COVID-19 in America: K-12 Education
Like everything else in the United States, the COVID-19 pandemic has both exposed every systemic problem with the education system and made all of those said problems much worse.
The already acute shortage of both staff and funding for the education system has grown much worse since COVID-19, both in the K-12 system and America’s postsecondary institutions.
Before I begin with what went wrong, I will give my biases right off the bat.
In the absence of a vaccine, school closures and going to remote learning was the least bad option for everyone, where all of the options were terrible. This method was the best way to help as many students as possible learn and contain the spread of COVID-19, if it was actually followed. But when vaccines became available for everyone (especially schoolchildren), schools should have reopened immediately. That they did not is reflective of a serious problem that will be discussed below.
What Went Wrong
Before anything else happens, it is vital to keep in mind that the American education system was already in serious trouble thanks to decades of underfunded and understaffed schools. The pandemic just made both of these problems worse.Despite the heroic efforts of millions of teachers and other educational professionals, I can’t find anything that went right across the country from a systemic perspective.
No one accomplished their goals of either containing learning loss or COVID-19 in schools, mainly because the worst of all possible worlds was selected: partial shutdowns.
To be frank, the learning loss has been nothing short of a massive disaster across the country, especially for students who were already struggling.
The infrastructure was not in place to support remote learning. Thanks to wildly unequal access to reliable internet services, poor students and (quite often) students of color suffered catastrophic learning losses in reading, writing, and math skills. Put it another way, systemic racism in who is able to get reliable internet access and support means that students already on the margins fell into a precipice.
Compounding this lack of dependable internet was that many of these students were suddenly cut off from the only consistent social support and food source they had. The fact that our country’s education system is functioning in this capacity is a damning indictment on America’s social safety net as a whole.
Moreover, the already strained relationships between school boards, parents, and teachers only got worse because of the pandemic.
School boards were desperate to contain the pandemic, limit learning losses, and placate constituents: desperate and frustrated parents. Teachers on the whole wanted to continue their jobs with better conditions and other overdue demands. Parents wanted some sense of normalcy.
The fact that these three groups, in addition to local governments, had disputes that the pandemic exacerbated has only made matters worse.
Even more ruinous, the pandemic has caused an already understaffed education system to lose more people as teachers and other education professionals, professionals the system absolutely cannot afford to lose.
To be clear, I don’t blame teachers for the fact that learning loss has occurred. The fault for that comes from the abysmal state of the American education system and an inexcusable lack of even basic preparation for what can go wrong.
But I do blame some teachers union leaders for denying that learning loss has been a problem at all, mainly in Los Angeles and San Francisco (although in the case of San Francisco, its board of education was much more to blame for things going so badly). My understanding is that they denied this was a problem because of longstanding animosity against the people who brought up the problem—a problem we see Republicans commit on a much larger scale when talking about basic health measures such as masks.
As for who bears responsibility for what, I blame local governments and school boards for doing a poor job of maintaining their local schools and managing money. I also blame parents for acting in ways that encouraged destructive practices such as unequal funding formulas for schools and for behaving like reprobates at school board meetings.
But most of all, I blame the American public for not even encouraging basic preparations for the American education system in case of a pandemic or other major disaster.
What Must Be Done
Any schools that are not open must open immediately. The vaccines are available for both education professionals and students.Schools must see a drastic increase in funding and not just from property taxes. They must also see increased state funding. It is unrealistic to expect higher performances from the education system if it is starving for funding.
More must be done to ensure that students have access to reliable internet. The internet is increasingly how research is done, papers are written, projects are conducted, and grades are tracked. Increased broadband funding would be a good place to start.
Steps must be taken to ensure that the system has enough staffing power to function, not to mention clean up the mess COVID-19 has left behind. Moreover, to tackle the racism inside the education system, more teachers of color, especially Black teachers, must be recruited. Studies show that Black students are far likelier to attend college if they have teachers that look like them.
I don’t have any good answers on how to tackle the learning loss. Getting students caught up makes fixing supply chains look easy by comparison. But the best guess I can give is to cut down on the number of days off and increase the number of students in summer school.
If you have heard me say this before, then take a shot: Do you have a better bad idea than this?
Otherwise, ask Trevor, who has served as a schoolteacher himself, in the comments what he thinks.