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Yahoo
09-05-2025
- Health
- Yahoo
10 ways COVID changed American schools
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, reported Chalkbeat. 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 past five years: 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." 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. 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." 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. 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?" 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. 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. 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. 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. 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 staff Aleks Appleton, Kalyn Belsha, Jason Gonzales, Mila Koumpilova, Julian Shen-Berro, and Carly Sitrin contributed reporting. This story was produced by Chalkbeat and reviewed and distributed by Stacker.
Miami Herald
08-05-2025
- Health
- Miami Herald
10 ways COVID changed American schools
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, reported Chalkbeat. 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 past 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 staff Aleks Appleton, Kalyn Belsha, Jason Gonzales, Mila Koumpilova, Julian Shen-Berro, and Carly Sitrin contributed reporting. This story was produced by Chalkbeat and reviewed and distributed by Stacker. © Stacker Media, LLC.
Yahoo
17-04-2025
- Health
- Yahoo
The Disaster of School Closures Should Have Been Foreseen
Of the many mistakes made in the COVID era, none were as glaring as prolonged school closures. The damages go beyond loss of learning, a dire consequence in its own right: Millions of families, both children and parents, still carry the scars of stress, depression, and isolation. The closures began at a time of understandable panic, but that was only the beginning of the story. On February 25, 2020, Nancy Messonnier, the director of the CDC's National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases, led a press conference to address the developing coronavirus crisis. Messonnier warned the public that, without vaccines, non-pharmaceutical interventions—things like business closures or social-distancing guidelines—would be the most important tools in the country's response. 'What is appropriate for one community seeing local transmission won't necessarily be appropriate for a community where no local transmission has occurred,' she said. The school closures that would be implemented the following month—and that endured through the end of the school year in nearly all of the roughly 13,800 school districts in the United States, in regions that had wildly different infection levels—showed this directive was not followed. At the time of the initial closures, in mid-March, COVID was spreading quickly, but large areas in the U.S. were absent any known cases. Still, to the extent that a planned response to influenza was an appropriate universal pandemic guide, these closures were aligned with the CDC's most recent update to its pandemic playbook, released in 2017. According to that document, an initial two-week closure of schools would be sufficient to fulfill a first objective of buying authorities time to assess the severity of the pandemic. Given the news being reported of care rationing in northern-Italian hospitals, following this plan was not unreasonable—and, as part of broader stay-at-home orders, it may have had some effect on disease transmission. 'Italy spooked us,' Jennifer Nuzzo, director of the Pandemic Center at the Brown University School of Public Health, told me. 'We did not want to be Italy. The governors all saw China and Italy lock down and decided to follow their example.' Indeed, had China not locked down, perhaps the rest of the world might not have done so either. China, governed by an authoritarian regime that rules the country with tremendous top-down power, does not share the same attitude toward personal liberties as Western democracies. And neither the CDC's pandemic playbook nor the pre-2020 consensus within the public-health field favored a lockdown of society of the breadth that we would experience. On a countrywide scale—from both an epidemiological perspective and a human-rights perspective—closing all nonessential business, closing all schools, prohibiting most social interactions and nonessential travel, and so on, was not considered feasible or wise. Because we initially lacked the ability to test, Nuzzo said, shutting schools, along with other facets of society, did make sense at first. The problem, in Nuzzo's mind, was not closing down in March; it was that there was no plan beyond that. By 'no plan,' Nuzzo was referring to two interrelated problems: all the potential harms of closures, and the challenge of unwinding interventions after they'd been implemented. In Messonnier's press conference, she mentioned the CDC's 2017 pandemic report directly, said that school closures were part of the plan, and recognized that they were likely to be associated with unwanted consequences such as missed work and loss of income. 'I understand this whole situation may seem overwhelming and that disruption to everyday life may be severe,' she advised. 