When we are certain that the human soul
is no longer at work in the world,
it’s time to make sure that ours
is visible to someone, somewhere.
—Parker Palmer
So much of our work is an act of faith.
—Michael Harris
We have met the enemy, and he is us.
—Pogo
While recently exploring the influence of digital technologies as a dominant environment currently sculpting our brains and behavior, it occurred to me that the pandemic itself has now been with us long enough for it, too, to have become a dominant environment starting to sculpt our brains and behavior. That, in turn, caused me to recall that back in mid-April, when this on-going natural disaster was relatively new, I wrote a post in response to some observations a friend had made about the abrupt switch to virtual learning in which I shared some initial thoughts about the potential ultimate costs of the pandemic for education. All of which got me to wondering: now that we are 10 months into this pandemic, what actual long-term costs for teaching and learning have started to reveal themselves more fully?
In Notes from the Trenches and More Notes from the Trenches, I have already written about the costs I have seen firsthand as I returned to the classroom this fall after my sabbatical last year. But some recent statistics I came across in my research has provided a “35,000 foot” view of the pandemic’s impact on the future of education in this country, and the view is not pretty. First, it is estimated that the crash-like swing to virtual learning this past spring set student learning back anywhere from 1 to 5 months, depending on where you lived and the color of your skin. Second, with this set-back already in place, researchers estimate that the reading skills gained during the present virtual school year will only be 63-68% of those of previous years, and the situation in math is even more dire, with an estimate that the math skills gained will be as little as 37-50% of those of previous years. A grim picture indeed!
But the final recent statistic that caught my attention the most is the loss of 4.5 million childcare slots in this country. The reason this one struck me so deeply is because of its implications for the brain development of an entire generation of children experiencing the pandemic right now, and to understand what they are, I am going to need first to provide a short primer on the topic (for those who would like a deeper dive, see Chapter 8).
To start, between birth and about age 5, the growing brain adds neurons and synaptic connections in its different parts in response to the environment it inhabits; the richer and more varied the environment, the more neurons and synaptic connections created and the better all the different parts of the brain will function. It is why Head Start programs are so important for enriching the learning environments for children whose socio-economic status put them at a disadvantage and why high-quality day-care makes such a difference in long-term learning outcomes. It is also why if you stress a particular skill during this time period, the brain will create the extra neurons and neural connections to support it; Olympic level gymnasts and figure skaters do not get started in their teens for this very reason.
Next, between roughly age 5 and ages 10-12, the brain takes the neural connections it now has from stage 1 and reinforces them, adding additional synaptic contact points to increase processing speed. It does so, again, in direct correlation and response to the environment it inhabits, and again, the richer and more varied the environment, the more of the brain’s many neural networks it reinforces. It is why wealthier public schools make sure their elementary schools maintain their music, arts, and P.E. programs and why those wealthy enough to do so will pay the tuition dollars for the extra attention—as well as extra programs—provided in an independent lower school. It is also why, again, stress a particular function of the brain over others and that’s the part that gets reinforced to work the fastest.
Finally (but not really; it’s just that changes after this stage are much slower and smaller), between ages 10-12 and 22-25, the brain takes everything it has constructed so far and starts systematically and permanently to prune any connections which its environment tells it are not important, dismantling some of them completely. It is why, yet again, the richer and more varied the environment the brain encounters during these years, the less pruning that will take place, and it is, quite frankly, the biological justification for the liberal arts. It is also why if you spend all your free time as a teenager on your smartphone texting and watching videos, your other communication skills start to suffer: your brain is literally pruning your ability to employ them.
Now, for purposes of the current discussion, what is critically important to understand about this whole process is that it is linear, unidirectional, and genetically hard-wired. Once a child moves from the first stage to the second, no new neurons and new connections get made (except for memory centers; see Chapter 3). Once the transition from stage two to stage three occurs, there is no more reinforcement to speed things up, and once the final transition to full adulthood occurs, there is no un-pruning. There will be minor changes as you age, but the basic architecture of the brain is cemented in place for life by age 25.
Returning, then, to the loss of 4.5 million childcare slots (as well as the estimated losses in reading and math skills), and I suspect many readers can already see where this is going. In a growing child, tween, or teen, a year for the brain is an enormous length of time, and what the brain fails to experience during that time leaves a permanent mark. The 3-year old who is not learning how to work and play with others right now because daycare is closed is not growing the extra neurons in that part of his, her, or their brain. The 8-year old who is not gaining certain reading and math skills due to the limits of virtual learning is not reinforcing those connections in the brain. And the teenage athlete who is not getting to play as a result of COVID restrictions has a brain starting to prune the synapses associated with the specific skillset associated with his, her, or their game.
Furthermore, what the brain does experience likewise leaves its immutable mark. As Matthew Biel, chief of the child and adolescent psychiatry division at Georgetown University School of Medicine, puts it:
The strain on kids [right now] is enormous. Your 7-year-old wants to be recognized when they raise their hand. Oftentimes doesn’t happen on Zoom. They want to be able to make a comment, make a joke with a peer — can’t do that, no chatting allowed. Wants to be able to get up and walk around the classroom and move — can’t do that, we need to see your face on screen (Natanson & Meckler).
