But many Americans didn’t actually see it — apart from, for some, the effects on their own families. We didn’t see moments like these:
A 7-year old Black boy in St. Louis, unable to access a working computer at home, starts skipping remote school in May 2020. Instead, he dons his red school uniform polo and heads to a Family Dollar store, where he pretends to be an employee, holding doors and carrying bags. He uses his tips to pay for meals.
PublicAffairs
In New Jersey, a kindergartner is missing his school friends so much by the end of the 2019-2020 school year that he stops eating. His parents tell him he cannot leave the table until he finishes his food, and things seem to improve — but then his mother, suspicious of the boy’s ever-thinner cheeks, goes through the trash and discovers he has been secretly spitting his small bites of waffles, sandwiches and broccoli into napkins.
“He was, like, just lying in his bed,” the boy’s mother recounted later. “My baby. Saying he would just rather die, over and over and over again.”
As kids head back to school in this third year of the pandemic, Kamenetz has given us an essential read for anyone who wants to understand how American schools and schoolchildren fared in the early days.The book also investigates the historical factors, blatant inattention, and racist and sexist world that had shaped America’s public school and child-care systems into what they were by the time the virus began closing schools across the country in March 2020. Kamenetz documents how America has long failed to invest in its schools, leaving some lacking basics such as soap, paper towels and running water when the virus arrived; how the nation’s refusal to invest in child care or offer paid family leave created a teetering, unequal system that crashed, flattening many mothers, when schools shuttered; and how the structure of special education, designed to pit parents against school systems, forged an even more bitter relationship between families and districts at the height of the pandemic, when mutual support and understanding were needed most.
“It is entirely possible that when all is said and done, districts and states end up spending more money fighting families in court over COVID-related denial of services, and on paying families’ legal fees when they lose, than they spend on the services themselves,” Kamenetz writes. “Meanwhile, months become years and children grow up.”
She analyzes how America performed compared with peer nations, noting that we kept schools closed longer than many parts of the Asia Pacific did and that, unlike Europe, Britain and Israel, we prioritized reopening other institutions — bars, restaurants, businesses — ahead of the places where the next generation is supposed to go to learn.
She also offers thought-provoking, clear-eyed insights into the way systems and people functioned, and did not function, during the pandemic. For example, she asks us to think of the virus’s effects on children “as being like the climate crisis. More heat stress, more energy going into the atmosphere raises the likelihood and the intensity of individual disasters like wildfires and floods. … In the same way, [the pandemic] raised the background conditions that made ACEs [adverse childhood experiences] more numerous and more severe, especially for children who are already vulnerable.”
She breaks the fourth wall to make another salient point: “More than nine out of ten of the researchers, advocates and other experts I talked to for this book were women. Because that’s who tends to study children. And a great number of those women were raising children themselves. At the time when the country needed voices like [theirs] the most, their capacity was limited by the same catastrophe that was affecting everyone else.”
To her credit, Kamenetz has no desire to play the blame game. Rather than deploy a favorite argument of the right — that left-leaning parents, school officials and teachers’ unions were responsible for school closures — or entertain progressives’ assertions that virus-denying, Trump-supporting proponents of school reopening did not care much whether teachers lived or died, Kamenetz takes a more balanced view.
“These decisions shouldn’t have been left up to districts in the first place,” she writes. “They were mired in political battles. They had little relevant expertise to judge incomplete and emerging evidence.”
Still, the book is at times confusing, leaping backward and forward in time despite its ostensible division into sections labeled “Spring 2020,” “Summer 2020” and so on. The plethora of expert, parent and student voices from across the country can be overwhelming — and sometimes I wished for more direct quotes and thoughts from the children she interviewed, rather than summaries of their parents’ perspectives.
There is a slight overemphasis on history for a book that Kamenetz promises, in the introduction, will tell “the story of 2020 and 2021 in the words of children and teenagers from around the country.” Occasionally, the book also suffers from clumsy writing — for example, a triply mixed metaphor in which Kamenetz declares that the “politics of childcare” is a “field … crisscrossed with bright lines and third rails, like one of those laser mazes in a heist movie.” Elsewhere, she jarringly interjects, in mockery of a senator’s statement, “Hahahaha that’s a sweet thought, guy.”
The book is at its best when Kamenetz’s human reporting is allowed to dominate the page. These moments will stick with me most:
The teacher in Brooklyn who realized the school system wasn’t fulfilling its promise of deep cleaning when she drew in pencil on a desktop, then arrived the next morning to discover it hadn’t been wiped away overnight.
The 11-year-old autistic, dyslexic boy in San Francisco who, frustrated by his inability to learn on Zoom, begged of his parents: “I want to die. I wish I could kill myself. I want you to kill me!”
The teenager on an Oklahoma reservation who lost his scholarship when his grades slipped during online learning — rendering him unable to accept the offered spot at his dream school, Oklahoma State. When the teen’s mother and Kamenetz showed up at the Sonic restaurant where he worked, he refused to acknowledge them.
“May I please take your order?” was all he would say. He didn’t want to talk about it.
Hannah Natanson is a Washington Post education reporter.
It was a cold day in January 2019, and Heidi, who was 6 years old, was ready for her first day of school in the United States. Her father, Jorge, woke up early to help her with her hair and pack her lunch. Jorge and Heidi had migrated from Guatemala to the United States in 2018. (I am using their first names only because of their vulnerable and changing immigration status.) Upon arrival at the Mexico-U.S. border, they were separated. For more than two months Jorge was in Texas while his daughter was 1,700 miles away in New York City.
Like many immigrant parents, Jorge’s greatest goal is to provide a better life for Heidi. And like many immigrant parents, he believes that American schools promise Heidi the opportunity for that better life. For Jorge, after the hardship of the journey north and the trauma of family separation, school offers hope.
Before Heidi headed to school that morning, Jorge took pictures of her in her dress, tights and puffy silver coat. They waited at the bus stop, looking nervous but feeling excited. Heidi spoke mostly Spanish and a little English. She was headed to a bilingual program where one of her teachers spoke Spanish. Jorge was hopeful. Heidi was hopeful.
Over 18 million children in the United States — one in four children — were born in another country or have at least one parent who was. For the last 12 years I have focused on understanding the trajectories of Latin American immigrant families in the United States. Immigrant parents describe education and schooling as among the most important benefits of migrating to the United States. Leaving home and risking the treacherous, expensive journey north is often partly motivated by the promise that U.S. schools hold for children. To migrate is to care.
The promise of education, however, became precarious in March 2020, when school closures and remote learning measures were implemented to curtail the spread of the coronavirus. These measures disadvantaged immigrant children. Their parents were unfamiliar with the school system and often faced language barriers — which posed challenges to navigating distance learning.
In addition, the pandemic compromised many in-person school support structures that immigrant students depend on, such as English-language instruction, speech therapies, reading support, social work check-ins and other forms of counseling. Between 2020 and 2021, many immigrant parents struggled to navigate their vulnerable immigration statuses and a health crisis while continuing to work outside their homes in essential services.
With school buildings open again, educators now must focus on welcoming immigrant students and families to their classrooms, providing in-person language support and, most important, learning from these families’ experiences.
When an immigrant child arrives in an English-speaking classroom without many English-language skills, research shows that the most important factors are the teacher’s mind-set, access to adults who speak the child’s language and the overall environment of the school. Some educators perceive immigrant families negatively because of cultural and language differences: They focus on what immigrant children don’t know and don’t have, as opposed to what they do know and what they bring to the classroom. A deficit-oriented view can lower educators’ expectations of immigrant children, which in turn can make it harder for those children to succeed academically. Classrooms where teachers celebrate immigrant students’ languages and cultures in meaningful ways provide a safe space for children to grow.
Language connects school and home. Any communication materials — letters sent home, emails from teachers, phone calls from nurses, signage on school walls — in languages other than English allow immigrant families to get closer to schools and educators. Bilingual or multilingual programs, teachers trained in language learning, counselors, nurses and school psychologists who speak languages that the children speak all increase trust between families and schools.
But perhaps the most effective way to provide an environment that allows for children to flourish, learn and develop is to understand the specific vulnerabilities of immigrant families in the United States. In other words, to care. Teachers in many schools have done just that. From creating WhatsApp group chats with families to engaging in parent-teacher conferences over FaceTime, teachers are meeting parents and children where they are. Some immigrant parents work in low-paying, unstable jobs, leaving them with little time to physically go to schools. There is also a general hesitance to trust the bureaucratic structure of schools because of immigrant families’ vulnerable immigration statuses. There is fear that sharing their stories, physically being in school buildings and signing school forms could hurt their asylum cases or compromise their undocumented status.
Educators in schools with high rates of immigrant student enrollment are learning about immigration laws and how those laws affect the families their districts serve. This knowledge makes authentic relationships possible.
Our society benefits as a whole when educators support immigrant students. When implemented with care, multicultural and multilingual curriculums engage students in constructive dialogue, prioritizing the human experience and genuine learning. Schools aren’t only about the hopes of individuals but also the larger hope that we can create an inclusive and just society where people of all sorts of backgrounds can thrive.
Heidi had a great first day of school that January in 2019. She mentioned the colorful classroom, the teacher speaking to her in Spanish, and her excitement about having books to bring home. It took Jorge a couple of months to trust Heidi’s teacher enough to tell her the story of their migration. Heidi had already written some stories and made drawings about Guatemala, the border and living in the United States at school.
When the pandemic hit a year later, Jorge’s hopes for school as a place of opportunity shattered. Like many children, Heidi had a hard time engaging in remote schooling. The Wi-Fi connection was unstable at home, she missed the social aspect of learning among peers and Jorge contracted the coronavirus, resulting in a three-week stay at a hospital.