'You should think about what you would do for child care if schools or day cares close.' There was no mention of how the government might aid families during school closures, or, for example, about what a single parent with a job as a cashier in a grocery store and a 4-year-old at home was supposed to do. Rather, in just one line amid a lengthy speech, people were told to simply 'think about' it. To government officials and many others at the time, this was a regrettable but entirely reasonable approach—a presumed temporary loss of wages and child-care issues were lower-order concerns compared with the coming onslaught of a pandemic. Yet what was positioned as a secondary issue—a mere abstraction, warranting just a brief mention—led to catastrophic consequences for millions of children, and their families. A year later, my kids, along with tens of millions of other students, were still trudging through remote learning, either as their exclusive form of schooling or through so-called hybrid schedules during which they could attend classes only part time. (Meanwhile, bars, restaurants, and all manner of other businesses had long since reopened, as had many private schools.) Teachers in much of the country had been prioritized for vaccines—making them eligible for protection before some other, more vulnerable populations—yet schools in half the country still weren't open full time, and in many places weren't open at all. While federal public-health officials made recommendations regarding schools, the actual closures were carried out at the state and local levels, in response to misplaced public fears and aggressive campaigning by teachers' unions. Randi Weingarten, the high-profile head of the American Federation of Teachers, said in a February 8, 2021, New York Times article that she hoped things would be 'as normal as possible' by the following fall. Class-action lawsuits in multiple states had been filed on behalf of children with special needs on the claim that the conditions of IDEA—a federal law that requires certain services (such as physical and occupational therapy, supplemental aids and equipment, etc.) for children with disabilities—were not being met in remote-learning models. [Read: Where all the missing students?] Opinion pieces with titles such as 'Remote School Is a Nightmare. Few in Power Care,' had been appearing in major news outlets since the previous summer. Working parents, especially mothers, were dropping out of the workforce in staggering numbers because of child-care obligations during the pandemic. An analysis by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce found that nearly 60 percent of parents who had left the workforce had done so for this reason. The psychic toll on parents and children was never—and can never be—calculated. It won't show up in statistics, but it was real for millions of families. And millions of children, especially those without resources for tutors or parents to oversee them during the day, were losing ground with their academics. Worse, they were suffering from isolation, frustration, and, for an increasing number of them, depression from spending their days alone in front of an electronic screen. Untold numbers of other children became 'lost,' having dropped out of school entirely. Those in power who advocated for school closures were not adequately prepared for these consequences, which were still pervasive a full year into the pandemic. But they should have been. The damaging effects of school interruptions were not unforeseen. They were explicitly warned about in the academic literature. Exhibit A is a 2006 paper called 'Disease Mitigation Measures in the Control of Pandemic Influenza,' in the journal Biosecurity and Bioterrorism, written by Nuzzo; her mentor (and global eminence on disease-outbreak policies), D. A. Henderson; and two others. 'There is simply too little experience to predict how a 21st century population would respond, for example, to the closure of all schools for periods of many weeks to months,' these authors wrote. 'Disease mitigation measures, however well intentioned, have potential social, economic, and political consequences that need to be fully considered by political leaders as well as health officials. Closing schools is an example.' The authors went on to warn that closures would force some parents to stay home from work, and they worried about certain segments of society being forced to bear an unfair share of the burden from transmission-control policies. They wrote: No model, no matter how accurate its epidemiologic assumptions, can illuminate or predict the secondary and tertiary effects of particular disease mitigation measures … If particular measures are applied for many weeks or months, the long-term or cumulative second- and third-order effects could be devastating. Nearly a decade and a half before the pandemic—in a stark rebuke to the approach championed by the CDC, White House Coronavirus Response Task Force coordinator Deborah Birx, and other powers that be—the paper had called out the major harms that would come to afflict many families in our country as a result of school closures. Yet, from the spring of 2020, health officials who directed our pandemic response ignored many of the consequences they must have known to expect. Or, at the very least, they failed to provide adequate information about them to the public. The officials had opened a bottle of medicine while disregarding the skull and crossbones on the warning label. And the portents were not just in Henderson's and Nuzzo's paper. A 2011 paper by researchers from Georgetown assessed the decision making behind—and the consequences from—several hundred brief school closures enacted during the 2009 H1N1 pandemic. The authors noted that the child-care costs to families were substantial, and that hardships from closures were inequitable. 