Four years ago this month, schools across the country began closing, sparking one of the most polarizing and partisan debates about the pandemic.
Some schools have reopened by fall 2020, often in Republican-led states and localities, while others are expected to take another year to fully reopen, typically in large cities and Democratic-led states. is.
Since then, a variety of data has been accumulated regarding children’s academic performance and the spread of the new coronavirus infection. Many public health and education experts now believe that while extended school closures have not significantly stemmed the spread of the coronavirus, the academic damage to children has been significant and long-lasting. This is widely recognized.
While poverty and other factors play a role, research shows distance learning has been a major factor in academic decline during the pandemic, and this finding holds true across income levels.
“In general, there’s a pretty good consensus that as a society, we’ve probably kept our kids out of school longer than we should,” she said of the school reopening guidance for Americans. said Dr. Sean O’Leary, a pediatric infectious disease expert who helped create it. Pediatric Society June 2020.
There were no easy decisions to make back then. Officials had to weigh the risk of a new virus against the academic and mental health impacts of school closures. And even schools that reopened quickly by fall 2020 saw lasting effects.
But as experts plan for the next public health emergency, whatever it may be, a growing body of research shows that school closures due to the pandemic have taken a heavy toll on students.
The longer schools were closed, the more students fell behind.
At the state level, students spent more time in remote or hybrid instruction during the 2020-21 school year and saw test scores decline significantly, according to a New York Times analysis of school closure data and results from the National Assessment of Educational Progress. A prestigious exam conducted for her 4th grade and her 8th grade students across the country.
That finding holds true at the district level, too, according to an analysis of third- through eighth-grade test scores in thousands of U.S. school districts led by researchers at Stanford University and Harvard University. School districts where students spent most of the 2020-2021 school year in remote learning were on average more than half a grade behind in math, while students in districts that spent most of the year in-person averaged more than a half grade level behind. I lost just over a third.
(A separate study of about 10,000 schools found similar results.)
Such losses can be difficult to overcome without significant intervention. The latest test scores for spring 2023 show that students as a whole have not caught up with the losses caused by the pandemic, and wide gaps remain among those who were the worst off in the first place. Students in districts that spent at least 90 percent of the 2020-21 school year remote or hybrid for the longest time still have almost no room to make up compared to students in districts where students were allowed to return for most of the year. There was twice as much left.
It would have been better to have time to meet in person than not have time.
As the year progresses and districts transition to in-person learning, more students who were offered a hybrid schedule (in-person a few hours or days a week and online the rest of the week) than students where their school was My grades were good on average. Even though it’s fully remote, it’s worse than where we had fully in-person school.
Income and family background also made a big difference.
The second factor associated with academic decline during the pandemic was the level of poverty in the community. When comparing school districts with similar distance learning policies, poorer school districts suffered greater losses.
However, it remained important for personal learning. When looking at districts with similar poverty levels, distance learning was associated with larger declines.
Sean F. Reardon, a professor of poverty and educational inequality at Stanford University who led the district-level analysis with Thomas J. Cain, said local poverty rates and the length of school closures are “roughly equal to student achievement.” He said it had an impact. , an economist at Harvard University.
But the combination of poverty and distance learning was particularly harmful. For each week spent remotely, students in poorer districts experienced a larger decline in math scores than students in wealthier districts.
This is noteworthy because poorer neighborhoods are also more likely to remain remote for longer periods of time.
Some of the country’s poorest neighborhoods are in Democratic-leaning cities that have taken a more cautious approach to the virus. Poor neighborhoods and Black and Hispanic communities also have higher death rates from the coronavirus, making many families and teachers in these areas reluctant to return home.
“We wanted to survive,” said Sarah Carpenter, executive director of Memphis Lift, a parent advocacy group in Memphis whose schools were closed until spring 2021.
“But looking back, I also wish my kids had gone back to school sooner,” she added, citing the impact on academics.
The Stanford and Harvard University study found that other things were also associated with poorer student outcomes, including increased anxiety and depression among the adults in children’s lives and overall restrictions on social activities in the community. .
Even short-term closures had long-term effects on children.
On average, students had better academic performance if they stayed in school, but this is not guaranteed. Some school districts that opened early, such as Cherokee County, Georgia, outside Atlanta, and Hanover County, Virginia, have lost important learning and been left behind.
At the same time, many schools are experiencing an increase in student anxiety and outbursts. And chronic school absenteeism is skyrocketing across demographic groups.
Experts say these short-term closures are a sign of the broader pandemic’s lasting impact on educational culture.
“During the coronavirus era, there was almost an atmosphere of ‘I’ve given up, I’m just trying to keep body and soul together,’ and I think that eroded the high expectations of school.” Margaret Spellings said. She served as Secretary of Education under President George W. Bush and is currently chief executive of the Bipartisan Policy Center.
Closing schools does not appear to significantly slow the spread of the coronavirus.
Perhaps the biggest question surrounding reopening schools is: Was it safe?
This was largely unknown in spring 2020, when schools first closed. But experts say the situation had changed by the fall of 2020, when there were first signs that children were less likely to get seriously ill and schools could reopen with safety measures in place. There is growing evidence from parts of Europe and the United States that these methods are ineffective. The amount of transmission will increase significantly.
Dr. Jeanne Noble, who led the coronavirus response at the University of California, San Francisco Health System, said, “Infectious disease leaders are saying that closing schools is not a critical strategy to stop the spread of the coronavirus.” I generally agree with that.”
Politically, however, disagreements remain over exactly when it is safe to reopen schools.
Republican governors who pushed for early school openings have said their efforts have worked, while Democrats and teachers unions have emphasized safety efforts and investments in helping students recover.
Jerry T. Jordan, president of the Philadelphia Federation of Teachers, said he had resisted returning to schools in person over concerns about vaccine availability and poor ventilation in school buildings, but “we believe it was the right decision.” . Philadelphia schools waited until spring 2021 to partially reopen, a decision Jordan believes saved lives.
“It doesn’t matter what’s going on inside the building and how much people learn if they can get the virus and die,” he said.
School closures due to the pandemic offer lessons for the future.
Experts say the next health crisis may have different details and risk calculations, but the effects of school closures are now well established.
Infectious disease experts said they hope that in the future, decisions will be made based on epidemiological data as they become available, taking into account tradeoffs.
“Couldn’t we use data to better guide our decision-making? Yes,” said Dr. Uzma N. Hasan, Chief of Pediatric Infectious Diseases at RWJBarnabas Health in Livingston, New Jersey. should not guide decision-making.”
Source: Fahle, Kane, Patterson, Reardon, Staiger, Stuart, “School District and Community Factors Associated with Learning Loss During the Covid-19 Pandemic.”
This study used learning loss estimates from the Stanford Education Data Archive. For closure duration, the study averaged district-level estimates of time spent in distance and hybrid learning compiled by the COVID-19 School Data Hub (CSDH) and the American Enterprise Institute (AEI). .. AEI data defines remote status by whether there was an in-person or hybrid option, even if some students choose to remain virtual. In the CSDH dataset, a school district is defined as remote if “all or most” of its students are virtual.