Eight months later, when Heidi was able to go back to school in person, she and Jorge felt the nervousness of that January day again. But Heidi came home from her first day back and told her father that there were other students in her class who also were from Guatemala. Heidi was excited she got to use Spanish and English with her friends. She was enthusiastic about helping them find the library and gave them tips about when and how to use the bathroom at school. Heidi was hopeful.
Gabrielle Oliveira is an associate professor of education and Brazil studies at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. Her work focuses on family migration, care structures and the educational trajectories of immigrant children in the United States. She is the author of “Motherhood Across Borders: Immigrants and Their Children in Mexico and in New York City.”
Kimberly Wilson’s TikTok videos often begin with the back of a little girl’s head. The child’s hair is matted, and Wilson, who works at Butcher-Greene Elementary in Grandview, Mo., begins to gently comb out the snarls. By the end of the videos, which tend to be just a minute or two long, the girl’s hair has been transformed into a beautiful braided style, often with colorful bows adorning it.
Wilson, who posts under the handle @ms.honey.vibes, is careful to obscure the children’s identities and never shares specific details of their struggles. Butcher-Greene is a Title I school, which means that it receives federal assistance because a high number of its students come from low-income families. Over 80 percent of its nearly 300 students qualify for free or reduced-price lunches.
Wilson told me that some of her students are dealing with unstable and even violent home lives, and they see things outside of school a child should never have to see. She started making videos of the children before she even had a TikTok account, because she wanted to show them how to do their own hair at home if the adults in their lives weren’t capable of helping them care for it.
Hair care isn’t part of Wilson’s job description. As a behavior intervention specialist, she provides support to teachers when students are struggling. She gives children breaks from the classroom when they act out, and helps them work on their emotional regulation. “We’ll either remove the student to work on skills or remove the students to have a sensory break,” she explained. Wilson has mats and beanbag chairs in her room, where children can rest when they are exhausted or overwhelmed.
She does hair in any spare moments she can grab. Since her TikToks started going viral, other educators have reached out to her to say they do similar care work for their students. Wilson highlighted a fourth-grade teacher in Alabama named Carey Arensberg who has a “care closet” filled with toothbrushes, deodorant, hair ties and food for kids in need. Wilson has been able to install a washer and dryer in her school building, thanks to donations from her TikTok followers, so that children without clean clothes can do laundry.
This kind of crucial support for children is something that happens every day in schools. When the pandemic began in 2020 and schools shut down, children did not just miss out on academics. They missed out on essential care from trusted adults outside their homes. I’m not just talking about child care for working parents, though of course schools do provide that, to an extent (still, the American school day doesn’t mirror typical parents’ working hours). I’m talking about a full spectrum of physical and emotional support, what Lauren Bauer, a fellow in economic studies at the Brookings Institution and the associate director of the Hamilton Project, who researches education and safety net policies, described as “stability and relationships.”
Dig deeper into the moment.
“Schools served a vital function in protecting our most vulnerable kids,” said Bauer. This function may have been obscure to many people who don’t frequently interact with the public education system. But when schools closed for months, “we no longer had that window into children’s lives. The screening — not just for glasses but for trouble at home; the observation that a child is falling asleep at their desk, or seems hungry or lacks an appetite,” she said.
Before the pandemic, more than 29 million children received food from the National School Lunch Program and around 15 million received food from the School Breakfast Program on a typical day, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture. And according to Census Bureau data for 2020, the most recent year for which information is available, the median estimated poverty rate for school-age children was around 13 percent.
This lapse in care for many children happened before the pandemic, in a smaller way, every summer break: As the nonprofit campaign No Kid Hungry noted in 2016, “Research shows that family grocery costs rise more than $300 a month when school is out and school meals disappear, putting a strain on already tight budgets.”
But once the coronavirus quarantines hit, it was a true disaster. “Between March and May of 2020, the rate of food insecurity tripled in the United States; by May, one-fifth of mothers were struggling to feed their children — the highest rate since such data became available in 2001,” according to Karina Piser in The Nation.
What seems missing from a lot of the culture war wrangling over the implementation of “social-emotional learning,” or SEL — a curriculum meant to help bolster students’ emotional regulation and relationship skills — is the acknowledgment that emotional stability and academic achievement are inextricably linked. And that link is not new. Wendy A. Paterson, the dean of the School of Education at Buffalo State College, who has been an educator for 40 years and now trains educators, said that it has always been her experience that the whole child matters. “If you were a really well-prepared teacher, you were also sensitive to the fact that these are human beings in progress, and that schools have such a great influence,” Paterson said.
For example, it is much more difficult to learn if you’re crushed from grieving a parent or caregiver who died from Covid, a fate suffered by roughly one in 450 American children by the end of 2021. As the report “Hidden Pain: Children Who Lost a Parent or Caregiver to Covid-19 and What the Nation Can Do to Help Them,” from a group of health, economic and education experts, points out, “The traumatic loss of a caregiver has been associated with depression, addiction, lower academic achievement and higher dropout rates.” Nonwhite children lost caregivers at “up to nearly four times the rate of their white peers,” the report notes — a “grim reality.”
While “kids are incredibly resilient,” Paterson said, after being out of school for a prolonged period of time, “we were getting kids coming back who were just unable to work with other kids, to integrate with other kids and speak with them appropriately.”
What’s the most important thing school offered you? How did it influence your life, either in the long term or the short term?Continue »
When The Times polled over 300 school counselors in May, 88 percent of them said that students were having more trouble regulating their emotions than they did before the pandemic. This is a stark reminder for everyone that “we have got to go back to the notion that the classroom is a place for the development of people, and not just for the dissemination of curriculum,” as Paterson said. Ideally, we would live in a country where kids had their basic needs met by their parents or their close communities, and schools did not have to play such a vital and expansive role in children’s emotional lives. But we don’t live in an ideal world, and the more places children can learn to be empathetic humans, the better.
As Kimberly Wilson told me, what she’s doing for these children “goes so much further than just hair.” All the children in her school know that she only does hair for the kids who really need it, so they have started looking out for one another. They will bring her the children who need help. When the children walk in the room with their new hairstyles, their classmates shower them with compliments. “It’s starting to come full circle with our babies,” Wilson said. The children are seeing their teachers act with care and compassion, and they are giving it back to one another. If that’s not an essential schoolroom lesson, I don’t know what is.
In one word, how does it feel to be a teacher right now?
These 12 Teachers Don’t See Themselves as Superheroes
Give this article
Across the United States, education has become one of the hottest and most keenly felt political issues. Ever since the Covid pandemic began, governors, mayors, union officials, legislators and school board members have been arguing — often quite fiercely — about fundamental questions: When should schools reopen? What should be taught there? What is the purpose of public education? Who should decide these questions?
Once pretty much everyone was back in school — an uneven process that took place at different rates in different areas and in different types of schools — another set of questions emerged: How far behind had students fallen academically? How could they catch up? What about their social and emotional development, which also seemed to be lagging?
Nearly everyone had an opinion, but it sometimes seemed that one of the most important constituencies in this discussion was left out: teachers. As part of Opinion’s “What Is School For?” package, we asked a dozen public school teachers from elementary, middle and high schools to talk with us about teaching during a pandemic, trying to meet students’ academic and social needs and being caught between parents and politicians.
Like a lot of people in America, they were worried. “I find we don’t even have the art of conversation anymore,” one of the teachers said. “My students can’t talk to each other.” Teacher after teacher talked about how much harder the job has gotten over the past few years. “I just feel like I have an endless to-do list,” one said. “I understand that everyone should have a say,” another pointed out. “But oftentimes, there’s a lot of collision there.”
The teachers we gathered spent an hour and a half talking through these collisions with one another — which policymakers and parents would benefit from digging into — but they also took the time to talk about what inspired them to become teachers in the first place and what, despite all the difficulties, is keeping them in the classroom.
“Our school district has seniors write a letter to a teacher that’s impacted them, an elementary or a middle school teacher that’s impacted them,” one teacher told us. “And when you get a letter from a student saying, ‘I hated going to the library at the beginning of the year, but after taking your reading class and reading better, I love to go to the library, and I might write a book myself one day.’ I mean, that’s why I do it.”Aaron Retica and Adrian J. RiveraMr. Retica is an editor in Opinion. Mr. Rivera is an editorial assistant in Opinion.PARTICIPANTS
Stacey55, Democrat, Black, special area teacher
Brandie38, independent, Black, elementary school teacher
Jill35, Democrat, white, elementary school teacher
Carlotta35, Democrat, Latino, elementary school teacher
Bobbie48, Democrat, Asian, special education teacher
Dan55, independent, white, high school teacher
Shannon54, Democrat, white, middle school teacher
Laura49, Republican, white, high school teacher
Mary37, Democrat, white, elementary school teacher
Jessie37, Democrat, white, high school teacher
Tyler35, Republican, white, middle school teacher
David55, independent, white, high school teacherTRANSCRIPTModerator, Margie Omero
If you had to describe your biggest concern about the United States in a single word, what would it be?
Jill, 35, Democrat, white, elementary school teacher
Inequitable.
Jessie , 37, Democrat, white, high school teacher
Extremists.
Dan, 55, independent, white, high school teacher
Polarized.
Shannon, 54, Democrat, white, middle school teacher
Divided.
Brandie, 38, independent, Black, elementary school teacher
Unbalanced.
Tyler, 35, Republican, white, middle school teacher
Corruption.
Carlotta, 35, Democrat, Latino, elementary school teacher
Lacking.
Stacey, 55, Democrat, Black, special area teacher
Turmoil.
Mary, 37, Democrat, white, elementary school teacher
Hate.
David, 55, independent, white, high school teacher
Polarized.
Bobbie, 48, Democrat, Asian, special education teacher
My word would be “disregard.”
