Addressing the Long-Term Effects of the COVID-19 Pandemic on Children and Families (2023) / Chapter Skim
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4 Effects and Potential Interventions in Education
4 Effects and Potential Interventions in Education
Pages 93-136
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From page 93... ...
SCHOOLS AND EDUCATORS Initial Effects in K–12 Education By the end of March 2020 the vast majority of early childhood programs and K–12 public schools in the United States had closed for in-person 1Student engagement is defined as the student's active participation in academic and other school-related activities. See https://www.edglossary.org/student-engagement/ for a full definition.
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The COVID-19 pandemic appears to have deepened the impact of disparities in access and opportunity facing many students of color in public schools, including technological and other barriers that make it harder to stay engaged in virtual classrooms. The disruptions were especially difficult for some students.
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More than 75 percent of public schools reported that it is more difficult to get substitutes than it was before the pandemic. And almost 75 percent of public schools are frequently relying on administrators, nonteaching staff, and teachers on their free periods to cover classes (IES, 2022b)
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From page 96... ...
As the 2020–2021 school year began, some districts offered in-person learning; others offered only remote learning; and still others used hybrid approaches that combined the two, trying to balance the needs of safety and health with education. By January 2022, just 40 percent of K–12 students had access to any in-person instruction; by June 2022, more than 98 percent of public schools offered full-time in-person instructions (Institute of Education Sciences [IES]
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From page 97... ...
Low-income communities with limited local tax bases depend on state support for these types of repairs and updates, but not all states provide capital funding for schools. It is too soon to know the extent to which federal ARP funds have helped in addressing improvements in school facilities. Mitigation and Safety Measures As the pandemic surged, early childhood learning programs and public schools were pressed to establish protocols and put in place a variety of measures to guard against the spread of the virus (Coronado et al., 2020)
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From page 98... ...
. Larger class sizes mean more crowding and thus increased risks for contact and spread of the virus; bringing average class sizes down created greater opportunities for physical distancing. In many instances, reducing class size required making changes to school schedules; one way this was done was by alternating the days of the week when specific grades came to school (CDC, 2022)
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Again, on average, lowpoverty districts reported spending less time reviewing previously taught material than their high-poverty counterparts. These differences in district wealth also translated into differences in how remote instruction was delivered and supported.
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100 FIGURE 4-1 School district strategies for delivering distance learning, by grade level and whether high or low poverty. SOURCE: Garet and colleagues (2020, p.
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School Engagement Engagement in schooling, from preschool through college, has dropped according to a variety of measures, including enrollment, attendance, and graduation. The available evidence, discussed below, suggests that because of the pandemic, fewer students are enrolled in public or any formal schooling or preschool; daily attendance is lower than it was prior to the pandemic; and high school graduation and college enrollment rates are lower than would have otherwise been expected.
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From page 102... ...
Nearly 300,000 fewer children were enrolled in statefunded preschool that year than in the prior year, a drop of 18 percent. The pandemic also reduced enrollment in other publicly funded early childhood education programs, including a 33 percent drop in Head Start enrollment and a 16 percent drop in early childhood special education enrollment.
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. Data from individual states provide further insights into which students left public schools in the fall of 2020 and where they went.
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These trends suggest that public schools continue to struggle to convince parents that school buildings are as safe and that instructional quality is as high as they were prior to the pandemic (Bamberger, 2022; Stein, 2022; Velez, 2022)
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In the 2021–2022 school year, 72 percent of public schools nationwide reported chronic absenteeism rates higher than the previous year, with only 27 percent saying the situation had improved relative to the 2020–2021 school year (IES, 2022b) : see Figure 4-3.
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106 FIGURE 4-3 Absenteeism data from School Pulse panel.
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That same evidence suggests the highest increases in 2020 high school graduation rates were concentrated among Black students, students with disabilities, and English-language learners. These roughly stable high school graduation rates, while perhaps surprising, may be driven by states' relaxed graduation standards in reaction to the pandemic.
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From page 108... ...
Between 2019 and 2021, freshman enrollment across all sectors declined by 14.3 percent for Black students, 8.6 percent for Latino students, and 19.6 percent for Native American students, compared with a 12.0 percent and a 3.5 percent decline for White and Asian students, respectively. For public 4-year colleges, relative to White students, enrollment declines for Native American and Black students were twice as high, while for Latino students the decline was only one-sixth of that for White students.
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Early Childhood Learning National data have found evidence of substantial missed learning in prekindergarten years, with entering kindergartners showing lower skill levels than in previous years. Evidence from the DIBELS5 testing system from 1,400 schools in urban metropolitan areas in 41 states showed that the fraction of kindergartners "well below benchmark" in early literacy skills rose from 28 percent in the 2019–2020 school year to 47 percent in next year.