'Officials considering closure must weigh not only the total amount of disruption but also the extent to which social costs will be disproportionately borne by certain segments of society,' the authors wrote. Even the CDC playbooks themselves warn of some of these issues. Both the 2007 original and the updated 2017 report cautioned that school closures could lead to the secondary consequence of missed work and loss of income for parents who needed to stay home to take care of their school-age children. This effect, the latter report noted, would be most harmful for lower-income families, who were also hit hardest by COVID in the first place. With prescience, and comic understatement, the authors noted that school closures would be among the 'most controversial' elements of the plan. Meanwhile, the second of Nuzzo's points—that unwinding interventions is often incredibly difficult, and there must be a plan on how to do so—was also a well-established phenomenon. Just as public-health experts are biased toward intervention, they, along with the public, are also biased toward keeping interventions in place. This is a known phenomenon within the literature of implementation science, a field of study focused on methods to promote the adoption of evidence-based practices in medicine and public health. Westyn Branch-Elliman, an infectious-diseases physician at UCLA School of Medicine with an expertise in implementation science, told me that de-implementation is generally much harder than implementation. 'People tend to err on the side of intervening, and there is often considerable anxiety in removing something you believe has provided safety,' she said. There also is a sense of inertia and leaving well enough alone. It's not unlike legislation—oftentimes repealing a law, even an unpopular one, poses bigger challenges than whatever barriers existed to getting it passed. Although the initial school closures may have been justifiable (even if off-script in many locations), there was no plan on when and how to reopen. Officials repeated a refrain that schools should open when it was 'safe.' But 'safe' was either pegged to unreachable or arbitrary benchmarks or, more often, not defined. This meant there would be limited recourse against a public that had been led to believe this intervention was a net benefit, even long after evidence showed otherwise. The lack of an exit plan—or an 'off-ramp,' as many health professionals would later term it—would prove disastrous for tens of millions of children in locations where social and political pressures prevented a reversal of the closures. [Read: The biggest disruption in the history of American education] Without sufficient acknowledgment of the harms of school closures, or adequate planning for unwinding this intervention, officials showed that their decisions to close were simply reactive rather than carefully considered. The decision makers set a radical project in motion with no plan on how to stop it. In effect, officials steered a car off the road, threw a cinder block on the accelerator, then jumped out of the vehicle with passengers still in the back. No one was in the front or even knew how to unstick the pedal. This article was adapted from David Zweig's book An Abundance of Caution: American Schools, the Virus, and a Story of Bad Decisions. Article originally published at The Atlantic
Atlantic
17-04-2025
- Health
- Atlantic
The Disaster of School Closures Should Have Been Foreseen
Of the many mistakes made in the COVID era, none were as glaring as prolonged school closures. The damages go beyond loss of learning, a dire consequence in its own right: Millions of families, both children and parents, still carry the scars of stress, depression, and isolation. The closures began at a time of understandable panic, but that was only the beginning of the story. On February 25, 2020, Nancy Messonnier, the director of the CDC's National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases, led a press conference to address the developing coronavirus crisis. Messonnier warned the public that, without vaccines, non-pharmaceutical interventions—things like business closures or social-distancing guidelines—would be the most important tools in the country's response. 'What is appropriate for one community seeing local transmission won't necessarily be appropriate for a community where no local transmission has occurred,' she said. The school closures that would be implemented the following month—and that endured through the end of the school year in nearly all of the roughly 13,800 school districts in the United States, in regions that had wildly different infection levels—showed this directive was not followed. At the time of the initial closures, in mid-March, COVID was spreading quickly, but large areas in the U.S. were absent any known cases. Still, to the extent that a planned response to influenza was an appropriate universal pandemic guide, these closures were aligned with the CDC's most recent update to its pandemic playbook, released in 2017. According to that document, an initial two-week closure of schools would be sufficient to fulfill a first objective of buying authorities time to assess the severity of the pandemic. Given the news being reported of care rationing in northern-Italian hospitals, following this plan was not unreasonable—and, as part of broader stay-at-home orders, it may have had some effect on disease transmission. 