The Biggest Educational Disruption

The Atlantic has the story. Or, at least, it has some of the story. Daniel Markovits and Meira Levinson have now shown that the American policy of shutting down schools for months on end was a complete calamity. They remark that no other civilized nation adopted the same policy.

And yet, they fall completely silent when the question arises-- in our mind, but not in theirs-- about who is responsible for what they call the biggest disruption. It’s a moment that reminds us of the Sherlock Holmes story, “Silver Blaze” where the most important clue was the dog that didn’t bark.

In short, let’s assume that the Atlantic is running cover for those responsible for the great educational disruption. So, we can conclude from its silence that a band of government bureaucrats, Democratic politicians and teachers’ unions got together and conspired to destroy the social, emotional and intellectual well-being of millions of children. And that left thinking thinkers will never hold them responsible.

If Republicans had in any way been involved, the hue and cry would be deafening. Considering that the victims of this policy were most often minority children, if there had been any way to pin this on Republicans, it would be portrayed as a racist genocide.

Since Democrats, the people who are supposedly fighting for equity and inclusion, conspired to deprive minority children of their intellectual development, the authors have absolutely nothing to say about who might be responsible.

Nevertheless, they analyze in depth the damage produced. One remarks, in the interest of fairness, that I have been following this story from the beginning and have denounced it from the beginning. If you are a long time reader of this blog, you will not be surprised:

No other high-income country in the world relied to such a great extent on remote instruction. The coronavirus caused by far the biggest disruption in the history of American education. Neither the Great Depression nor even the two World Wars imposed anything close to as drastic a change in how America’s schoolchildren spent their days.

How important is the experience of going to school? Very important, indeed. Children do not just learn to think, they do not just acquire intellectual skills, but they receive medical care through the schools and learn to socialize and to function in organized groups-- outside of the family.

Shutting down schools caused what the authors call “lost growth:”

Some of the lost growth was academic and social, as school closures cut children off from teachers and friends. These losses were compounded by children’s exclusion from an array of other goods and services. In the United States, almost all public services for school-age children in some way run through schools. Schools provide nutrition; dental care; nursing services; mental-health care; physical, occupational, and speech therapy; child care for teen parents; referrals to social workers and child-welfare agencies; and laundry facilities and clothing for homeless students. Even in an era of mass shootings and COVID outbreaks, schools are the safest place for children. Moreover, schools don’t just serve the children who attend them. They also provide child care for parents and create social, cultural, and political hubs for communities.

They continue:

When schools closed, all the goods that they provide became suddenly scarcer, and children and families who relied most on public provision of these goods suffered a cascade of harms that touched virtually every aspect of their lives. The disruption the coronavirus has caused to schoolchildren will ripple through the future of the COVID generation. Unfinished learning may turn out to be the easiest of these losses to cure.

I take exception to the notion that “unfinished learning” may turn out to be the easiest to cure. I would suggest that it is going to be very hard to overcome. Teachers are seeing children regress intellectually, and this, as we predicted, is very difficult to overcome.

In any event, remote learning, through Zoom, meant that minority children did not go to school at all:

Rather, physical school closures meant no school—literally none at all, for days and even weeks on end.

National surveys of teachers by the EdWeek Research Center, for example, reported that nearly a quarter of students ended the 2020 spring semester “essentially truant.” In Los Angeles, the situation was even more dire: Four in 10 students simply failed to participate regularly in remote-learning programs during the first pandemic spring.

The distinction between rich and poor played itself out here, because wealthy parents could overcome the shutdowns far better than could poor parents:

 Richer kids got more in-person schooling than poorer kids. And even when they were physically locked out of buildings, richer kids got more, and more effective, Zoom schooling than poorer kids. In public schools, students with household incomes below $25,000 experienced about 76 days, or nearly half a school year, without schooling at all. Students with household incomes above $200,000, in contrast, lost about 54 days—still considerable, but roughly a month less lost schooling than their lower-income peers….

Even when they closed their buildings, elite private schools had an easier time facilitating remote instruction, thanks to low student-teacher ratios and access (for both students and teachers) to technology.

How much lost learning was there?

Lost schooling shows up as “unfinished” academic learning, measured according to standardized test scores. Even in schools that closed only in spring 2020 and reopened more or less on time the following fall, students a full year later were about two months behind academically where they would have normally been. And when schools stayed closed longer, students fell even further behind, with the poorest students losing out the most. 

The authors also report on a subject that has been widely discussed. And many teachers report that children lost more than a couple of months of learning. Be that as it may, the children who were shut out of schooling suffered severe mental health problems:

School guidance counselors also noticed a pronounced shift in students’ mental health. In a survey conducted by The New York Times, 94 percent reported increased signs of anxiety and depression, 88 percent reported observing increased difficulties with emotional self-regulation, and 73 percent reported that students had greater difficulties in solving conflicts with friends. 

One survey participant from a high school in Portland, Oregon, summed up the situation: “I’ve seen more physical fights this year than in my 15 years combined.” These impressions are bolstered by district data; in Denver public schools, for instance, fights were up 21 percent in the fall of 2021 over pre-pandemic levels. Strikingly, high schoolers who felt connected to somebody at their school—whether a peer or an adult such as a teacher or a guidance counselor—reported much lower rates of mental distress and suicidal thoughts. School closures, however, broke these protective connections and left the most vulnerable children most isolated.

What lessons do the authors draw from this? Allow them their word:

One lesson of the pandemic is that, for all their inadequacies, schools do work, and for all their inequities, they provide a more equal setting than the worlds they draw children out of. Kids need to be in school—for their academic learning and for their health and safety. Parents need kids to be in school to do their jobs and keep their sanity. And communities need kids to be in school to sustain their solidarity.

Again, the authors denounce the biggest disruption, but without saying who is responsible. Evidently, they will propose at some point that the solution is to spend more money on public education and to dumb down meritocratic admissions. For the record, they say nothing about charter schools, those that have been most successful teaching minority children:

The pandemic has amounted to a comprehensive assault on the American public school. It strained the ties—not just physical but also social and even psychological—that connect American families and children to the schools that are essential for delivering almost every support our welfare state provides. Kids missed out on all of it while schools were closed: not just academic learning but also nutrition, and exercise, and friendship networks, and stable relationships with caring adults, and health care, and access to social workers, and even the attention, at home, of parents unburdened by the need to provide child care during school hours.

The disruption that the pandemic caused to American children’s lives has no historical precedent; the harms that this disruption has imposed on them, taken all together, are similarly large. Our response needs to be on a scale sufficient to meet the harms that students have already endured—and to create a more resilient system to meet future challenges, whether new variants of concern, climate-change-driven displacement, or other threats. 

We have barely begun.

One reason we have barely begun is that the authors refuse to hold anyone accountable for the damage inflicted. Like most of those who comment on the problems, they remain optimistic about the possibility of repairing the damage, but still, they do not propose to solve the problem by opening more charter schools and by breaking the hold that the teachers’ unions and Democratic politicians have on the education of minority children.

They seem brimming full of empathy, because that is the default position prescribed by our mental health establishment. And yet, as happens in most cases, a strong dose of empathy will do nothing more than blind you to the real problems.