Laura, 49, Republican, white, high school teacher
Mine was one that was already used — “division.”Moderator, Margie Omero
Why did people pick so many words around “division”?
Stacey, 55, Democrat, Black, special area teacher
I feel like we’re going backwards in terms of equity. Whenever I look at the news, it’s always the left, the right, Republicans, Democrat. And in my head, I’m thinking, “Why can’t we all just be one?”
David, 55, independent, white, high school teacher
With polarization, it has to be “either/or,” instead of “both,” instead of “and.” We’ve lost empathy. And with that, we lose forgiveness.
Bobbie, 48, Democrat, Asian, special education teacher
I teach high school. I teach young adults. I used to teach in college. But even just within my limited experience, I’ve seen a lot of shift in attitude. I’ve seen a lot of shift in effort.Moderator, Margie Omero
A shift in a good way or a shift in a bad way?
Bobbie, 48, Democrat, Asian, special education teacher
A bad way. I find we don’t even have the art of conversation anymore. My students can’t talk to each other. They can’t talk to adults. And I feel that that doesn’t bode well because, again, I look at these young people, and I want to have hope for them, but then I try to teach them, and I just don’t feel hopeful.
Mary, 37, Democrat, white, elementary school teacher
I kind of have the opposite experience. I did intervention this past school year, and before that, only elementary education for eight years. I feel like the kids now are so much more respectful and appreciative of each other, especially in the district I came from before Kansas City. It was Title I, low income. But they realized how hard it is to work for something and how appreciative they were when they got something. And I don’t think kids now, like older kids maybe, high school kids — I think they’re spoiled rotten, whereas the younger kids have — they’re just so much more respectful and appreciative. It was mostly second, third grade where, yeah, they’re little and not corrupt yet, I guess.
Jessie , 37, Democrat, white, high school teacher
I definitely can empathize with Bobbie in terms of feeling hopeless. I’ve been an educator for 13 years, and my toughest year was this past year. But I have hope that we’re going to swing away from this extremely difficult time.Moderator, Aaron Retica
This is another pick-a-word exercise, a single word to describe how it feels to be a teacher right now.
Dan, 55, independent, white, high school teacher
Challenging.
Bobbie, 48, Democrat, Asian, special education teacher
Tough.
Laura, 49, Republican, white, high school teacher
Exhausting.
Mary, 37, Democrat, white, elementary school teacher
Pressure.
Tyler, 35, Republican, white, middle school teacher
I’m trying to think of a word that’s like “pulled in different directions.” “Overwhelmed,” maybe.
Jessie , 37, Democrat, white, high school teacher
Also “exhausting.”
Brandie, 38, independent, Black, elementary school teacher
Chaotic.
Shannon, 54, Democrat, white, middle school teacher
Frustrating.
Carlotta, 35, Democrat, Latino, elementary school teacher
Exciting.
Jill, 35, Democrat, white, elementary school teacher
Exhausting.
Stacey, 55, Democrat, Black, special area teacher
Unappreciated.
David, 55, independent, white, high school teacher
Needed.Moderator, Aaron Retica
There were three people who said “exhausting.” Why “exhausting”?
Jill, 35, Democrat, white, elementary school teacher
I am in a school district where we’re facing the possibility of going on strike. It’s exhausting to me to come in already starting the school year where our board of education is not respecting us. And after last year and the year and a half we’ve had with teaching, it’s just — it’s so exhausting to be pulled all these different ways.
Laura, 49, Republican, white, high school teacher
I just feel like I have an endless to-do list that’s what I have to do to prepare for my classroom, what admin wants me to do to prepare for my classroom, what the law says I have to do.Moderator, Aaron Retica
Carlotta, you said “exciting.”
Carlotta, 35, Democrat, Latino, elementary school teacher
I agreed with the other words that everybody else said, too, but I was trying to think of something a little bit different. And I’m into technology, and so that’s why I think it’s exciting with all of the new technology that is coming into the classrooms for students to use.Moderator, Aaron Retica
Tyler, you were trying to describe a sort of multifaceted feeling?
Tyler, 35, Republican, white, middle school teacher
Kind of piggybacking off of what Laura just described: You’re answerable not only to administration and also parents but also to the different levels of bureaucracy that are sometimes telling you things that don’t coincide with one another on a district level and on the state level and the federal level. And then there are just a lot of voices because education is essential. I understand that everyone should have a say. But oftentimes, there’s a lot of collision there. And then we’re kind of caught in between with what exactly the expectations are for us. And then things kind of get piled on with state testing and then other mandates. It’s a lot to kind of manage all of that, while also managing behaviors day to day in the classroom.
Dan, 55, independent, white, high school teacher
Teaching’s always been challenging. I’m going into my 30th year, and it’s still a challenge. When I first started, it was a challenge to get stuff ready for my classroom. And I didn’t think I was doing a very good job. And I still don’t know if I’m doing a good job, but it’s less challenging for the classroom management part. But the other challenges come up. There are new initiatives. It’s always something new.Moderator, Aaron Retica
Dan, several teachers here have mentioned that this last year was particularly challenging, and you said that all the years are challenging. Do you feel that the postpandemic period has been especially difficult for teachers overall?
Dan, 55, independent, white, high school teacher
Absolutely. Last year, we finally got back to being in a classroom. The kids who really hadn’t been in a classroom for two years — I kind of think they forgot how to be in a classroom and forgot how to act in a classroom. It was a challenge to get them to focus. This isn’t your house. Get off the furniture. You can’t do that kind of stuff. You’re back in school. And we have certain things we have to do in class.Moderator, Margie Omero
If we had done this group three years ago before the pandemic, would you have picked the same word to describe teaching? How many people say, “I would have picked the same word if we did this three years ago, before the pandemic”?If we had done this group before the pandemic, would you have picked the same word to describe teaching?9 people raised their hands.
Stacey, 55, Democrat, Black, special area teacher
Brandie, 38, independent, Black, elementary school teacher
Jill, 35, Democrat, white, elementary school teacher
Carlotta, 35, Democrat, Latino, elementary school teacher
Bobbie, 48, Democrat, Asian, special education teacher
Dan, 55, independent, white, high school teacher
Shannon, 54, Democrat, white, middle school teacher
Laura, 49, Republican, white, high school teacher
Mary, 37, Democrat, white, elementary school teacher
Jessie , 37, Democrat, white, high school teacher
Tyler, 35, Republican, white, middle school teacher
David, 55, independent, white, high school teacher
Jessie , 37, Democrat, white, high school teacher
I said “exhausting,” and I’ve always felt that teaching is exhausting, which doesn’t, at this point in my career, stop me from doing it.
Brandie, 38, independent, Black, elementary school teacher
Yeah, I picked “chaotic,” and I would just say I’ve been a teacher for 16 years. It’s always been a certain level of chaos and unpredictability. But I would say, postpandemic, it’s just intensified things that teachers have been saying for years about workload, about support with managing challenging student behaviors, about unrealistic testing and curriculum expectations.
Stacey, 55, Democrat, Black, special area teacher
I feel the same way. For the most part, I feel like being a teacher is a thankless profession. And it’s something that you definitely have to want to do. Otherwise, you won’t be doing it for long. I come from a district that’s a parent-pleasing district —Moderator, Margie Omero
What does that mean, “a parent-pleasing district”?
Stacey, 55, Democrat, Black, special area teacher
Students aren’t held accountable, parents aren’t held accountable. For example, at one point, they wanted to implement a uniform policy. Parents raised a stink. OK, they scrapped that. A teacher gives a kid a grade — or a kid earns a grade on a certain thing, and they don’t pass the assignment or the class. And the district is breathing down the teacher’s neck: “You need to pass this child.” Well, the child didn’t do what he or she was supposed to do. At times, there’s pressure on you to change it because the parent is over here, barking at the district level. And then the district is barking at the administration. And the administration is barking at us.Moderator, Margie Omero
Shannon, you said you would have picked a different word if we had done this a couple of years ago. What’s changed?
Shannon, 54, Democrat, white, middle school teacher
When I started teaching, it was more fun, and students were held accountable. Now my middle school students come with some kind of sense of entitlement. And I don’t know where that comes from. And many of their parents are younger, and they just want to be their friend. When I was a kid, you were afraid of your parents. If you got in trouble at school, there was a consequence at home. Now a lot of these kids, they get suspended, they come back with new fancy shoes and tattoos and rewards for being rude and disrespectful.Who here has thought of leaving the profession because of challenges during the pandemic?5 people raised their hands.
Stacey, 55, Democrat, Black, special area teacher
Brandie, 38, independent, Black, elementary school teacher
Jill, 35, Democrat, white, elementary school teacher
Carlotta, 35, Democrat, Latino, elementary school teacher
Bobbie, 48, Democrat, Asian, special education teacher
Dan, 55, independent, white, high school teacher
Shannon, 54, Democrat, white, middle school teacher
Laura, 49, Republican, white, high school teacher
Mary, 37, Democrat, white, elementary school teacher
Jessie , 37, Democrat, white, high school teacher
Tyler, 35, Republican, white, middle school teacher
David, 55, independent, white, high school teacher
Stacey, 55, Democrat, Black, special area teacher
For me, it was a fleeting thought because at the beginning of the pandemic, my district’s theme was compassion over compliance. Well, that quickly went out the window. Almost a year into the pandemic, we finished out the first year virtual, and the following year was almost completely virtual. And in the middle of our district’s Covid numbers escalating, they ordered all teachers back in the building, with no students. Well, some of us, like me, have children who are also in the district. You want me back in the building, but I can’t bring my child. And my child is a minor, and she can’t stay home by herself. If I wasn’t so close to the end of the rainbow, I would have said, “You know what? Forget this.” I just felt like I wasn’t appreciated.