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Data for 12 states on proficiency rates on standardized exams in spring 2021 showed large learning reductions in comparison with prior years: students were 14 percentage points less likely to score at least proficient in mathematics and 6 percentage points less likely to score proficient in English language arts. Declines in achievement were significantly larger in school districts with a larger proportion of low-income, Black, or Latino students (Halloran et al., 2021)
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Results for the assessments reflect the performance of students attending public schools, private schools, Bureau of Indian Education schools, and U.S. Department of Defense schools (IES, 2022b)
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. Prior studies of the relationships between academic achievement and both individual and national economic outcomes suggest substantial costs from students' missed learning during the pandemic.
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. Specific predictions of lost earnings are based on numerous assumptions and thus come with substantial uncertainty, but it seems likely that the missed learning experienced during the pandemic will have lasting economic consequences for individuals and society unless effective and timely interventions are implemented (Hanushek & Woessmann, 2020; Viana Costa et al., 2021)
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The rest of this chapter covers four areas for intervention: compensating for lost instructional time in order to address missed learning; reengaging families and students who have become disengaged from schools; strengthening the educator workforce needed to accomplish these first two goals; and pandemic-proofing schools to minimize future disease-related disruptions to education. Addressing Missed Learning Opportunities As detailed in Chapter 3, the pandemic resulted in substantial reduction of instructional time and in decreased learning for K–12 students due to school closures and to the broader health, economic, and social disruptions caused by the pandemic.
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From page 115... ...
plan their spending of the last of the ESSER pandemic education funding, they will have to make difficult decisions between funding the need to address missed learning, fixing aging and financially neglected school buildings and facilities, bolstering school staffing, and implementing programs and support for students' social and emotional development and mental and physical health needs. Evidence-Based Interventions Strategies for supporting learning beyond classroom instruction and addressing academic challenges of marginalized students are not new.
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. Many of these programs have been rigorously evaluated, providing useful evidence to inform strategies to respond to pandemic-related missed learning.
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Deploying different approaches together could be useful not only to compensate for specific areas of missed learning, but also to address consequences of the pandemic on students' mental health, social and emotional development, loss of friendship networks, and school disengagement. These interventions could also provide a venue to detect early warning signs of disengagement or learning challenges.
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Several barriers hamper students' continuous attendance, including lack of transportation, need to provide child care for younger siblings, need for income from summer jobs, and the sense that programs are just "more school." For example, a randomized evaluation of a voluntary full-day 2-year summer learning program in five urban school districts found that each summer approximately 20 percent of students signed up but did not attend a single day the first summer, as many as 48 percent did not attend a single day the second summer, and a large number attended only sporadically (McCombs et al., 2020)
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This objective is as important as the specific content of a program. Scaling challenges are exacerbated by the staffing shortages across public schools resulting from the pandemic, which is particularly severe in some regions of the country (IES, 2022b)
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Several initiatives already in place provide useful blueprints.8 Reengaging Students and Families and Restoring Enrollment As detailed above, public school enrollments dropped nationwide during the pandemic, with the sharpest declines in the earliest grades. There are a variety of potential reasons for the decline, including family decisions to home-school, students needing to work because of family financial circumstances, and students being homeless.
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. Better data on engagement in remote settings can help school officials to make decisions about which students should have priority for in-person learning opportunities.
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. One approach to establishing personal connections between students and adults is reflected in Nashville's Navigator Initiative, in which teachers and other school staff meet regularly with students to get to know them better and to learn what kind of support they need (Jacobson, 2020; Metro Nashville Public Schools, 2021)
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. Given the prepandemic conditions, along with the additional stresses of the pandemic, identifying viable strategies for strengthening the educator workforce will be key to addressing other policy interventions in education.
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. Increasing the diversity in the pool of future educators could, over time, help to stabilize staffing in schools serving historically marginalized students.
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Fear about the virus and schools' potential role in spreading it drove many of the extended school closures, caused at least some of disenrollment from formal schooling, and has likely made it harder to retain and recruit teachers. Concern about the health risks of in-person schooling is higher among low-income and racially and minoritized communities than other communities.
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One estimate suggests that school districts would need an annual infusion of $85 billion more than they currently spend in order to fully upgrade school buildings (21st Century School Fund, 2021)
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. 2021 state of our schools: America's PK-12 public school facilities.
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. Understanding COVID-19-era Enrollment drops among early-grade public school students.
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. Patterns in the pandemic decline of public school enrollment.
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. The economic impacts of learning losses.
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. Nation's Public School Enrollment Dropped 3 Percent in 2020-21.
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. A blueprint for scaling tutoring and mentoring across public schools. AERA Open, 7. https://doi.org/10.1177/23328584211042858 Kuhfeld, M., & Lewis, K
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RAND Corporation. https://www.rand.org/pubs/research_reports/RR3201.html Metro Nashville Public Schools.
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. Estimated resource costs for implementation of CDC's recommended COVID-19 mitigation strategies in pre-kindergarten through grade 12 public schools -- United States, 2020-21. Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Re port, 69, 1917–1921.
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. Retaining early childhood education workers: A review of the empirical literature. Journal of Research in Childhood Education, 30(4)
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