Covid-19 changed education in America - permanently

There was a moment last spring when every parent and employer in America suddenly realized how deeply their lives and livelihoods depended on an institution too often in the background and taken for granted: the nation's schools.

With almost no notice, adults and children found themselves in the middle of a massive national experiment in new ways of teaching and learning, and new ways of dividing responsibilities between home, school and work.

A year later, it's clear that the Covid-19 pandemic has changed education in America in lasting ways, and glimpses of that transformed system are already emerging. School districts are developing permanent virtual options in the expectation that after the pandemic, some families will stick with remote learning - even for elementary school kids. Hundreds of colleges have, for the first time, admitted a freshman class without requiring SAT or ACT scores, potentially opening admissions to the most selective colleges to more low-income students. And thousands of educators across the country, from preschool to college, are finding new ways to spark their students' creativity, harness technology and provide the services they need to succeed.

The pandemic has unleashed a wave of innovation in education that has accelerated change and prompted blue-sky thinking throughout the system. What if more schools could enhance learning and nutrition by offering their students not just a free breakfast and lunch, but dinner and a snack? What if schools delivered books during the summer? What if high school art students had access to graphic design and architecture software?

It's not all upside, of course; the pandemic has been a tragedy for many students' educations. Stories of hungry children, of kids who have melted away from school, of community college students doing their work in fast food parking lots to pick up a Wi-Fi signal, have exposed how deeply inequity shapes the experiences and outcomes of America's students. The disproportionate weight of the pandemic on Black and brown and low-income students has ignited calls for a dramatic reinvestment.

Before we can contemplate the arrival of some futuristic, high-tech utopia, millions of students have to be supported to catch up academically and process trauma, something that educators say will take several years at least. Some students need to be tracked down and convinced to come back to school at all. Policymakers have to commit to long-term change beyond the Band-Aids applied over the past year to a crumbling system. Even the most obvious gain of the pandemic - millions more students with access to technology - will be fleeting in the absence of structural improvements.

The challenge, said Jaclyn Ballesteros, an early childhood educator at KIPP Northeast Elementary, a charter school in Denver, is "how can we keep breaking down these barriers of inequity through what we learned in the pandemic?"

This year, Ballesteros has been teaching 4-year-olds alternately online and in person, forcing her to come up with jerry-rigged solutions like making a scale out of a coat hanger and shoelaces to teach the difference between heavy and light. The experts are "going to want to get the data, they're going to want to get the research," she said. "But you talk to any teacher, you talk to any Guatemalan grandma who's had to take care of four kids while their mom and dad work - they know what they need."

The bottom line is that this past year has provided, well, an education for everyone connected to American schools and colleges - and that's pretty much everyone. Here are five of the biggest lessons we've learned, and what they might mean for the future of education in America.

LESSON 1

No school - or college - is an island

We didn't realize as a society how much we needed schools until they were shuttered. In addition to all the intellectual development and enrichment they offer to children, preschool and elementary school programs are the linchpins of a child care ecosystem that allows parents - especially mothers - to participate in the workforce. They feed millions of students breakfast and lunch, which has been proven to pay off over the long-term in better health and education outcomes. Many schools also offer crucial mental health counseling, medical and dental care, and identify cases of child abuse. When schools closed because of Covid, so did a vast system of supports for the nation's children and their families.

Similarly, we learned over the past year how vulnerable college students are. Unless they have groceries, a computer and Wi-Fi, would-be college students don't show up to campus at all - imperiling their chances of ever reaching the middle class. More than one in five college students have their own children, and the pandemic proved that lack of child care is one of the biggest barriers to college attainment.

It turns out that school and work are more deeply interconnected than we knew, and both depend on a network of social supports.

