10 ways COVID changed American schools

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COVID had already killed thousands of people in other countries and was spreading in the United States when a top federal health official said schools should prepare to offer “internet-based teleschooling” in case they had to close for a period of time.

“We are asking the American public to work with us to prepare for the expectation that this could be bad,” Dr. Nancy Messonnier, then a leader in the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s pandemic response, told reporters on a Feb. 25, 2020 conference call.

School leaders said they weren’t really set up for remote learning.

But ready or not, three weeks later, nearly every school in the country was closed. Some would not open their doors again for more than a year.

Five years on, the impact of COVID-era closures–the ways schools rose to meet the moment and the ways they failed–continue to reverberate through the American education system and in the lives of students, parents, and teachers.

“We just didn’t do nearly enough of what we needed to do, and the results speak for themselves,” said Robin Lake, who runs the Center for Reinventing Public Education. “We have a learning chasm that is shocking. We failed an entire generation of kids.”

Teachers were too overwhelmed, Lake said, and the drive to return to normalcy was too great.

Student academic performance remains below pre-pandemic levels. Inequality has grown, with students in more affluent school districts largely back to normal–academically at least–and those in high-poverty communities still struggling.

Students carry lingering emotional scars from the deaths of family members, from the anxiety and weight of responsibility they felt during the pandemic, and from the isolation of school closures. Far more students miss school regularly than before the pandemic. And teachers report many students seem less engaged in their lessons.

“We are the generation that spent important years of our lives in the COVID-19 lockdown, then released back into the world without the tools to cope,” high school senior Adonte DaCosta told New York City Council members at a hearing last fall.

With the pivot to remote learning, technology is now everywhere in American schools, but a new digital divide has opened up between those filling out worksheets on Chromebooks and those learning how to use generative AI. Divisions over school closures and COVID safety protocols turned schools into political war zones and fueled the rise of the conservative parents’ rights movement.

Here are 10 ways schools have changed in the last five years:

Students are still paying for COVID learning disruptions

Karyn Lewis recalls thinking that the worst had passed when she saw promising signs from testing during the 2021-22 school year. Lewis is vice president of research and policy partnerships at NWEA, which administers the MAP test used by many school districts.

But it’s clear now–on NWEA’s own assessments and on numerous other national and international tests–that the impact of COVID learning disruptions have only grown.

“We were just thinking about the act of missing school in the wrong way,” Lewis said.

Students who missed out on foundational skills are struggling to learn more advanced material later on. Even students who would have been in preschool during the height of the pandemic are behind their prepandemic counterparts. Research finds that students are making up ground–but not fast enough to make up for what was lost.

In retrospect, Lewis said, it should have been obvious that recovery would be a multiyear effort and one that will need to continue into the future. An NWEA analysis suggests it may take seven years to see full recovery in math.

Schools should have been treated like emergency rooms, Lake said. Children should have been triaged for learning loss, given individualized assessments, and routed to specialized teams trained to help. Instead, classroom teachers were expected to address learning loss largely on their own–an impossible task.

“I didn’t imagine that people wouldn’t act as if there were a crisis,” Lake said. “Business as usual took hold.”

Schools recognize struggling students need individualized support

School districts around the country invested in tutoring, summer school, and academic interventionists. These strategies often showed promising results, even as districts struggled to scale those interventions to serve enough students effectively. In the process, many educators and administrators realized students needed this kind of support all along.

Manuel Sanchez was a veteran math teacher with three decades of experience when his Chicago elementary school tapped him to be an academic interventionist. But at first he felt “lost” in his new role. Because students often hesitate to ask for help, he hadn’t realized just how far behind some students were.

Sanchez now works with several small groups of students, pulling them out of their classrooms for intensive help and also “pushing in” to classrooms to help teachers offer extra support. The relationships he’s developed with students have helped him find his stride.

He also works with a small group of high-achieving middle schoolers on more-advanced math.

“Students now trust me in a way that they can ask me anything,” Sanchez said.

The challenge going forward is how to keep paying for these positions now that federal pandemic relief dollars have expired.

Around the country, districts are reallocating money and lobbying their state legislatures for funds to keep tutors and other academic supports.

Schools more active in addressing student mental health

School closures upended routines and left many students isolated from their peers and cut off from supportive teachers. Students also faced the loss of family members to the virus and the upheaval of parents losing jobs and housing.

Students now struggle with mental health challenges that feel more pervasive and more persistent than before the pandemic. Schools continue to report more behavior problems and less student engagement.

