Final Trend Feature

 On the wings of COVID-19 insanity, one group has been consistently left behind: children.

With no vaccine available to them for months, and growing pressure to reopen schools despite a nationwide pandemic, children have had to bear their fair share of troubles locked away in their homes, unable to socialize or be effectively educated in person.

Now, with schools returning to in-person classes en masse, educators are finding that there may 

be some long term effects to missing so much time away from each other.

COVID-19 learning loss is affecting students across the nation both in their social-emotional development and in their education levels, experts say.

Learning loss is a phenomenon causing educators to take a good hard look at the foundations of our educational system, and suggest if it is time for a change. 

The COVID-19 pandemic and subsequent lockdown hit the United States mid-March 2020.

Schools and businesses closed, and many parents were forced to become extremely involved in their childrens’ education, either home-schooling or going to remote learning where kids invariably needed assistance with using a computer and other various technical difficulties. 

Except, some parents were not able to provide the support their children needed, instead having to work during a pandemic to support their families.

Children from low-income families tended to be harder hit by COVID-19 learning loss, according to PACE (Policy Analysis for California Education).

While many students worked hard to stay on task and on target through a pandemic, many did not have the support behind them to really push them to continue their education, with some students attending no online classes and many attending less than 15% of their online class sessions, per the British Journal of Education.

Now that schools are returning to in-person learning, the gap between students is becoming more obvious than ever before.

“I had two sixth grades. I had to try to catch up one section of my class, while keeping the other part engaged in a lesson that they already knew,” said Desry Guenther, a 6th grade teacher at Claire Lilienthal Elementary School in San Francisco.

All over the world, socioeconomic inequalities were revealed by the COVID-19 pandemic in a way that had never been seen before.

A study conducted by the International Journal of Educational Development found that large learning losses occurred in students with a lower socioeconomic background. But it also showed that across the board, a significant learning loss occurred in every group of students, on every level.

Students from a poor socioeconomic background were difficult to reach through online learning, even if they wanted to participate in lessons.

“Public housing is not wired for WiFi, so the wireless connection for a lot of my students was virtually nonexistent,” said Desry Guenther. “I had kids who wanted to learn and wanted to do the work, but they just completely could not.”

The UNESCO Institute for Statistics along with the World Bank also created the term learning poverty, which is defined as the inability to read and comprehend a simple passage by the age of ten years old. This helped to demonstrate just how bad the learning crisis is in schools, and ensures a more complete understanding of how bad the crisis is as a whole.

A study of learning poverty showed similarly broad rates of learning poverty amongst every socioeconomic background, although it also showed that learning poverty did not disappear with age, as students as old as 15 years old were still experiencing some form of learning poverty.

Elementary school parent Tina Jordan rightly suspects online learning played a large role in this phenomenon.

“All of my children said the same thing: online learning was way easier than in-person,” said Jordan. “Assignments were easier, it was easier to reference the textbook or cheat, there was no real supervision… it was a void platform.”

Other teachers cited distractions when learning online, and the interruptions to class students were more inclined to make with the decrease in supervision.

“We had kids in garages, I met puppies, I met babies, I had it all but at least the kids were all in their own spaces,” said elementary school teacher Chris Tenhoff.

Online learning’s inability to really compare to in-person learning in a classroom is the biggest reason why so much learning loss occurred at the outset of the pandemic. Many private schools returned to in-person classes before public schools, widening a socioeconomic disparity commonly seen in this learning crisis.

“If I wanted to home school my children I would’ve homeschooled them. But that’s not the platform I want and it’s not what I’m paying tuition for,” said Tina Jordan.

Even though there was significant pressure to return to in-person learning, creating a safe-space for education was still a top concern for administrators.

“We are lucky as a school. Administrators would come to observe from other schools and they would basically go ‘we can’t replicate this’ because we just were fortunate to have so many resources,” said Chris Tenhoff. “We were all nervous. The kids were nervous, the teachers were nervous, we all felt like walking COVID-bombs.”

It wasn’t until after kids returned to in-person learning that learning loss became apparent as a real problem in the student population. Returning after a year or year and a half of online learning had taken its toll.

“Kids had a much harder time when they came back in-person, being able to communicate without technology,”said Stephanie Lee. “We had a project where they had to cut out molecules. I remember just sitting there and watching these kids struggle with scissors. The motor skills were that bad.”