Consider what happened at Ganesha High School in the southern California city of Pomona, which serves a high-poverty student body. When Covid hit, it was one of 15 high schools in Los Angeles County only months into a grant-funded pilot project designating them as "community schools," hubs where all sorts of wraparound supports are available. That meant that when one student's mother died from Covid and their father was on a ventilator, and the student was staying with a relative in another city, the school was able to drop off groceries and connect the family to counseling. When the father came home from the hospital to bills piled up, the school arranged emergency aid to keep them in their home.

Jennifer L. Francev, the school's principal, said that none of her efforts to improve the school's academic performance will succeed if her students and their families are struggling with basic needs.

"It doesn't matter how many programs I build … if they're not getting a good night's sleep because they're sleeping in a car," Francev said. "How can we as a society, say, 'Pull yourself up by your bootstraps?'"

The community schools model is gaining support as a way to build a better system post-pandemic, but it's not the only one. There are many other examples of schools keeping students engaged through a year of profound disruption by addressing their basic needs for food and shelter as well as their emotional needs, from phone call check-ins to devoting class time to offering support for what students are going through. As a result, in many places, home and school have never been better integrated.

LESSON 2

Online learning is here to stay

For weeks starting in January, from my home in Maryland, I sat in on a virtual course on American Indian education and policy at Salish Kootenai College on the Flathead Reservation in western Montana. The professor, a woman named Michael Munson, had never taught a live (or "synchronous," in the industry lingo), fully virtual course before. But her warmth helped make it feel like an intimate group of friends. Sure, something was lost because the students couldn't chat after class or grab a cup of coffee. But something was gained in that they could join even if they were sick - as one did while convalescing with Covid - even if they were in their car taking care of some essential family matter, and even on the day in February when it was -5 F in Montana and the pipes burst in Munson's academic building.

In virtual classrooms at all levels around the United States, teachers and students have been making discoveries like this. To be clear, online learning has been disastrous for many, many children, whether because the screen is a barrier to building teacher-student relationships, or because they lack a strong internet signal or a quiet place to work. After all, we've seen students logging in from the laundry room and doing class presentations in the bathroom. Alarming news about failing grades makes this abundantly clear.

But one of the most surprising lessons to emerge is that some students are thriving, and that includes quite young students.

A recent poll from POLITICO and the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health found that 29 percent of parents want their child to be in remote or hybrid learning for the next school year, while a RAND Corporation survey of school districts found that by last fall, one in five were already planning or contemplating a post-pandemic virtual schooling option.

Experts believe that post-Covid, most students will be back in a classroom. But for a subset who face challenges ranging from social anxiety to the disproportionate rates of school discipline for Black students, remote learning may be a good option. Same for families where parents like some aspects of homeschooling, but still want a strong tether to a formal program. As physical classrooms adopt cameras, students who are often out of school due to a chronic illness will have an option to stay better connected. Schools disrupted by blizzards or wildfires will have a fallback. (Okay, ending snow days is not going to win any popularity contests.)

It will take vigilance, however, to ensure that options that arise to meet this new demand for remote learning are of high quality. As RAND noted in reporting its survey results, based on pre-Covid research, "students enrolled in online schools have had poorer outcomes in math, reading, science, writing, and history achievement when compared with students in traditional schools."

Even when they are teaching in person, many teachers will continue drawing on lessons they learned from having to teach online. After she was forced to cancel all four of her annual choral concerts, Kate Lee had to radically rethink what to teach as director of choirs at Maine East High School in Park Ridge, Ill. She asked students in her heavily immigrant community to choose and perform a song that was meaningful to them, and was blown away by video performances that included a folksong from Nigeria and an Assyrian funeral hymn. Lee decided that going forward, she won't just assign music and teach students how to perform it.

"Now, I want to give my students more of a voice, so I can learn about them, and they can learn about each other," she said. "And they can also learn about themselves, right?"

LESSON 3

Technology is a basic need

With the possible exception of the earliest grades, it's now clear that in a post-pandemic America, every student needs their own device and a reliable internet connection. There is just too much good happening today in the digital environment for students to miss out. Even when school is fully in-person, digital access will allow students to more easily form study groups and do homework together, get involved in coding or digital art projects, or practice patient care in a simulated hospital while training for health care jobs.