'Italy spooked us,' Jennifer Nuzzo, director of the Pandemic Center at the Brown University School of Public Health, told me. 'We did not want to be Italy. The governors all saw China and Italy lock down and decided to follow their example.' Indeed, had China not locked down, perhaps the rest of the world might not have done so either. China, governed by an authoritarian regime that rules the country with tremendous top-down power, does not share the same attitude toward personal liberties as Western democracies. And neither the CDC's pandemic playbook nor the pre-2020 consensus within the public-health field favored a lockdown of society of the breadth that we would experience. On a countrywide scale—from both an epidemiological perspective and a human-rights perspective—closing all nonessential business, closing all schools, prohibiting most social interactions and nonessential travel, and so on, was not considered feasible or wise. Because we initially lacked the ability to test, Nuzzo said, shutting schools, along with other facets of society, did make sense at first. The problem, in Nuzzo's mind, was not closing down in March; it was that there was no plan beyond that. By 'no plan,' Nuzzo was referring to two interrelated problems: all the potential harms of closures, and the challenge of unwinding interventions after they'd been implemented. In Messonnier's press conference, she mentioned the CDC's 2017 pandemic report directly, said that school closures were part of the plan, and recognized that they were likely to be associated with unwanted consequences such as missed work and loss of income. 'I understand this whole situation may seem overwhelming and that disruption to everyday life may be severe,' she advised. 'You should think about what you would do for child care if schools or day cares close.' There was no mention of how the government might aid families during school closures, or, for example, about what a single parent with a job as a cashier in a grocery store and a 4-year-old at home was supposed to do. Rather, in just one line amid a lengthy speech, people were told to simply 'think about' it. To government officials and many others at the time, this was a regrettable but entirely reasonable approach—a presumed temporary loss of wages and child-care issues were lower-order concerns compared with the coming onslaught of a pandemic. Yet what was positioned as a secondary issue—a mere abstraction, warranting just a brief mention—led to catastrophic consequences for millions of children, and their families. A year later, my kids, along with tens of millions of other students, were still trudging through remote learning, either as their exclusive form of schooling or through so-called hybrid schedules during which they could attend classes only part time. (Meanwhile, bars, restaurants, and all manner of other businesses had long since reopened, as had many private schools.) Teachers in much of the country had been prioritized for vaccines—making them eligible for protection before some other, more vulnerable populations—yet schools in half the country still weren't open full time, and in many places weren't open at all. While federal public-health officials made recommendations regarding schools, the actual closures were carried out at the state and local levels, in response to misplaced public fears and aggressive campaigning by teachers' unions. Randi Weingarten, the high-profile head of the American Federation of Teachers, said in a February 8, 2021, New York Times article that she hoped things would be 'as normal as possible' by the following fall. Class-action lawsuits in multiple states had been filed on behalf of children with special needs on the claim that the conditions of IDEA—a federal law that requires certain services (such as physical and occupational therapy, supplemental aids and equipment, etc.) for children with disabilities—were not being met in remote-learning models. Opinion pieces with titles such as 'Remote School Is a Nightmare. Few in Power Care,' had been appearing in major news outlets since the previous summer. Working parents, especially mothers, were dropping out of the workforce in staggering numbers because of child-care obligations during the pandemic. An analysis by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce found that nearly 60 percent of parents who had left the workforce had done so for this reason. The psychic toll on parents and children was never—and can never be—calculated. It won't show up in statistics, but it was real for millions of families. And millions of children, especially those without resources for tutors or parents to oversee them during the day, were losing ground with their academics. Worse, they were suffering from isolation, frustration, and, for an increasing number of them, depression from spending their days alone in front of an electronic screen. Untold numbers of other children became 'lost,' having dropped out of school entirely. Those in power who advocated for school closures were not adequately prepared for these consequences, which were still pervasive a full year into the pandemic. But they should have been. The damaging effects of school interruptions were not unforeseen. They were explicitly warned about in the academic literature. Exhibit A is a 2006 paper called 'Disease Mitigation Measures in the Control of Pandemic Influenza,' in the journal Biosecurity and Bioterrorism, written by Nuzzo; her mentor (and global eminence on disease-outbreak policies), D. A. Henderson; and two others. 