Remarked Desry Guenther, “Some of these kids would come back as fifth graders, but in seventh grade bodies.”

Still the internet clearly saved us from being even worse off. 

“If this were the 1918 flu pandemic, they didn’t have internet they couldn’t all be put online,” said Tina Jordan.

According to the Centre for Sociological Research at the University of Leuven, learning loss has affected 80% of students worldwide. Even still, some students were able to either offset the effects of COVID-19 learning loss or avoid them entirely with a combination of good habits and good WiFi.

“Students who were self-starters and who knew how to advocate for themselves tended to handle this better. Those who were on the quieter side, or who wanted to hide in the classroom because they didn’t get it, those were the students who got a lot more lost,” said Chris Tenhoff.

More often than not, outside factors still played a large role in whether or not a student was successful in an online setting. 

“You can tell what kind of base the kid has at home based on how the family or the kids respond to emails, letters home, things like that,” said Stephanie Lee.

According to a study done by the British Journal of Educational Studies, parents tended to care more about their student’s success or failure in online learning if they were in a particularly important year for learning, Year 10 and Year 12 students in the UK. 

Otherwise, attendance of online classes dipped dangerously. Many that did attend school only attended between 1 and 10 days, making it simply not possible for schools to give the same level of education across home-schooling and virtual lessons compared to on-campus, in-person classes. 

Taking a step back from regular life during distanced learning gave more educators and school administrators time to reflect on their instructional tendencies.

While some students fell far behind in their coursework, many begged the question, “what do students really need from an education?

“We need to talk about what kids need to get out of an education. They can google a lot of what we are talking about,” said high school teacher Stephanie Lee. “When you’re a teacher for 10-15 years, you start to do the same thing every year, every month, every week. During the pandemic, we were forced to change a lot of things about education, which was hard for a lot of those teachers. Now that we’re coming back, expect to see that push to go back to everything they did back in the day, and make that change all the way back to before the pandemic.”

Maybe education needs a reboot across some parts of the world, but any short term changes will most likely be spawned out of necessity.

“Part of our learning process is developing that grit with students… when kids came back this year, I felt a really big resistance to just try,” said Desry Guenther. “Some of these kids would come back as fifth graders, but in seventh grade bodies.”

This way of thinking sat mainly with younger teachers, and others pushed back against the sentiment. 

“I’m not giving up on the students, or giving up on the curriculum. I’m just having to reapproach the curriculum, and tweak that for the students going forward for the next few years,” said Chris Tenhoff. “When I hear this hoopla from these other school districts, they are often just looking for a fight. Why can’t we just work together for the good of our communities and for the good of our kids?”

Other parents sided with the senior teachers in this matter.

“We’re talking about reducing the rigor of our curriculum [but our children are going to have to] compete in a global workforce? I don’t think so,” said Tina Jordan. “Fear kills rational thought.”

The United Nations made headlines in 2020 by calling for building and upgrading of education facilities that are child, disability and gender sensitive and provide safe, nonviolent, inclusive and effective learning environments for all.

Even before the coronavirus crisis, projections showed that more than 200 million children would be out of school, and only 60 percent of young people would be completing upper secondary education in 2030. The proportion of children and youth out of primary and secondary school had declined from 26 percent in 2000 to 19 percent in 2010 and 17 percent in 2018.

Stephanie Lee added, “Even if there wasn’t a pandemic going on, school administration is quite hectic. So when the pandemic broke out, it was full-on chaos.”

While broad, these calls could fulfill some of the reforms our education systems need while still maintaining a rigorous environment that pushes students of all backgrounds to grow and achieve. 

Making sure no child is left behind as we move forward through this pandemic needs to be at the top of educators’ and administrators’ minds as we transition through this period of unprecedented interruption to our learning.

Interviewees:

Stephanie Lee, Teacher at Archbishop Riordan High School, slee@riordanhs.org

Desry Guenther, Teacher at Claire Lilienthal Elementary, 415-370-8584

Tina Jordan, Mother During COVID-19 Pandemic, 415-310-6288

Chris Tenhoff, Teacher at St. Brendan Elementary School, ctenhoff@stbrendansf.com