say.

Poetry Out Loud is a competition where students recite poems that we have to choose from the anthology of poems on the Poetry Out Loud website.

The first stage is the school competition and then it was state competition.

It was similar to the school competition where there's one round of poems, then there's a second round and the only difference is they pick five finalists and those finalists have to recite a third poem.

The judges are judging us on a few sets of criteria.

One of the criteria that we're judged on is how accurate we interpret the poem.

We can't be overly dramatic, but they don't want us to be stoic.

They're judging us, of course, on the accuracy.

We also get judged on our voice and how our voice carries the poem into the audience.

My own dear love.

He is sweet and bold and he cares not what comes after.

His words ring sweet as a chime of gold and his eyes are lit with laughter.

I was definitely nervous, as most of us were.

It's just you and the audience and, of course, the judges.

I cannot see anything.

I have to wear glasses, so I took them off while I was on stage so that I couldn't see the audience and it did help a lot.

I'm sure I was making eye contact with people, but I couldn't see any faces, just forms.

So that made it a lot easier for me.

(audience applauding) - [Moderator] Congratulations!

The North Dakota 2022 Poetry Out Loud State Champion is Maya Tena, Bismarck High School.

- From Poetry Out Loud and competing in the competition, I've gotten a lot of support.

I love seeing that my family really cares about me and my friends and my teachers.

My English teacher, Mrs. Lorde Olsen, she helped me.

She did such a great job of coaching me and guiding me.

She always had something new to contribute that eventually led to me succeeding in the state competition as I did.

I gaze upon her rose wreathed hair and gaze upon her smile.

Seem as you drank the very air her breath perfumed the while and wake for her the gifted line that wild and witching lay.

Before I started critically analyzing the poems for Poetry Out Loud, I didn't pay much attention to poems.

I didn't realize the amount of critical thinking that has to go into analyzing a poem.

From Poetry Out Loud and participating in the competition, I've gotten a greater appreciation for poetry and writers and all that they have to do to put their words artistically onto the page.

It's an art and I see it as that now.

I fully appreciate what poetry is and there is a lot of technique that has to be involved.

"Spanglish" is by Tato Laviera and I chose that poem because there is some Spanish in the poem that you have to recite and I thought that would be a lot of fun because my parents are from Mexico and I grew up speaking Spanish.

That was my first language and I thought it would be a really fun experience to use that in my poem.

"Spanglish," by Tato Laviera.

(speaking Spanish) by cultural systems, scientific lexicographical, intertextual integrations.

Two expressions existentially wired, two dominant languages continentally (speaking Spanish).

In colloquial (speaking Spanish) and (speaking Spanish), Spanglish emerges.

(speaking Spanish) mixing with radio rock and roll, (speaking Spanish).

Immigrant, migrant, nasal mispronouncements.

(speaking Spanish) social club.

Hip hop (speaking Spanish) street Salsa.

Corner (speaking Spanish) Standard English classroom with computer technicalities.

Spanglish is literally perfect.

Spanglish is ethnically snobbish.

Spanglish (speaking Spanish).

Which U.S. slang do you speak?

(upbeat music) - Well, that's all we have this week on "Prairie Pulse," and, as always, thanks for watching.

(upbeat music) - [Announcer] Funded by the North Dakota Council on the Arts and by the members of Prairie Public.

(upbeat music)