As a result, children of all ages “are suffering emotionally, mentally, and even physically from so many hours, often alone, in front of a computer screen (Natanson & Meckler). All of which is impacting, depending on one’s age, either neuron growth or reinforcement or pruning in the parts of the brain responsible for these pandemic experiences. There is a reason that PTSD is so challenging to treat.
However, I do not want to overstate what is happening either. That theoretical 3-year old mentioned earlier still has neurons in the parts of the brain for working and playing with others; that’s part of the brain’s built in plasticity I wrote about in my last two posts. It is simply that by being deprived of the environment that would increase the neurons and connections in those parts of the brain, said child is going to find working and playing with others more challenging and that challenge is going to last a lifetime because he, she, or they can’t get that developmental time back. Those extra neurons from that year are never going to appear. Again, a generation of children are not losing their brain’s ability to function, but the pandemic is introducing hinderances and limitations to those functions that will last a lifetime.
And the impact on BIPOC children is going to be even worse. Part of what makes racism in this country a systemic problem is because of the very brain development process I just described. The majority of BIPOC children during their first 5 years live in environments that are not rich and varied, and they then attend underfunded schools that likewise do not provide rich and varied experiences. The consequence is fewer new neurons, less reinforcement, and more pruning, resulting in levels of educational achievement that limits the level of employment opportunities such that, too often, as adults they find themselves living and raising families in the same impoverished environments that produced them in the first place, creating a self-perpetuating, self-reinforcing cycle (i.e. systemic racism).
In the current situation, though, this cycle has been made all the worse by the pandemic’s exacerbation of the digital divide’s impact on education. In my original post on this topic, COVID-19 and the Digital Divide, the figure I had available to me from the most recent research I could find at the time (2017) was that there are 18 million households without internet access in this country—the vast majority of them home to those who would identify as BIPOC. But in February of 2020, BroadbandNow estimated that that figure is closer to 42 million, and while some have argued that it is more of an infrastructure issue than anything else, in New York City—where broadband/wi-fi infrastructure is not an issue—nearly 1 million people (an 1/8th of the population!) has no access simply because they cannot afford it.
The bottom line is that the digital divide is real, and I strongly suspect that it is a major reason why that setback in reading skills from the spring which I mentioned earlier show a clear delineation. For white children, the setback was 1-3 months; for black children, it was 3-5. Hence, the bitter irony right now is that at a time of social awakening in this country, the impact of the pandemic on education is actually reinforcing the systemic racism our educational system already contributes to in the first place.
Nor does the bad news stop there. It is not just K-12 where COVID-19 is setting the stage for long-term negative consequences for education. Distaste and disaffection with on-line learning has driven undergraduate enrollments down by 3.6% overall and a full 10% at community colleges (often the gateway for first time members of less affluent families). Given that all the research and statistics show that for each year past high school an individual does not enroll in college, the less likely it is for a person to earn an eventual degree, and we find ourselves in a situation where, as Doug Shapiro of the National Student Clearinghouse puts it, we will have “an entire generation that will enter adulthood with lower-education, lower skills, less employability, and ultimately lower productivity” (Nadworny).
And to pour gasoline onto all this fire, there may be no help to remediate the pandemic’s damage to the learning part of the educational process because there may be no one available to do the teaching part. As Natasha Singer of the New York Times puts it, “a pandemic teacher exodus is not hypothetical,” and the statistics are sobering. Applications for early retirement in public schools are up 30% in the state of Minnesota, up 60% in Pennsylvania, and in Indiana, a staggering 72% of the state’s schools report significant staffing problems due to abrupt changes in teachers’ retirement plans. Moreover, it’s not just the 30-year+ veterans walking out the door. The National Education Association says that 28% of all its members report being more likely to leave the profession now, including 20% of those who have taught 10 years or less. Shea Martin summarizes the situation well when she says, “if we keep this up, you’re going to lose an entire generation of not only students but also teachers” (Singer).
But do we have to “keep this up?” Granted, the tally of the cost of the pandemic to education is already a grim one. However, as I reminded the class of 2020 in my letter to them, out of ashes is the chance to build a phoenix, and right now is the time when we need to be constructing our plans for how we will rebuild education in this country moving forward….
Coda
It was January 3 when I started writing the preceding paragraph and took a pause to allow this essay to ferment in my mind for a while before finishing to post it. Like anyone with half-a-brain, I compose off-line before copying and pasting (since once on-line, it is forever), and I like to feel confident that I am presenting my most genuine self when sharing my thoughts with others. In the meantime, of course, as this past week has made abundantly clear, it is not only education we must rebuild from the ashes, it is our very sense of identity as a society that must be reconstructed.
As for the actual events of this past Wednesday, I must confess that I was neither shocked nor surprised by the uprising. Those closest to me know that I have been predicting for more than two years that our 45th president would not leave without a physical fight, and January 6 merely confirmed my anticipation. I was shocked, surprised, and appalled that the pitched battle I expected was not taking place on the outside of the Capital Building since it is simply not possible that I was the only one seeing the obvious, especially given our 45th president’s behaviors and the Right Wing internet traffic following the election: that it took 90 minutes into the insurrection before Federal defense officials finally allowed the governor of my state to send in troops from the Maryland National Guard speaks to either willful intent or blind ineptitude—both of which are frankly equally possible with this administration.