Tyler, 35, Republican, white, middle school teacher
I had an exit plan this summer and was looking to shift careers. This past year, the group of sixth graders that I had was by far the best I’ve had in my six years of teaching. That wasn’t pushing me out. I still love the curriculum and love interacting with them. But it was the other stuff that I wasn’t sure was going to end. Everything that we have to do on top of teaching was kind of driving me out. But I do have hope for this next year.Moderator, Aaron Retica
What are some of the other jobs that you’re performing when you’re a teacher?
Carlotta, 35, Democrat, Latino, elementary school teacher
A counselor, a parent, a nurse.
Brandie, 38, independent, Black, elementary school teacher
Technician, curriculum development. Mediator, social-emotional therapist, to some degree. Secretary, data analyst.
Jill, 35, Democrat, white, elementary school teacher
I’d say all the above, as well as, sometimes I’m — I don’t feel like a police officer, but I’m breaking up fights, even at the elementary level.
Mary, 37, Democrat, white, elementary school teacher
A safe space, the only safe space for some, and a confidante, an advocate.Moderator, Aaron Retica
A lot of people suggest that teachers don’t have enough say in decisions about education.Do you have enough control over what you’re doing? Who says no?8 people raised their hands.
Stacey, 55, Democrat, Black, special area teacher
Brandie, 38, independent, Black, elementary school teacher
Jill, 35, Democrat, white, elementary school teacher
Carlotta, 35, Democrat, Latino, elementary school teacher
Bobbie, 48, Democrat, Asian, special education teacher
Dan, 55, independent, white, high school teacher
Shannon, 54, Democrat, white, middle school teacher
Laura, 49, Republican, white, high school teacher
Mary, 37, Democrat, white, elementary school teacher
Jessie , 37, Democrat, white, high school teacher
Tyler, 35, Republican, white, middle school teacher
David, 55, independent, white, high school teacherModerator, Aaron Retica
If teachers had more of a voice, how would things be different?
Shannon, 54, Democrat, white, middle school teacher
Teaching is a second career for me. And I’ve never had a job where so many people think they could do your job better than you without any training. People think they can just come in and be a teacher. Everybody says, “Oh, teachers are so valuable.” But in most states — and I’m sure many of you would agree — they’re not treated that way. In other countries, teachers are paid very well and given all these other things and revered. And here they’re not. We do need to be about the students. At the same time, with the pandemic, people are like, “Well, if you don’t like teaching, just quit.” Well, who’s going to teach the kids if we all quit?Moderator, Aaron Retica
Laura, you were talking before about being pulled a million different ways. If teachers like you had a bigger voice, how could it be better?
Laura, 49, Republican, white, high school teacher
Well, I think the biggest thing is to let teachers be the drivers of policies that are created, instead of them being created at a political level or even an admin level. And when I say admin, I’m not talking about the admin within my school but the district itself. Really listening to the educators and just letting them drive the policy decisions, not letting people who have never been in a classroom — politicians and things like that — drive those policy decisions. Because we know what happens in our classroom on a day-to-day basis, and others don’t.Moderator, Aaron Retica
Could a couple of you give me examples of what you would be doing in class that you’re not getting to do because of the jumble of other things?
Jill, 35, Democrat, white, elementary school teacher
Yeah, I would say focusing more on the social-emotional side of teaching, because my kids, they come in, and they’ve been home for a year and a half, almost two years. And they’ve forgotten how to play with each other or how not to argue — just the basics. I felt like because I teach first grade, they haven’t ever been in school, some of my kids. So I really wish we could spend more time building the background that they need, even just saying “thank you” after you get something. Some of them don’t get that at home. I just wish we could focus more on that instead of so much on the rigor of what we have to teach, because if they aren’t met emotionally, they’re not going to retain anything.
Stacey, 55, Democrat, Black, special area teacher
As far as nonteachers making policy decisions: In my state, any Joe Blow can be on the board of education. Most professions, you have to be in that profession to be on the board that governs that profession. And that’s not the case for education. Nonteachers making policy changes and decisions that affect us — it’s ridiculous.Moderator, Margie Omero
We talked about some of the challenges of teaching. But what made you decide to go into teaching? What inspired you?
Brandie, 38, independent, Black, elementary school teacher
I wanted to be a teacher because of the children. That was my big drive when I started. And that’s what I continually think about on the bad days, is, “These kids depend on me,” especially kids that look like me. They need to see other teachers that look like them in the classroom. And I’ve always taught primary children, so third and second and first. And they’re just funny at that age. Just remembering something silly that the kids did or something they said or something they said to each other just makes me smile and gets me through the day.
Laura, 49, Republican, white, high school teacher
I love what I teach: government and history. I love the age group that takes those classes in my state, juniors and seniors in high school. I love talking with that group of kids. They have a lot to talk about and to learn about history, and we have a lot of great conversations.
Dan, 55, independent, white, high school teacher
I tell everybody I have the greatest job because I get to come to school and I get to play every day in physics. And I like teaching high school because the kids have a sense of humor. They start to laugh and get sarcasm. And we have a good time. I also coach and advise classes and see kids outside of the class as well. It’s just — it’s a great experience.
Carlotta, 35, Democrat, Latino, elementary school teacher
I had some teachers who were a great help to me in middle school. That’s why I wanted to go teach.
David, 55, independent, white, high school teacher
I didn’t want to be a teacher. I hated kids. I graduated from U. of A., was working for the city of Tucson. It was boring, and the people I worked with were boring. When my college career ended, my roommate kind of forced me to go help out at the local high school. I had fun with coaching. You can have some positive effect on kids. You see and you kind of become everything that everybody else is saying — a parent. You see their successes. You have the joy with them. But you have the accountability. And so I went back and changed my career and went back to U. of A. and got a teacher certification. And now I’ve taught 11 different subjects across 32 years.
Jessie , 37, Democrat, white, high school teacher
Similar to David, I didn’t think I wanted to teach. I studied writing in college. And they say when you’re an English major, you can do anything. And I just said, tell me one thing because I don’t know what I want to do. And I loved books. And I thought — I had a friend who became a teacher, and I was like, “Oh, maybe I can just talk about books all day and have super-high-level conversations about literature. That sounds like a good thing.” And I learned quickly into student teaching that that is not what education was all about. So I went into education for books, but I stayed for the students. I don’t always get to have those high-level conversations. But once in a while, they do. The kids absolutely have kept me in it. And I don’t think I ever would have thought that. Seeing kids first in their family not only to graduate high school but to be in high school or to see them get those acceptance letters from college — I mean, there’s nothing like it in terms of being there when that happens.Moderator, Aaron Retica
Sometimes people talk about how teachers are kind of superhuman. What do you think people mean when they say that?
Brandie, 38, independent, Black, elementary school teacher
As I’ve chugged along in my career, I’ve liked that phrase less and less. It adds an unrealistic pressure. And in some ways, it takes the humanity out of us. It’s like we can’t have bad days. We can’t be off. We can’t be unhappy. We have to be always on. The culture’s infatuated with superheroes. Superman can’t have a bad day. He’s Superman. He has to save everybody constantly. But who’s saving Superman when he has a bad day? Or he’s sick or he’s hurt?
Mary, 37, Democrat, white, elementary school teacher
The idea that teachers are superheroes — do people say that because there’s so much stuff we go through and have to deal with that normal civilian people are like, “There’s no way I could do it”? Well, half the time, we can’t do it, either. But also, when a student comes back to you or when you have a struggling student and they finally get it, that is the biggest emotion in the world, is when you have that kid, that kid who overcomes a behavioral issue or finally masters the standard or hits proficient on something. Those are the superhero moments, for sure.
Shannon, 54, Democrat, white, middle school teacher
Sometimes people say “superhero,” and my thing is, I’m just doing my job. I mean, everybody does their job. Sometimes I think that people expect teachers to fix everything. As much as we love the kids, you can’t fix everything in their life with school. But our school district has seniors write a letter to a teacher that’s impacted them, an elementary or a middle school teacher that’s impacted them — and when you get a letter from a student saying, “I hated going to the library at the beginning of the year, but after taking your reading class and reading better, I love to go to the library, and I might write a book myself one day.” I mean, that’s why I do it.Moderator, Margie Omero
Let’s switch gears here a bit. What is the purpose of education? What is school for?
Bobbie, 48, Democrat, Asian, special education teacher
School is to help students realize their potential. They get exposed to different kinds of people and different backgrounds and different topics. And it’s for them to absorb as much as they want to and to do that exploration on their own. So my job, as a homeroom teacher or as a science teacher, is just to give them more options beyond maybe what they’re seeing online or in their home, to see that there’s other stuff out there and just to get out and figure it out for yourself. It’s really about encouraging them to find confidence and move on and just be awesome.Moderator, Margie Omero
Carlotta, in your view, what is school for?
Carlotta, 35, Democrat, Latino, elementary school teacher
Teaching kids the basics of life: reading, writing, math, budgeting.Moderator, Margie Omero
Tyler, how about you?
Tyler, 35, Republican, white, middle school teacher
To provide the next generation with the skills to help them succeed and to be responsible citizens with good values, to give students the foundation of what our democratic system is. This is how we participate in it. And this is why it’s important, along with compassion, strong families, kindness.
David, 55, independent, white, high school teacher
I think education is just formalized curiosity. Our skill set is to get a bunch of kids and individual kids who don’t want to be there — and don’t want to do what you do — to do it and do it willingly and happily. As teachers, we’re just the directors to help them get the skill set, the civic responsibility, as a person.Moderator, Margie Omero
What do you mean by “civic responsibility”?
David, 55, independent, white, high school teacher
To understand that they’re not entitled to anything, that they have to give back and it’s a community. And you have to be respectful and listen. That’s civic responsibility, as well as, “You can have a chance. There’s still hope for social mobility.”Moderator, Margie Omero
You think that’s an important part of your job as a teacher, is helping kids with social mobility?
