NYT: Damage from Covid closures.
NYT: Damage from Covid closures.
What was done to children in public schools during the Covid lock-down was inexcusable. There will never be a full accounting, but this article in the NYT gets much of it right.
Some schools, often in Republican-led states and rural areas, reopened by fall 2020. Others, typically in large cities and states led by Democrats, would not fully reopen for another year.
Fauci, the CDC and the WHO were alarmist about Covid. Spring quarter of 2020 went from a two weeks to flatten the curve, to a complete write-off. Prior to that, I was wiping my desks down with a bleach solution. We didn’t know what were dealing with. By summer, we understood what we understood that Covid was little threat to young people.
The federal government was shutting down opposing viewpoints from experienced doctors, so it took admirable courage to make reasonable decisions. In Ohio, Gov. DeWine passed the buck to local authorities. School superintendents might face legal liability or professional damage for doing what was best for children. That’s their job. Many didn’t do it.
A variety of data — about children’s academic outcomes and about the spread of Covid-19 — has accumulated in the time since. Today, there is broad acknowledgment among many public health and education experts that extended school closures did not significantly stop the spread of Covid, while the academic harms for children have been large and long-lasting.
The academic harms are easy to measure, but may be the least of the damage to students. During remote learning, students saw what we weren’t prepared and didn’t care.
Students learned that integrity was a weakness.
In August, when it was obvious that Fall quarter would be remote, I talked to Principal Osborne about assessment integrity. I suggested that Admin generate a procedure for students to come in to school for tests and quizzes. The gyms and cafeteria could be set up as testing centers with widely spaced tales and aides assigned to proctor. Teachers could submit assessments and students could schedule testing time. Testing times could be available from 8 am to 8 pm, seven days per week. That approach is unprecedented and expensive. It would show a dedication to education with the understanding that the money could be worked out later. North Royalton received five million dollars for Covid mitigation.
Principal Osborne did nothing to address online testing. Some teachers surrendered to the inevitable and put little time into developing new tests. Others developed more free response or open book tests that aren’t so easy to copy and insisted that students have their cameras on for the test. Some students immediately realized that any resources could be available off-camera and by looking down, the teacher wouldn’t see the student talking to their cell phone. Eventually, most students figured if we didn’t care about cheating, why should they?
Once students rely on cheating, then paying attention in class doesn’t make much sense. When good students are cheating and not learning, then, being smart people, they assume that is how the world works. Everybody is cheating and nobody really does the work.
The learning loss is real and measurable. This graph shows how much ground has been lost in Math.
If education was important to the people in charge, wouldn’t they lengthen the school year to get students back on track? No district is doing that and nobody is suggesting it. Again, it would be expensive and unprecedented. Tough shit, the federal government hemorrhaged cash during Covid and continues to run an unimaginable deficit. There are about 50 million children in school. Giving each school $5,000 per student to length the school year by six weeks would cost $250 billion. That’s a lot, but the federal government spends that much regularly for financial stimulus that yields no demonstrable benefit.
At the state level, more time spent in remote or hybrid instruction in the 2020-21 school year was associated with larger drops in test scores, according to a New York Times analysis of school closure data and results from the National Assessment of Educational Progress, an authoritative exam administered to a national sample of fourth- and eighth-grade students.
Notice that remote and hybrid learning are lumped together since both were failures. Remote learning could have been credible had we addressed assessment integrity. Hybrid learning was worse.
At North Royalton, hybrid learning was implemented in the worst possible way. Classes were divided in half by alphabet. A to M came in on Monday and Wednesday, N to Z came in on Tuesday and Thursday. Friday was an asynchronous day.
That would have been workable. My sense of duty required me to produce online versions of my lessons and homework explanations. On their off days, students would work asynchronously through the online resources. In-person days would be for labs, assessments and addressing questions.
Principal Osborne insisted that every day, in-person and remote students would be in class. That meant that every class period, teachers were teaching two classes at once. On in-person and one remote. Some teachers addressed this by having in-person students bring their Chromebooks to class to do remote learning in school along with the students who were at home.
My approach in class was to focus on the students who were in class. Since Fall was remote, I hadn’t met any of them and they were all starved for personal interaction. I started each class by greeting the online students, then sending them to my class website to watch an online lesson or check their homework.
To make hybrid even more ineffective and impossible to teach, Principal Osborne allowed students to choose to remain remote for the remainder of the year. Each teacher had students present today, students they had in class yesterday and students who where remote every day.
In several conversations with assistant principal Hubbell, she insisted that online students must have the same experience as students present in the class. Not the same lessons or content, but the same experience. That was very disappointing because when Hubbell was a teacher, she was direct, reasonable and had good instincts.
Producing those online resources took a phenomenal amount of time, but I’m proud of what I generated.
The lecture videos get all the information across with some great video examples.
The homework explanations were intended to get across the details for a student who has some understanding of the concepts and attempted to complete the problems. Just like in class, they are expected to check their answers. The counter is to imply that more is coming. The video speed of the algebra was doubled because it’s boring to watch. Since it’s a video, students can pause when necessary.
Like anything a teacher develops, version 1.0 is rough. My intention was to refine these lessons and make them available as an additional resource when school got back to normal.
At the same time, many schools are seeing more anxiety and behavioral outbursts among students. And chronic absenteeism from school has surged across demographic groups.
These are signs, experts say, that even short-term closures, and the pandemic more broadly, had lasting effects on the culture of education.
“There was almost, in the Covid era, a sense of, ‘We give up, we’re just trying to keep body and soul together,’ and I think that was corrosive to the higher expectations of schools,” said Margaret Spellings, an education secretary under President George W. Bush who is now chief executive of the Bipartisan Policy Center.
Friends have told me that along with the academic damage and assault on integrity, some students had forgotten how they are expected to behave. Elementary students were hardest hit, with some of them behaving like children half their age.
I don’t have any confidence in what my students learned that year, but don’t regret the time and effort I put in. People in a position of authority should be ashamed of themselves.
“Infectious disease leaders have generally agreed that school closures were not an important strategy in stemming the spread of Covid,” said Dr. Jeanne Noble, who directed the Covid response at the University of California, San Francisco health system.
All that damage to children was unproductive and unnecessary.