'There is simply too little experience to predict how a 21st century population would respond, for example, to the closure of all schools for periods of many weeks to months,' these authors wrote. 'Disease mitigation measures, however well intentioned, have potential social, economic, and political consequences that need to be fully considered by political leaders as well as health officials. Closing schools is an example.' The authors went on to warn that closures would force some parents to stay home from work, and they worried about certain segments of society being forced to bear an unfair share of the burden from transmission-control policies. They wrote: No model, no matter how accurate its epidemiologic assumptions, can illuminate or predict the secondary and tertiary effects of particular disease mitigation measures … If particular measures are applied for many weeks or months, the long-term or cumulative second- and third-order effects could be devastating. Nearly a decade and a half before the pandemic—in a stark rebuke to the approach championed by the CDC, White House Coronavirus Response Task Force coordinator Deborah Birx, and other powers that be—the paper had called out the major harms that would come to afflict many families in our country as a result of school closures. Yet, from the spring of 2020, health officials who directed our pandemic response ignored many of the consequences they must have known to expect. Or, at the very least, they failed to provide adequate information about them to the public. The officials had opened a bottle of medicine while disregarding the skull and crossbones on the warning label. And the portents were not just in Henderson's and Nuzzo's paper. A 2011 paper by researchers from Georgetown assessed the decision making behind—and the consequences from—several hundred brief school closures enacted during the 2009 H1N1 pandemic. The authors noted that the child-care costs to families were substantial, and that hardships from closures were inequitable. 'Officials considering closure must weigh not only the total amount of disruption but also the extent to which social costs will be disproportionately borne by certain segments of society,' the authors wrote. Even the CDC playbooks themselves warn of some of these issues. Both the 2007 original and the updated 2017 report cautioned that school closures could lead to the secondary consequence of missed work and loss of income for parents who needed to stay home to take care of their school-age children. This effect, the latter report noted, would be most harmful for lower-income families, who were also hit hardest by COVID in the first place. With prescience, and comic understatement, the authors noted that school closures would be among the 'most controversial' elements of the plan. Meanwhile, the second of Nuzzo's points—that unwinding interventions is often incredibly difficult, and there must be a plan on how to do so—was also a well-established phenomenon. Just as public-health experts are biased toward intervention, they, along with the public, are also biased toward keeping interventions in place. This is a known phenomenon within the literature of implementation science, a field of study focused on methods to promote the adoption of evidence-based practices in medicine and public health. Westyn Branch-Elliman, an infectious-diseases physician at UCLA School of Medicine with an expertise in implementation science, told me that de-implementation is generally much harder than implementation. 'People tend to err on the side of intervening, and there is often considerable anxiety in removing something you believe has provided safety,' she said. There also is a sense of inertia and leaving well enough alone. It's not unlike legislation—oftentimes repealing a law, even an unpopular one, poses bigger challenges than whatever barriers existed to getting it passed. Although the initial school closures may have been justifiable (even if off-script in many locations), there was no plan on when and how to reopen. Officials repeated a refrain that schools should open when it was 'safe.' But 'safe' was either pegged to unreachable or arbitrary benchmarks or, more often, not defined. This meant there would be limited recourse against a public that had been led to believe this intervention was a net benefit, even long after evidence showed otherwise. The lack of an exit plan—or an 'off-ramp,' as many health professionals would later term it—would prove disastrous for tens of millions of children in locations where social and political pressures prevented a reversal of the closures. Without sufficient acknowledgment of the harms of school closures, or adequate planning for unwinding this intervention, officials showed that their decisions to close were simply reactive rather than carefully considered. The decision makers set a radical project in motion with no plan on how to stop it. In effect, officials steered a car off the road, threw a cinder block on the accelerator, then jumped out of the vehicle with passengers still in the back. No one was in the front or even knew how to unstick the pedal.