David, 55, independent, white, high school teacher
Absolutely, to teach them there is hope. You can still, in this nation, be whatever and whomever you want to be.
Jessie , 37, Democrat, white, high school teacher
I think part of it is helping students really figure out who they are. And I can say this, especially for high school, what they’re good at and how to foster that, what they’re not good at and how to either get better at it or kind of work around it and then prepare them to sort of take that and show them what possibilities there are for them in all that.Moderator, Margie Omero
OK, Stacey, what do you think? What is school for?
Stacey, 55, Democrat, Black, special area teacher
Guiding the students in how to navigate this world that we live in. It’s changed. It’s not like it was when we were growing up. I was just telling my daughter this morning, she and her peers have the world at their fingertips. And there is nothing that they can’t find out by going online. And so at this point — I don’t see schools going away, but I see fewer and fewer brick and mortar buildings because, again, the pandemic has taught us that for older kids anyway, a certain level of things can be done online.
Mary, 37, Democrat, white, elementary school teacher
I want my kids to have a passion and to take ownership of their learning. And whatever they are thrilled about, diving deeper into — amazing. We’re all forced to teach to the standards and whatever, yada, yada, yada. That is not the entire thing of school. School is learning how to be social with people. School is building character. It’s so much more than reading, writing, arithmetic.Moderator, Aaron Retica
Here’s the last thing I want to ask about: How much do you think it would matter if teachers had higher social status and were simply paid more? Would that revolutionize education?
David, 55, independent, white, high school teacher
Thomas Jefferson always said that you needed the best and the brightest to be able to educate the next generation. And if that’s true, you need to treat them with respect. That means monetary compensation. Then others will hold you in that same regard. If not, then anybody, like the guy next to me, says, “I’ll just go teach as a hobby.” They don’t have any idea of the skill set that we possess.
Bobbie, 48, Democrat, Asian, special education teacher
This is actually my second career. I am a doctor, a medical doctor. And due to circumstances, I went from being in the hospital to being in the classroom. And I’ve actually had a strange reluctance to let people know about my education or my professional background because they’re like, “Why are you a teacher?” And I always tell people, “I can teach the material. I know my stuff. But not everyone can relay it and get it through to the kids.” So for me, I actually have both sides of it. I do believe that we need a little bit more respect and prestige for teachers because, again, as we said earlier, a lot of what we do does go unappreciated, just because of ignorance. They just don’t know what we do, how we get there, how hard it is every single day. It’s not just at graduation or the first day of school. It’s that second Tuesday in the middle of November when nobody wants to be there. And you’ve got to somehow muster up the strength to get everybody to open up that book and try to learn something today.
Shannon, 54, Democrat, white, middle school teacher
America in Focus seeks to hear and understand the views of cross-sections of Americans whose voices are often not heard in opinion journalism.
This discussion was moderated by a focus group veteran, Margie Omero, and Aaron Retica, an editor in Opinion. Ms. Omero does similar work for political candidates, parties and special interest groups. She chose the participants. (Times Opinion paid her for the work.) This transcript has been edited for length and clarity; an audio recording of the session is also included. Participants provided their biographical details. As is customary in focus groups, our role as moderators was not to argue with or fact-check the speakers, and some participants expressed opinions not rooted in facts.
Illustrations by Lucinda Rogers.
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American students’ test scores plunge to levels unseen for decades
Test scores in elementary school math and reading plummeted to levels unseen for decades, according to the first nationally representative report comparing student achievement from just before the pandemic to performance two years later.
Math scores dropped seven points during that period, marking a first-ever decline, while reading scores slipped five points, producing the largest dip in 30 years on the National Assessment of Educational Progress, or NAEP, often called “the nation’s report card.” The students who took the tests — given from January to March in 2020 and in 2022 — were 9 years old and mostly in fourth grade.
“These results are sobering,” said Peggy G. Carr, commissioner of the National Center for Education Statistics, which administers the tests. “It’s clear that covid-19 shocked American education and stunted the academic growth of this age group.”
The falloff — which she called “historic” — left little doubt about the pandemic’s toll. The average math score of 234 this year was comparable to the average score recorded in 1999, and the reading score of 215 was similar to the 2004 score. How long it might take to catch up is unclear and not likely to be understood until further test results are analyzed.
Carr said the academic losses are part of a complex picture of pandemic schooling. Other studies have shown a rise in classroom disruption, school violence, absenteeism, cyberbullying, and teacher and staff vacancies, and schools also say more students are seeking mental health services. “There are a lot of factors that contextualize these data that we’re looking at,” she said.
Schools began to struggle in spring 2020, as school buildings were shuttered nationally and learning faltered during the last few months of the school year. Then, for at least part of the next school year, millions of students learned remotely or under hybrid schedules that blended virtual and in-person classes. Last year, schools opened for in-person classes, but many scrambled repeatedly to manage covid surges, quarantines, mask mandates and staffing shortages. A number of educators called it the toughest time of their careers.
The stark results are likely to stir more debate about the wisdom of virtual learning and the speed at which schools reopened. There is wide agreement among educators that most students do better when they are in a classroom with a teacher.
The new data show that many of the most vulnerable students fared the worst. Children who performed at the lowest level lost the most in reading and math this year — with scores that plunged 10 to 12 points. By comparison, students who performed at the highest level fell an average of two to three points.
“While we see declines at all performance levels, the growing gap between students at the top and those at the bottom is an important but overlooked trend,” said Martin West, a member of the governing board that sets policy for NAEP and academic dean at Harvard Graduate School of Education, in a statement. “These results show that this gap widened further during the pandemic.”
“Supporting the academic recovery of lower-performing students should be a top priority for educators and policymakers nationwide,” West said.
Math scores for Black students tumbled 13 points, compared with eight points for Hispanic students and five points for White students. In reading, all three groups fell by six points. No statistically significant change in scores was reported for Asian, Native American or multiracial students.
Similarly, math scores sank seven to eight points for students who are economically disadvantaged, students with disabilities and English language learners. Reading scores dipped too, except for English language learners.
Geography made a difference, with math performance falling eight points in the Northeast, nine points in the Midwest, seven points in the South and five points in the West. Suburban schools fared worse than schools located in urban or rural areas.
Amid all of the declines, flat scores drew attention: No measurable declinein reading was found in the West, in cities or in rural areas. “The fact that reading achievement from students in cities held steady — when you consider the extreme crises cities are dealing with during the pandemic — is especially significant,” Carr said
Seventy percent of the 9-year-olds tested this year recalled learning remotely at some point during the pandemic. More than 80 percent of higher-performing students reported always having access to a laptop, a desktop computer or a tablet. Among lower-performing students, about 60 percent had constant access.
NAEP testing is done at public and private schools across the country that are randomly sampled, according to NCES. The test for 9-year-olds included three 15-minute blocks of questions, most of which were multiple choice, with more time allotted for answering a questionnaire. Test takers are randomly sampled, too — 14,800 students in all, from 410 schools. More than 90 percent of schools were sampled in both 2020 and 2022.
Education Secretary Miguel Cardona said in a statement that the NAEP results cast the experiences of the last two years in “a stark light” but should remind people to press ahead with efforts to accelerate student learning, support student mental health needs and invest in educators. States should steer federal relief funds “even more effectively and expeditiously” to proven strategies including “high-dosage” tutoring and after-school and summer programs, Cardona said.
Federal officials said the results are part of a special collection of long-term trend data. A more comprehensive look at student achievement is expected later this year. It will include national and state data, along with selected school district data for students in fourth and eighth grades in math and reading.
NAEP tests are a congressionally authorized project, sponsored by the Department of Education and administered through its statistical arm, the NCES.
Perspective by Lila Nordstrom and Sarah Senk Washington Post September 11th 2022
In the 21 years since Sept. 11, 2001, Americans have relied on wartime tropes to understand the tragedy: “Ground Zero” conjured images of nuclear detonation; the dead were described as “fallen heroes”; the proliferation of American flags served as a visual symbol of unity; we conjured up a “war on terror” in response. We used these tropes to create a sense of solidarity, something we’ve also attempted with less impressive results throughout the coronavirus pandemic. In the last two years, calls for unity and common purpose have centered on the same talk of victory and defeat that permeated 9/11 discourse. Vaccines and therapeutics have been figured as weapons, and viral surges described as covid’s “counterattack.” We’ve been at “war” with a cartoon spiky orb, and we’ve been losing.
The way we speak about the pandemic comes straight from the conceptual mold of 9/11 — the last crisis we can remember fondly for the way it brought us all together, if only for a while. Such rhetoric was stunningly effective at convincing the vast majority of Americans at the time that military actions were not only justified but a necessary response to the attacks. That focus, however, left us blind to the extent of the internal damage, including the suffering of those such as sick first responders and civilians. While similar martial metaphors have failed to unite us as successfully throughout the pandemic, they may still serve to obscure pain and loss.
Framing major domestic disasters through the lens of war occludes a role for civilians on the front line, displacing them from our national narratives. In fact, thanks in large part to community advocacy, only recently has the 9/11 commemorative story been modified to include those who are suffering from or have died of 9/11-related illnesses like cancer, respiratory and gastrointestinal illness, and other health issues caused by inhaling toxic dust. Such health problems began emerging in the early days of the World Trade Center cleanup, but they broke into public consciousness only after being championed by comedian Jon Stewart on “The Daily Show” in 2010, nine years after the attacks.
More broadly, recognition for 9/11’s second wave of victims has come after a decades-long struggle to secure care for those who cleaned up the World Trade Center site, and for those who lived, worked and attended school in Lower Manhattan’s toxic air in the aftermath of the towers’ collapse. All were assured by their own government that the air was safe to breathe. (Despite insufficient data, the Environmental Protection Agency announced within a week of the attacks that the air was safe, a claim that was debunked in 2003 in a report by the EPA inspector general.) All saw their concerns roundly ignored by those in power, even as officials invoked 9/11 to justify expensive interventions abroad.