All of this has led schools to take a more active role in supporting student mental health and emotional well-being. They’ve invested in social and emotional curriculum–about 83% of principals reported last year that their schools use an SEL curriculum compared with fewer than half before the pandemic. Schools have also hired more social workers and counselors.

In New York, local and state officials are ramping up investments in student wellness clubs and peer-to-peer mental health programs. The peer-led model allows students to hear from people their same age or just a little older, who have been through the same experiences. They can be more credible messengers than adults.

Tamar Cox-Rubien, a youth peer leader at the National Alliance on Mental Illness NYC, was 20 when the pandemic arrived. She hit “rock bottom” during that time.

“That allowed me to realize what I needed to change in my life,” she said. “Forcing that growth can be really painful but needed, and I know that’s true for many other young people as well.”

School closures leave legacy of mistrust, political strife

Susan Meek already was a veteran of political battles over school vouchers when she was elected–on the cusp of the pandemic–to the school board in Douglas County, a conservative suburban district southeast of Denver. But nothing could have prepared her for the intensity of fights over masking, hybrid learning, and quarantines–decisions that kept her up at night as she weighed complex trade-offs.

“School boards became ground zero for debates on individual rights versus collective responsibility,” said Meek, who spoke for herself and not on behalf of the district. “When you think about the role of school boards, parents advocate for their own child’s needs, and school board members are responsible for the collective. We’re responsible for all students.”

Keri Rodrigues Langan, founding president of the National Parents Union, said the pandemic broke the relationship between parents and schools. Parents were no longer welcome inside schools due to safety protocols, and they haven’t been welcomed back in the years since, she said. Conservative groups such as Moms for Liberty and Parents Defending Education have used the sense that schools are hiding something to advance their priorities.

Some parents didn’t like what they saw during remote learning, including that many teachers struggled with basic technology. In some large cities, the influence of teachers unions contributed to schools staying closed longer.

“There were a lot of teachers who were heroes, but there were a lot of teachers who weren’t,” Rodrigues Langan said. “They were just whipping out packets, watch this YouTube video, answer three really quick and simple questions on Google Classroom. And that’s learning? And I think people were really shocked because they were expecting more and wanted more.”

Not long after the pandemic officially ended, most parents still gave their local school high marks. But the broader public perception of American schools is at an all-time low. And the political fallout can be seen in the recent expansion of school choice and in efforts by the Trump administration to dismantle the U.S. Department of Education.

School feels optional. Lots of kids are opting out.

Kids missed school at alarmingly high rates during the pandemic. Students got COVID. They got sent home to quarantine after exposure to COVID. Their parents kept them home for sniffles and coughs. And when their classmates and teachers were absent too, school felt kind of pointless.

All of that contributed to a dramatic spike in the share of students nationwide who were considered chronically absent, a designation that typically means they missed 18 days of school or more.

Chronic absenteeism peaked during the 2021-22 school year when nearly 30% of students missed that much school, almost double the pre-pandemic rate.

Many states have made improvements, but chronic absenteeism remains a stubborn problem.

Schools have tried every strategy in the book. They hired more staff to call home and knock on doors. They bought better computer systems to flag kids as they accrued absences. They hosted family events to make school feel more inviting.

None of these strategies have been particularly effective at reducing absenteeism, a nationally representative survey of school district leaders conducted by the nonprofit RAND Corporation and Center on Reinventing Public Education last year found. But why?

Lydia Rainey, a Center on Reinventing Public Education principal who conducted follow-up interviews with a dozen of the surveyed districts, heard repeatedly that more students feel school is optional and not as important. To address that, schools have to make sure families know why in-person attendance matters and give students a reason to be there.

“If there is this cultural shift away from thinking daily attendance is really critical, then we need different strategies that get toward that–which the early warning systems and the calls home don’t get to,” Rainey said.

That reflects the experience of Kevin Dahill-Fuchel, executive director of Counseling in Schools, an organization that provides counseling services at roughly 50 New York City schools. He’s seen students grapple with questions like, “Why do I have to show up in school? I used to sit at home on my computer,” or, “Why do I have to take this course, when life can be fleeting and things can happen that are out of our control?”

Something has gone very wrong with reading

Student reading scores on the most recent National Assessment of Educational Progress, or NAEP, were the lowest in 30 years–even as students showed modest improvement in math.

Many states recently adopted policies to promote evidence-based reading instructional practices, in particular more explicit phonics instruction. These policies may take time to show up in test scores.

Math may be easier to remediate now that students are back in school, while gaps in foundational reading skills could be following students into older grades where teachers have less training in teaching students how to read. Students who leave elementary school as poor readers may struggle the rest of their academic careers.