Consider what Precious Allen has done this year with her second graders at Betty Shabazz International Charter School in Chicago. The students have been blogging, making games and animations in Scratch, a coding language for kids, and holding a book club with students in West Virginia, Argentina, Turkey and Moldova. Allen, a county teacher of the year, is raising donations now to fund electronic circuit kits. Attendance and passing grades in her class, dismal early in the pandemic, are now quite strong.

As with many other teachers, the virtual school environment also transformed Allen's relationships with her students' families. Though we had telephones and video apps pre-Covid, the pandemic has forced a pronounced shift towards more communication. Going forward, parents with rigid work schedules will be better able to meet with their kids' teachers if they can jump on Zoom during a break instead of having to trek to the school building.

"I thought I was building that relationship with my parents [in years past], but I realized that I was just at the surface," Allen said. This year, it has been helpful "knowing who was getting divorced, who doesn't have child care, who needs extensions on assignments. It's something that I definitely want to carry over.'"

States including Texas and California handed out 1 million devices each, primarily laptops and tablets. But providing devices is simple compared to the difficulty many students faced in accessing reliable Internet connections, especially in rural areas. Even after all the measures taken during the pandemic, as many as 12 million schoolchildren remain disconnected or "under-connected," according to a recent report from Common Sense, Boston Consulting Group and the Southern Education Foundation. Students left behind by the digital divide are disproportionately Black, Latino and Native American.

The stimulus package passed in December and the American Rescue Plan passed in March both included funding for devices and internet services for schools and families, while President Joe Biden's infrastructure proposal includes $100 billion to expand broadband access. In the absence of a solution at the national level, a number of local communities have come up with creative approaches: California communities are taking steps like adding routers to light poles and setting up their own internet services. The Dallas Independent School District is installing its own cellular towers, at $500,000 a pop.

As the Common Sense report points out, the benefits of closing the digital divide aren't just narrowly about students completing schoolwork. Access to services like telemedicine and workforce development resources will better prepare children and their families for success in school and life.

LESSON 4

College admissions will never be the same

Thank the pandemic for piercing the invincibility of standardized college entrance exams, namely the SAT and the ACT, which for decades have been a mandatory part of applying to a selective college, despite evidence that they disadvantage minority and low-income students. But with test dates canceled because of Covid and no easy way to administer them remotely, hundreds of colleges allowed students to apply this year without submitting scores from one of these tests. There was already momentum in this direction before the pandemic, but now it will be difficult to go back.

In a survey by ACT, most colleges said they were unlikely to return to requiring the tests in the next few years. Soon, after the traditional May 1 deadline to accept an offer from a selective college, colleges will learn whether eliminating the testing mandate means they will be enrolling a more racially and economically diverse class of freshmen. And then over time, colleges will be able to see how students admitted without test scores do compared to those who submitted theirs.

There are reasons to think that they may find that those students do just as well. That's what happened at Wake Forest University, a highly selective private college in North Carolina, which has been test-optional since 2008.

This doesn't mean that top colleges will be radically more equitable in the fall, given how many Black and Latino and other low-income young people are putting off college plans to work and help their families. The flood of thousands of extra applications to the most exclusive colleges doesn't exactly help anyone's chances of getting in, especially when the vast majority of colleges have only committed to being "test-optional" rather than "test-blind," meaning they are still willing to look at test scores for those who do submit them.

Some experts in the field also say that deemphasizing standardized testing is only a first step towards a more equitable college admissions system. While in theory relying more on letters of recommendation and personal essays in place of test scores seems like a good thing - one that would force admissions officers to consider students more as individuals - it's not clear how much this will even the playing field, said Don Yu, chief operating officer of Reach Higher, a college access initiative founded by former first lady Michelle Obama.