But even though the wartime pomp of 9/11 made it harder to see this domestic tragedy unfolding, that same language has been critical for those seeking recognition. First responders had to lean heavily on their Bush-era depiction as the “first soldiers in the war on terror”when they went to Washington seeking care for their post-9/11 health issues. Others for whom that ready-made frame was a poor fit had to adapt their messaging in an almost comical exercise in creative marketing. The more than 300,000 civilians who breathed in the toxic air of Lower Manhattan after the attacks found that the only way to amplify public awareness of their illnesses was to position themselves as different kind of soldiers — troops in the fight to save the economy (a position that played into Rudy Giuliani’s assertion that “the resilience of life in New York City is the ultimate sign of defiance to terrorists”). But while the fantasy of toughing it out in wartime may have helped these patients achieve recognition, it was also what exposed them to danger in the first place. The media at the time highlighted their “brave” return to schools and homes, fulfilling their patriotic duty of “getting back to normal” as quickly as possible, breathing air they were promised was safe.
Today, a similar scenario is playing out in our covid-ravaged communities, and for similar reasons. As in the immediate aftermath of 9/11, our obsession with “getting back to normal” underpins much of the conversation about the pandemic. This fall we’ll be sending our children back to schools that have no covid mitigations in place and repeating the same careless mistakes we made with students after 9/11, potentially imposing a lifetime of illness in service of our desire to believe that our problems are over — or, more troublingly, that we’ve “vanquished” them.
It’s this fiction of triumph that’s critical. Wartime metaphors feel good because they tap into our understanding that wars end. Never mind that war has been our reality for the past two decades, no matter how many times we attempt to bookend it into a set of defeats and victories. Indeed, it may be this implicit idea of a terminus that makes the fact of perpetual conflict bearable.
Much the same is true for the pandemic, which lingers in ways we find we can endure precisely because our martial metaphors accustom us to thinking we will definitively defeat it. But until we stop using wartime language to describe domestic crises, we’ll be stuck with an unrealistic notion of the future, unable to imagine it as anything other than a return to some golden version of the past where everything was “normal.” That means we won’t be able to meaningfully move forward, let alone confront the lingering traumas and other consequences of the crisis we’re still living through.
We have an opportunity, however, to think outside the war framing and look critically at which experiences and impacts should inform our covid response. The coronavirus pandemic in the United States is a self-inflicted national tragedy whose uneven effects on people make it hard to classify. The fact that it has occurred in an age of intense political polarization and was exacerbated by the incompetence of the nation’s leaders has only made matters worse. Like the story of 9/11, the story of the pandemic is about the struggles of civilians to be taken seriously in the aftermath of government negligence. They are both stories of the failure of institutions and imagination and, frankly, our failure to recognize them as such is tied to our inability to conceive of these events as chronic rather than acute disasters.
We are not living through a war. We cannot fight our way out of a pandemic. Understood in terms of their domestic ramifications, the coronavirus and 9/11 are both public health stories, not war stories. Responding to them properly requires attention to social systems and health infrastructure, neither of which tends to capture the public imagination like victories and heroes do. When we think about chronic problems through a wartime framework, we make them more tolerable, but at the expense of our capacity to solve them. We must stop speaking as if we were all good soldiers and recognize that some human tragedies are just that.
By Caitlin Gibson July 21, 2022 at 10:28 a.m. EDT Washington Post
Eileen Grimes was sitting on the examination table, already feeling rather exposed in a thin paper gown as she waited to begin a routine appointment with her OB/GYN last August. Then the doctor walked in, looked Grimes in the eyes and gently asked with genuine concern: “How are you doing?”
Grimes, a married mother of two in Spokane, Wash., had spent the previous months caring for her husband through a recent addiction relapse, working a full-time job in IT and attempting to launch a new career as an author and entrepreneur, all while trying to keep her young children safe in the pandemic. Her 4-year-old daughter had grown increasingly clingy recently, often wanting to be held and comforted. Grimes’s 7-year-old son had started asking her what was wrong — are you mad at me? —and she knew that even though she’d been trying to shield her children from her own stress and anxiety, it wasn’t working.
All of this flooded her mind as she sat in the exam room, and Grimes suddenly found herself sobbing. “The floodgates just opened,” she recalls. “There was the stress of the pandemic, and not knowing the right thing to do with my kids, and my husband was struggling with his own mental health, and I felt like I was supposed to hold everything together.”
For the first time in her life, Grimes, 38, left her doctor’s office with a prescription for Prozac — a choice she made not only for herself, she says, but also for the sake of her kids.
The pandemic’s profound toll on the mental wellbeing of children has been well documented — especially by parents, teachers, pediatricians, counselors and psychologists who have witnessed the impact firsthand. Suicide has become a leading cause of death for children ages 10 and up, and mental health problems were responsible for a surge of children’s visits to hospital emergency rooms during the first months of the pandemic, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
But many kids are not grappling in a vacuum with life-altering changes to school, community and routine wrought by the coronavirus. Their families, too, have struggled — sometimes limiting the children’s ability to cope, or even amplifying the emotional impact on all members of a household. Meanwhile, demand for mental health resources has soared since 2020 even as the availability of therapy and other support, especially for families who are most vulnerable and in need, has plummeted.
Researchers like Jessica Borelli, a clinical psychologist and associate professor of psychological science at the University of California at Irvine, are trying to decipher exactly what all of this means for parents and children who are carrying the trauma of the past two years. In her work so far, which has included a national survey of parents conducted in the first few months of the pandemic, she has found that parents who reported higher levels of mental health symptoms often had children who were experiencing the same: “The more covid impacted parents’ lives, the more a parent’s mental health was adversely affected,” she says, “which in turn impacted their children’s mental health.”
Grimes had seen this pattern taking shape in her own household. In the weeks before her doctor’s appointment, she had noticed her son assuming a protective posture around her — if his little sister started throwing a tantrum, he would step in and try to intervene, behaving almost as a surrogate parent.
“That broke my heart and triggered something in me. I don’t want him to feel like he has to be another parent,” Grimes says. “It was a red flag. I knew I had to do something.”
The fact that so many parents and children are experiencing mental health crises right now is not surprising, Borelli says; the societal tumult of recent years has forced many families into impossible situations.
“Parents are not meant to meet all of a child’s needs, and when we are all of a sudden in a situation where parents need to meet all of their children’s needs — their social-emotional needs, their educational needs, their physical health and exercise needs, their nutritional needs, everything — the system cannot survive,” she says.
Her study was conducted in the early days of the pandemic, and much has changed since then. Schools, camps and day cares are largely available again, she notes. But parents are still facing extraordinary instability — unpredictable schedules, unexpected quarantines, shifting rules about masking and testing, children who are struggling to re-adjust to in-person schooling — and these constant fluctuations are mentally and emotionally taxing.
“We are asking so much of our kids, and we’re asking so much of our parents,” Borelli says. “The number of routines that children have had to transition between is just staggering, and parents are the ones who have to do that transitioning. It’s just a tremendous cognitive and emotional load.”
As a parent and an elementary school teacher in Baltimore City Public Schools, Samantha Altmann, 38, knows this better than most. When the lockdown began in March 2020, Samantha was teaching her third-grade students online, and her husband, Eben Altmann, was running a commercial kitchen for local food businesses. They had to balance those obligations with childcare for their then-2-year-old daughter, Mabel. Samantha, who was nearly four months pregnant at the time, soon learned that she could longer bring Eben with her to prenatal appointments.
This meant that she was alone when a grim-faced doctor told her, at 25 weeks pregnant, that their son no longer had a heartbeat. And she was alone as she underwent a subsequent dilation and evacuation procedure.
“Five days later, I was in front of my computer virtually teaching my students again,” she says. She felt she had to be there for them — she was a trusted presence in their lives amid so much upheaval, and her students were still reeling from the murder of George Floyd, and she wanted to support them, she says. “So in the middle of me losing the baby, and talking about what’s going on in the country and George Floyd — we’re talking about this virtually, with parents in the background, who are really engaged and wanting to contribute — I’m sitting here in my own trauma, with my daughter on my lap, and that was the start of the pandemic for me.”
When she became pregnant again a few months later, the doctor expressed concern about protecting Samantha’s mental health during another pregnancy — and wrote her an antidepressant prescription. Throughout the pregnancy, Samantha says she was dogged by constant fear of the worst happening again, until their son, Gus, arrived safely in March 2021.
How much of this experience did Mabel absorb? Her parents aren’t certain. “She’s just transitioned into the next age group at school, she’s changed classrooms, she’s left some of her friends behind. Sam’s grandmother recently passed away, and Mabel was very close to her,” Eben says. So when Mabel, now 4 years old, has a tantrum or struggles to listen or behave, there are many possible explanations, he says — “or it could be that she’s picking something up from our own issues and anxieties related to the pandemic.”
For Kim Alexander, 44, serving as director of an assisted living facility in Houston put her on the pandemic’s front lines, and she became fixated on making sure that she did not bring the virus home, where two of her adult children, her teenage son and her then-5-year-old granddaughter lived.
She was especially worried about her 13-year-old son, A. Jay, who has a chronic disorder called eosinophilic esophagitis that has resulted in 48 surgeries since his birth. The condition has led him to experience both depression and post-traumatic stress.
“One day I realized that I was no longer hugging my kids,” she said. “I was keeping myself away from them, which then made them feel more isolated, separate and apart from everybody else. The hurt for me was seeing their hurt, seeing how frustrated they were.”