However, regardless of how any one of us experienced this attack on our democratic institutions, I think it is critical that those acting on faith, trying to make the human soul visible in this world, take time in this moment to recognize and acknowledge that both this uprising as well as the Trump presidency that incited it are merely symptoms; they are not the actual disease that needs our help curing. On the surface, over 74 million people, predominately white and more than 1/3 of our adult population, were simply voting for Donald Trump for president on Nov. 3 because they preferred him as their candidate. And they did so, interestingly enough, in spite of the fact that nearly every policy of the previous four years—from tax breaks for the wealthy to climate change denial to the handling of COVID—has or will negatively impact both the short- and long-term quality of the daily lives of the vast majority of them.
Therefore, I want to argue that these individuals were not just voting for Donald Trump; rather they were voting for the disease, the social evil, he symptomizes—their White privilege and the systemic racism that supports it. As Isabel Wilkerson points out in her work on the American caste system, the puzzlement so many progressives and liberals have about what they perceive as the blindness of poor White Trump supporters—“how can they not see that they are actually economically worse off? That his policies only benefit the rich? That their health care is worse because of him?”—this puzzlement is due to a failure to understand that the perceived benefit these Trump supporters are voting for is their status as White people in this country. They are voting to maintain the position of their caste and to these people, Wilkerson argues, that benefit outweighs any possible socio-economic disadvantages that might also come with such a vote.
What all this means for those of us seeking to shine light on the present darkness within our society is that the upholding of the results of the recent presidential election is only the beginning. The disease which the insurgents this past week symptomize is fighting (literally) for its life, and it is going to take the collective will and effort of what Lincoln called, “the better angels of our nature” to cure and heal it. We have now witnessed firsthand the alternative, and while many have dismissed the recent decisions by Facebook, Twitter, Google, and other corporations to block our 45th president’s efforts to lie in public as “too little; too late,” I would point out the following: we have always been a reactionary society; even the so-called “Greatest Generation” had to be dragged from their intensely resistant neutrality into their “Greatness” by the attack on Pearl Harbor.
Yet once dragged, they saved the world, and now that our country today has had its own “Pearl Harbor” moment, who then will join in standing up to fight? Who will join to save tomorrow for all our children? A tomorrow that is functional, equitable, sustainable, and just? As Palmer’s epigram at the start of this post challenges, “when we are certain that the human soul is no longer at work in the world, it’s time to make sure that ours is visible to someone, somewhere” (p. 60). May each of us who desire to work for a better world seek to be more visible. It is vital that we do so now more than ever.
References
De La Rosa, S. Nov. 3, 2020 Report: Steeper COVID slide expected in math than reading. K-12Dive. https://www.k12dive.com/news/report-steeper-covid-slide-expected-in-math-than-reading/588185/.
Fowler, G. (Dec. 28, 2020) In 2020, We Reached Peak Internet. Here’s What Worked—and What Flopped. The Washington Post. https://www.washingtonpost.com/topics/road-to-recovery/2020/12/28/covid-19-tech/?no_nav=true.
Kashen, J.; Glynn, S.J., & Novello, A. (Oct. 30, 2020) How COVID-19 Sent Women’s Workforce Progress Backward: Congress’ $64.5 Billion Mistake. Center for American Progress. https://www.americanprogress.org/issues/women/reports/2020/10/30/492582/covid-19-sent-womens-workforce-progress-backward/#:~:text=This%20report%20estimates%20that%20if,to%20%2464.5%20billion%20per%20year.
Nadworny, E. (Dec. 17, 2020) ‘Losing a Generation:’ Fall College Enrollment Plummets for 1st-Year Students. NPR Morning Edition. https://www.npr.org/2020/12/17/925831720/losing-a-generation-fall-college-enrollment-plummets-for-first-year-students.
Natanson, H. & Meckler, L. (Nov. 26, 2020) Remote School is Leaving Children Sad and Angry. The Washington Post. https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2020/11/27/remote-learning-emotional-toll/?arc404=true&itid=lk_inline_manual_44.
Palmer, P. (2018) On the Brink of Everything: Grace, Gravity, & Getting Old. Oakland, CA: Brett-Koehler Publishers, Inc.
Singer, N. (Dec. 3, 2020) Teaching in the Pandemic: ‘This Is Not Sustainable.’ The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/30/us/teachers-remote-learning-burnout.html.
Stole, B. & Knezevich, A. (Jan. 7, 2021) Maryland Gov. Hogan: ‘America Would Be Better Off’ If Trump Resigns Or Is Removed From Office. The Baltimore Sun. https://www.baltimoresun.com/politics/bs-md-pol-hogan-capitol-20210107-7gjx3ksoqrhmrixhqr7zz2byom-story.html.
Wilkerson, I. (2020) Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents. New York: Random House.
Light a Candle 