For instance, implicit racial bias can seep into teacher recommendations, and wealthy students can pay to get extra help with their college essays. The Stanford Faculty Senate recently voted to ask the university to require applicants to list the names of people who read their application, and detail their connection to those people.

"Especially for low-income, minority, first-generation college students, that one decision at this early point in a young adult's life is a high-stakes decision, something that may even break generational poverty," Yu said. Yet despite those stakes, he said, the selection process is "very unscientific."

LESSON 5

Education needs massive reinvestment

It's tempting to think of the annual, or biennial, ritual of wrangling over a state budget as political theater, to think that advocates will always claim the sky is falling, that money comes and goes and it doesn't make much difference. The pandemic has proved otherwise.

The 2008 financial crisis began a long slide in funding for public education that didn't fully reverse when the economy recovered; as of 2016, 24 states were still spending less on education per-student than before the Great Recession, and schools had 77,000 fewer teachers and other staff while enrolling 1.5 million more children, according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. Public higher education was receiving $3.4 billion a year less in 2019 than in 2008, while shifting costs heavily towards tuition. The result is that Covid hit an education system significantly weakened compared to a decade earlier.

One result, as the Government Accountability Office found last year, was that in nearly 4 in 10 of America's school districts, at least half of the school buildings needed updated or new heating, ventilation and air conditioning systems. Needless to say, that has not helped get kids back into classrooms in the face of an airborne virus. (It wasn't helping before Covid either; research has tied air quality to improved academic performance.)

Most educators agree that tapping the full potential of Americans to live healthy lives and contribute to a better economy will take a full-throttled reinvestment in education. Biden's budget blueprint proposes boosting education funding for next year by nearly $30 billion.

Just as with efforts to close the digital divide, creative ideas are emerging to help students overcome financial hurdles and boost opportunity over the long term. Three former education secretaries, Margaret Spellings, Arne Duncan and John B. King Jr., have all endorsed the idea of a national tutoring corps, which would not only help kids but provide tutors with community service experience and stipends. Sal Khan, creator of Khan Academy, a nonprofit that provides online learning materials, has a new project called schoolhouse.world to connect students to vetted, volunteer tutors. A bipartisan, prospective ballot initiative in Colorado seeks to give every low-income family up to $1,500 to pay for tutoring or other enrichment opportunities.

Another idea that got a boost from the pandemic was emergency grants - short-term, small-dollar awards to college students to help them weather a financial hit instead of dropping out. They were suddenly tested at a massive scale when colleges were required to spend half of their funding from the CARES Act on emergency grants. Signs suggest that they have helped college students overcome short-term crises.

Last fall, staff at Amarillo College, a community college in Texas known for its work with students in poverty, called over 2,000 students whom they were helping with CARES Act funding. Some were experiencing homelessness, some were months behind on rent and utilities. Cara Crowley, vice president of strategic initiatives, made a couple hundred of those calls herself. Despite everything they were dealing with, 76 percent of those CARES Act recipients made it through to the spring semester - about the same as the general campus population.

"I would have bet surefire money they wouldn't have stayed in school when you talked to them," she said. "Because their need was so overwhelming."

The fact that a sizable portion of college students face obstacles like eviction and hunger is a reminder that the education system can't be expected to solve every problem in society. Schools would have an easier time if students' families didn't struggle with low incomes, unstable housing or a lack of health care, all problems that can greatly affect learning.

Of course, plenty of educators, parents and advocates have known this for decades; the same can be said for many of these pandemic lessons.

But the epic crisis triggered by Covid has forced the country to begin to do something about gaps in our education system that have been hiding in plain sight, and that acceleration of effort could mean a better educated America down the road.

"I don't think the pandemic has really unearthed all sorts of new 'aha's' about what kids need," said Melissa Connelly, CEO of OneGoal, a nonprofit that helps low-income students get into and succeed in college. "I think it's just forced our hand to actually try doing something different."