The toll of isolation, virtual learning and the difficult return to in-person high school exacerbated her son’s anxiety and anger, Alexander says — and when he started running away from home several months ago, she was terrified. “It got to the point for us where I was scared to leave the house, because I didn’t know if when I got home he would still be here.”
Now 16, A. Jay longs to be seen as a “typical” kid, she says, which creates tension between them when she advocates on his behalf and pursues the accommodations he requires. “I’m doing what he needs and not what he wants,” she says. “I’ve become the parent who has put all of these things in place to try to safety-net him from a world that doesn’t want him. And now I’ve made him feel special, I’ve made him feel like he is the center of attention, and his anger with me is ‘I just want to be left alone.’”
All of this weighs on her heavily, she adds: “I’m mentally exhausted. I really am.”
When parents turn to her for help, Jessica Borelli says, she tries to emphasize one thing above all: That a strong parent-child relationship can help shield children from the damaging impact of a parent’s mental health issues. It is a pattern she has consistently observed in her own research, across a range of cultural and socio-economic groups. The strongest predictor of a child’s mental health, she says, is “attachment security” — the feeling of having an open relationship between parent and child, even if one party is battling depression or anxiety or post-traumatic stress.
“Do your kids feel safe? Do they feel loved? Do they feel accepted by you?” If the answers are yes, then that’s what matters, she says. “This isn’t necessarily a time to excel, it’s a time to survive. Focus on the connection that you have with your child.”
For Eileen Grimes, that means being transparent. When she filled her first prescription for Prozac, she immediately told her children about the medication.
“I told them, ‘This is what Mommy’s taking, and there’s nothing wrong with it, it helps me to do what I need to do and be the mom I need to be for you,’” she says. “I want to normalize talking about this stuff. I don’t want mental health stigma to exist for them. And I want my kids to know they can come to me when life gets hard.”
Since April, Kim Alexander’s son A. Jay has lived with his father, Alexander’s ex-husband, in a nearby neighborhood. Alexander’s relationship with her youngest child has been strained by all they’ve endured, she says, but she hopes this distance might create a reset of sorts, and she has faith in the strength of their bond. “I’ve been a parent for 28 years, and I know there are ebbs and flows of parenting,” she says. “I’m not concerned about our relationship not being repaired. He will get there. I just want him to find his joy.”
For now, the temporary separation has helped her own anxiety level come down, and she knows that much is essential for both of them. “Honestly, I am relieved,” she says. “As a parent, you’ve got to put your own oxygen mask on first.”
8 ways to feel less anxious about things beyond your control
Advice by Lesley Alderman, LCSW Washington Post September 13th 2022
One of my patients showed up at her virtual psychotherapy session last week looking tired. She had always been ambitious and concerned about injustice. During this session, she sighed when talking about a meeting where her colleagues complained about unfair treatment. She said: “I don’t know why they bother getting upset, when it feels like nothing matters.”
I was concerned by her disengagement. But then a colleague sounded similarly worn down. She had spent the pandemic helping her third and fourth graders with remote school while trying to keep her small business going. She confided to me: “I haven’t followed the war in Ukraine at all, I simply don’t have the bandwidth.”
To an unusual degree, people are weary.
During the spring of 2020, just as the pandemic started, the question my patients asked was, “when do you think things will go back to normal?” Now, no one talks to me about a return to normal. There’s an unspoken recognition that the chaos we are experiencing might be with us for a long time.
Patients who had been concerned about national and world events and visibly frightened during the pandemic, now seem exhausted. The murder of George Floyd was horrific, and mass shootings are increasingly common. Now it feels like we are all in a relentless game of whack-a-mole, but in this case the rodents are existential threats.
I’m noticing that many of my patients are experiencing a deficit of optimism, and are overwhelmedabout important issues that are beyond their control.
I’m calling it “hope fatigue.”
People are tired of hoping that the pandemic will end, that the Ukraine war will be over, that mass shootings can be controlled, and that our government can address these pressing crises. Two in 10 Americans said they trusted the government in Washington to do what is right “just about always” or “most of the time” in a 2022 Pew Research Center poll.
The symptoms of this fatigue are feeling anxious, tuning out or giving up.
“People are having a lot of difficulties — covid has done a number on us. And now they are insecure about the state of the world,” said Paul Slovic, a professor of psychology at the University of Oregon, who has been studying the psychology of risk and decision-making for over 60 years.
Therapists are struggling to help. We try to instill a sense of hope in our patients: that they can feel better, that they have agency, that their catastrophic thoughts may be overstating reality. But when a patient laments climate change and questions whether they should have children, it’s a challenge.
It’s tempting, at times, to commiserate with them — but that’s not productive. I try to validate their concern and then explore what this means for them personally.
Our nervous systems were not designed for this
Many of the problems threaten our fundamental sense of security. Will my community be decimated by fires, are my children safe at school, could there be a nuclear war?
“I see a lot of people ‘going through the motions of living’ but, since they don’t know what to make of life, how to keep safe, how to have control over anything or make a difference in anything, how to have fun, they slip into a kind of detachment,” said psychologist Judy Levitz, founding director of the Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy Study Center in New York City.
Humans need to feel they have some degree of control. When you take away a person’s sense of safety, depression and anxiety can set in. Our nervous systems were simply not designed to attend to so many crises at once.
Dwelling on issues that seem unfixable can lead to an anxious paralysis, but there’s hope.
“Just because you can’t fix an issue, doesn’t mean that you should ignore it,” said Slovic, whose website, the Arithmetic of Compassion, highlights obstacles to humanitarian decision-making. “We are not helpless.”
This is some of the advice I give my patients.
Take a break from the news. Doomscrolling can be addictive and amplify the tragic nature of events. In one study, researchers found that those who were immersed in the Boston Marathon bombing news for multiple hours a day in the week after the event experienced higher acute stress than individuals who were on the scene. “We speculate that the graphic nature of the coverage and the repetition of those images triggered the intense distress,” said Roxane Cohen Silver, the senior author of the study and a distinguished professor of psychological science, public health and medicine at the University of California at Irvine.
I advise patients who are feeling depressed by the headlines to read the news just once a day, turn off alerts on their phone and, if possible, check social media sparingly.
Take care of yourself. I tell my patients: “You have to be in good fighting shape to cope with the current turbulence.” That means boosting your resilience by taking care of your nervous system (sleep well, eat well, exercise wisely) and engaging in life-affirming activities.
Focus on the present. Get in the habit of anchoring yourself in the here and now. Fretting about the future is not helpful.
Try a breathing exercise. Taking a few deep breaths — for instance, inhaling to the count of five and exhaling to the count of five — will help calm your sympathetic nervous system (the fight or flight response) and lower your anxiety.
When I offer deep breathing exercises, some of my patients can be skeptical, as if I am offering some kind of woo-woo, new-age mumbo jumbo. But I remind them the exercises are based in science. They typically report back that at the very least, breathing gives them something to do when they feel their heart rate escalating.
Think about your victories. Remind yourself of what’s working well in your own life — whether it’s your job, friendships, or the uplifting array of houseplants you nurtured during the pandemic.
Be your own therapist. Ask yourself, what do I specifically feel hopeless about and why? Being able to put into words what’s getting you down can help you feel less flooded by emotions and better able to process the information rationally.
Take action. Worrying doesn’t help one’s mental health, but taking action does. Look around your community. Maybe your local playground would benefit from a basketball court, or your church or synagogue could sponsor a refugee family. When people engage in local issues, they have a renewed sense of optimism.
Join forces with a friend. Pick a cause. There are hundreds of nonprofits dedicated to addressing some of the most tenacious challenges on the planet. Donate money to an inspiring organization or volunteer.
Slovic offers this advice: “Think about what you can do rather than what you can’t.”
President Biden calls on schools to leverage American Rescue Plan funds to expand programming and services to help students make up for lost learning time and succeed
America’s students are on average two to four months behind in reading and math because of the COVID-19 pandemic. President Biden understands the pain and loss our nation’s students, families, and educators are experiencing, and is committed to supporting our nation’s children. That’s why President Biden’s American Rescue Plan (ARP) provided an historic $122 billion in funding to help schools safely reopen and stay open, combat learning loss, and address student mental health and other needs.
Today, President Biden is calling on schools to use the $122 billion in ARP funds to provide high-quality tutoring, summer learning and enrichment, and afterschool programs that are proven pathways to helping students make up for lost learning time and succeed in school and in life, including by supporting their mental health. Building on President Biden’s call to action in the State of the Union, the Biden-Harris Administration is also joining with leading organizations to launch the National Partnership for Student Success (NPSS) to provide students with an additional 250,000 tutors and mentors over the next three years.
We know what works: fully staffed schools, and personalized support for students through high-quality tutoring, summer learning and enrichment, and afterschool programs that help students not only make academic gains, but also stay connected to school and one another. The steps announced today will further help ensure America’s children have what they need to thrive.
Use American Rescue Plan Funds to Provide Additional Instruction So Students Can Make Up for Learning Time Lost During the Pandemic
Thanks to the ARP, states and schools have the funds they need to help students recover from the pandemic. A majority of schools are already using these resources or have developed their plans to provide tutoring, mentoring, summer learning and afterschool programs, and to support staffing. Independent experts at Georgetown University have found school districts plan to spend over half of the $122 billion in ARP Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief funding for these purposes.
To ensure students are set up for success, the President is calling on states and school districts to continue using American Rescue Plan funds to fully staff schools and provide high-quality tutoring, summer learning and enrichment, and afterschool programs to support, on average, an additional four months of learning gains in reading and math. These programs are most successful when paired with initiatives that support student well-being and mental health, like arts and music, and the programs like those supported by the National Partnership for Student Success.
High-quality summer learning and enrichment:Multiple studies indicate that high-quality summer learning and enrichment programs lasting five weeks, with at least three hours of academic instruction per day, can help students gain roughly an additional two months of learning in math and one month in reading.