Surveys also find that far fewer students read for pleasure than in the past, and cell phones and social media could be sapping children’s attention spans.

Technology is ubiquitous. Some educators are seizing the opportunity.

The pandemic fueled a technology access explosion in American schools.

Before COVID, fewer than half of students had access to a personal device at school. Now it’s estimated that 90% of secondary students and 80% of elementary students do.

But surveys indicate the most common way students use technology at school is taking online tests and quizzes. Some educators are determined to buck that trend.

“I didn’t use those computers until COVID,” said Adrienne Staten, a veteran English teacher in Philadelphia who was far more comfortable with textbooks, paper, and handwriting. “COVID was the catalyst.”

Now Staten weaves generative AI–another innovation she initially greeted with skepticism–into her own lesson planning and what she asks her students to do. She wants them to understand technology’s potential and its pitfalls, including built-in biases and privacy risks.

AI has been especially helpful for her students who are learning English as a second language, giving them more confidence in how they express themselves and opening up more content areas, Staten said.

Staten has the support of the Philadelphia school system, where officials want to become leaders in using AI in education.

By the end of the school year, Staten’s seniors will use Google’s Gemini chatbot and Adobe’s Express Firefly image generator to create virtual zines about a community they belong to, in conjunction with reading the novel There There, which follows the stories of Native American characters in Oakland.

“I just want to know that I gave them all the equipment and tools that they need to be OK out there,” Staten said.

Schools have fewer students and more staff

Districts large and small have seen a steady decline in the number of students. Declining birth rates and rising housing prices play a large role, but the pandemic accelerated underlying trends. Families who didn’t like their pandemic schooling options moved to private schools or opted to homeschool, and some haven’t returned. Expanded voucher programs in a dozen states provide financial support for alternatives to public schools.

What’s the result? Even as the student population has declined, schools employ more adults than before the pandemic, according to an analysis by researcher Chad Aldeman in partnership with The 74.

Federal COVID relief paid for many of these positions–and research suggests that money helped improve student academic recovery–but now that money has gone away.

With school district budgets largely dependent on student population counts, these trends set the stage for painful budget decisions, layoffs, and school closures.

Child care is now everyone’s problem

Many child care centers stayed open through the pandemic to serve the children of essential workers even as schools shut down.

Staff at Chelsea Ndaiga’s Day Early Learning Center in Indianapolis, divided into two teams to maintain social distancing, and became experts in ever-shifting CDC protocols.

“If they don’t have their children in a safe spot, they can’t do their quality work,” Ndaiga said. “Families need to feel safe, need to feel that their children are safe, in order to do that.”

The pandemic made clear that a functioning economy depends on families having access to reliable child care. Federal pandemic relief helped shore up an early childhood sector that nearly faltered under the weight of lost income and staffing shortages.

But advocates warned of a “child care cliff” when that money ran out. While the worst-case scenarios have not come to pass, child care supply isn’t expanding and prices are rising, according to a report from The Century Foundation, a left-leaning think tank.

With significant federal help unlikely, states have forged their own solutions. In Indiana, that looks like deregulation coupled with expanded access to child care subsidies. The state can now offer child care to 62% of the 466,000 children who need it, up from 55% in 2021, according to an analysis by Early Learning Indiana.

But a smaller share of Indiana’s available childcare seats are in high-quality programs, according to the state’s evaluation metric. And there’s now a wait list for subsidies.

Colleges are adjusting to lower expectations in K-12

The University of Northern Colorado, where about 40% of students are the first in their family to go to college, launched University 101 before COVID to help freshmen adjust to college expectations.

But in the pandemic’s aftermath, the course has evolved to cover more basic ground.

“I can’t believe the class expects me to show up in person,” one student told University 101 program director Angela Vaughn last fall via a class feedback form. “I should be able to make that decision for myself.”

“How dare you say I can’t have my cell phone,” she said another student wrote. “I’m an adult.”

Relaxed expectations for high school students have become a habit that’s hard to break. Higher education institutions, in turn, are having to do more to educate students about how to be a student.

“Students are pushing back even more against those boundaries, those expectations of college,” Vaugn said. “They’re struggling with understanding why those things might be important.”

University 101 instructors meet weekly to discuss strategies and find better explanations than “because I said so.” They bring in upperclassmen to talk about why University 101’s expectations are normal, and they emphasize how college expectations relate to workforce demands.

“They’re starting to become adults, and we’re here to help them expand their perspective beyond what they’ve experienced and what they know or think they know,” Vaughn said.

Chalkbeat is a nonprofit news site covering educational change in public schools.

For more on COVID in schools, visit eSN’s Educational Leadership hub.