High-quality tutoring programs: Research has consistently shown that high-quality tutoring programs of a range of durations can produce about five months of additional learning. The best programs provide tutoring three times per week, for 30 minutes each day, and use teachers and well-trained volunteers.
High-quality afterschool programs: High-quality afterschool programs are associated with academic gains of roughly the equivalent of four months of learning, with positive impacts on attendance and student behavior as well. These high-quality programs include a concrete focus on skill development, including personal and social skills, and provide opportunities for students to practice new skills.
To help parents and schools ensure these critical supports are available in every district, the Administration is taking the following actions:
Tracking Progress in Providing Additional Learning Opportunities: The Institute for Education Sciences, the Department of Education’s statistics, research and evaluation arm, will use monthly surveys to track schools’ continued progress in providing summer learning and enrichment, tutoring, and afterschool supports.
Empowering Parents: Most decisions about how schools invest ARP funds are made at the local level and districts are required to engage families, educators and other stakeholders as they create their plans for using these historic funds. The Department of Education recently launched its National Parents and Families Engagement Council, and has created a new tool to help families and communities engage with district leaders around ensuring recovery funds are meeting students’ needs. Using this interactive map, families and communities can review how their state and district plans to spend their ARP funds. Parents and families should engage their local leaders if plans do not adequately address the needs of their students.
Highlighting Schools Effectively Supporting Student Success: Today, the Department of Education is launching a campaign through the Best Practices Clearinghouse to highlight states and schools using ARP funds to support learning recovery and student mental health in evidence-based ways. The Department is calling on education leaders to nominate work for national recognition through the Clearinghouse.
Highlighting How States, Cities and Counties Can Help: Ensuring our students have the supports they need to succeed cannot fall on education leaders alone. States, cities and counties can use the American Rescue Plan’s $350 billion in State and Local Fiscal Recovery Funds (SLFRF) to support student success. As outlined in a new White House toolkit, SLFRF can be used to hire and retain school-based staff; build the educator pipeline; and invest in other ways to support our students, including academic and mental health supports.
Recruit 250,000 New Tutors and Mentors to Help Students Succeed
Research shows that high quality tutors and mentors positively impact student achievement, well-being, and overall success. In fact, the CDC released analyses in March finding that students who are connected to adults and peers at school – the kinds of connections that tutoring and mentoring programs can foster — reported better mental health outcomes than those without such connections. However, many schools need help recruiting and training the caring adults who are essential to implementing these high-quality, evidence-based programs.
Today, the Biden-Harris Administration, led by AmeriCorps and the Department of Education, is joining forces with leading national education, youth development, and service organizations and the Johns Hopkins Everyone Graduates Center to launch the National Partnership for Student Success (NPSS). NPSS will help expand high-impact tutoring, mentoring, and other evidence-based support programs that help students succeed. The NPSS will bring together school districts, non-profits and higher education institutions to recruit, train and place screened adults in high impact roles as tutors, mentors, student success coaches, integrated student supports coordinators, and post-secondary education transition coaches, with the goal of ensuring an additional 250,000 adults serve in these roles over the next three years. This will also help build the pipeline of educators. As more Americans gain experience working in our schools, more will seek out roles as teachers and student support professionals.
To support this effort, AmeriCorps will prioritize the American Rescue Plan’s $20 million in Volunteer Generation Funds to assist non-profit organizations in recruiting and managing up to 200,000 additional volunteers in these critical positions in schools. The Department of Education has also made it clear that schools can use federal education funds as matching funds for AmeriCorps programs, making it easier for schools to partner with AmeriCorps grantees to support students.
President Biden is calling on Americans to come together to support our students in a number of different ways:
Individuals, from young adults to retirees, can learn more about supporting youth through a range of volunteer and national service opportunities, through AmeriCorps and the NPSS.
Community-based organizations and school districts can expand or improve tutoring, mentoring and other programs through the NPSS or through AmeriCorps
Colleges and universities can learn more about and sign up to partner with K-12 schools and community-based organizations, providing their post-secondary students with meaningful opportunities to support K-12 students’ success.
Organizations participating in NPSS include Accelerate, Afterschool Alliance, American Federation of Teachers, American School Counselor Association, Boys and Girls Clubs of America, Big Brothers Big Sisters of America, City Year, Communities in Schools, COVID Collaborative, MENTOR, National 4-H Council, National College Attainment Network, National Education Association, National Student Support Accelerator, National Summer Learning Association, AASA: the School Superintendents Association, and Voices for National Service. For a full list of participating organizations, visit https://www.partnershipstudentsuccess.org/.
The results of a national test showed just how devastating the last two years have been for 9-year-old schoolchildren, especially the most vulnerable.
National test results released on Thursday showed in stark terms the pandemic’s devastating effects on American schoolchildren, with the performance of 9-year-olds in math and reading dropping to the levels from two decades ago.
This year, for the first time since the National Assessment of Educational Progress tests began tracking student achievement in the 1970s, 9-year-oldslost ground in math, and scores in reading fell by the largest margin in more than 30 years.
The declines spanned almost all races and income levels and were markedly worse for the lowest-performing students. While top performers in the 90th percentile showed a modest drop — three points in math — students in the bottom 10th percentile dropped by 12 points in math, four times the impact.
“I was taken aback by the scope and the magnitude of the decline,” said Peggy G. Carr, commissioner of the National Center for Education Statistics, the federal agency that administered the exam earlier this year. The tests were given to a national sample of 14,800 9-year-olds and were compared with the results of tests taken by the same age group in early 2020, just before the pandemic took hold in the United States.
High and low performers had been diverging even before the pandemic, but now, “the students at the bottom are dropping faster,” Dr. Carr said.
In math, Black students lost 13 points, compared with five points among white students, widening the gap between the two groups. Research has documented the profound effect school closures had on low-income students and on Black and Hispanic students, in part because their schools were more likely to continue remote learning for longer periods of time.
The declines in test scores mean that while many 9-year-olds can demonstrate partial understanding of what they are reading, fewer can infer a character’s feelings from what they have read. In math, students may know simple arithmetic facts, but fewer can add fractions with common denominators.
The setbacks could have powerful consequences for a generation of children who must move beyond basics in elementary school to thrive later on.
“Student test scores, even starting in first, second and third grade, are really quite predictive of their success later in school, and their educational trajectories overall,” said Susanna Loeb, the director of the Annenberg Institute at Brown University, which focuses on education inequality.
“The biggest reason to be concerned is the lower achievement of the lower-achieving kids,” she added. Being so far behind, she said, could lead to disengagement in school, making it less likely that they graduate from high school or attend college.
The National Assessment of Educational Progress is considered a gold standard in testing. Unlike state tests, it is standardized across the country, has remained consistent over time and makes no attempt to hold individual schools accountable for results, which experts believe makes it more reliable.
The test results offered a snapshot for just one age group: 9-year-olds, who are typically in third or fourth grade. (More results, for fourth graders and for eighth graders, will be released later this fall on a state-by-state level.)
“This is a test that can unabashedly speak to federal and state leaders in a cleareyed way about how much work we have to do,” said Andrew Ho, a professor of education at Harvard and an expert on education testing who previously served on the board that oversees the exam.
Over time, scores in reading, and especially math, have generally trended upward or held steady since the test was first administered in the early 1970s. That included a period of strong progress from the late 1990s to the mid-2000s.
But over the last decade or so, student scores had leveled off rather than gained, while gaps widened between low- and high-performing students.
Then came the pandemic, which shuttered schools across the country almost overnight. Teachers taught lessons over Zoom, and students sat at home, struggling to learn online.
In some parts of the country, the worst of the disruptions were short lived, with schools reopening that fall. But in other areas, particularly in big cities with large populations of low-income students and students of color, schools remained closed for many months, and some did not fully reopen until last year.
The national tests, Dr. Ho said, tell the story of a “decade of progress,” followed by a “decade of inequality” and then the “shock” of the pandemic, which came with a one-two punch.
“It erased the progress, and it exacerbated the inequality,” Dr. Ho said. “Now we have our work cut out for us.”
He estimated that losing one point on the national exam roughly translated to about three weeks of learning. That means a top-performing student who lost three points in math could catch up in as little as nine weeks, while a low-performing student who lost 12 points would need 36 weeks, or almost nine months, to make up ground — and would still be significantly behind more advanced peers.
There are indications that students — fully back in school — have begun to learn at a normal pace once again, but experts say it will take more than the typical school day to make up gaps created by the pandemic.
The results should be a “rallying cry” to focus on getting students back on track, said Janice K. Jackson, who led the Chicago Public Schools until last year and is now a board member of Chiefs for Change, which represents state education and school district leaders. She called for the federal government to step up with big ideas, invoking the Marshall Plan, the American initiative to help rebuild Europe after World War II.
“That is how dramatic it is to me,” she said, adding that politicians, school leaders, teachers’ unions and parents would have to set aside the many disagreements that flared during the pandemic and come together to help students recover.
“No more of the arguments, and the back and forth and the vitriol and the finger pointing,” she said. “Everybody should be treating this like the crisis that it is.”
But solutions may be rather basic, if difficult to carry out. Martin West, a professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Education and a member of the National Assessment Governing Board that oversees the test, said that low-performing students simply needed to spend more time learning, whether it was in the form of tutoring, extended school days or summer school.
The federal government has budgeted $122 billion to help students recover, the largest single investment in American schools, and at least 20 percent of that money must be spent on academic catch-up. Yet some schools have had difficulty hiring teachers, let alone tutors, and others may need to spend far more than 20 percent of their money to close big gaps.
“I don’t see a silver bullet,” Dr. West said, “beyond finding a way to increase instructional time.”
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