If we don’t get this right, then it will affect their trajectory in life. So we have to get this right.
—Mohammad Choudhury, Maryland Superintendent of Schools
Learning’s Lost
Since the initial days of the pandemic, I have made no attempt to hide my concerns as an educator for the potential long-term costs of this disease to today’s children. Whether writing about the impact of pivoting to all virtual learning in the spring of 2020 or the possible disruption to brain development in our youngest this past winter, I have been actively pondering and discussing how our collective handling of this disease might be altering future generations ever since the very first lockdowns occurred.
Well, the official statistics are now in (at least in Maryland), and the picture is as grim as I and others have feared. Only 15% of children in grades 3-8 passed the Maryland Comprehensive Assessment Program math test (given this fall for diagnostic purposes only), and only 35% passed the English test—a drop from pre-COVID of more than half for the math scores and 8% for the English scores. Furthermore, statewide, only 40% of those entering Kindergarten arrived with the necessary toolkit to be ready to learn at the start of the current school year (down from 47% in 2019), and in the Baltimore City Schools, that number was only 25%. Gloomier still, as State Superintendent Mohammed Choudhury points out, “the declines were worse among students who have been out of in-person school for the longest.”
Not that Maryland is alone. Nationwide, of the 12 states that have collected data so far, the decrease in math and English skills has been on average 14% and 6% respectively. Thus, my home state is right there in the mix when it comes to the amount of damage to learning the pandemic has caused, but that is a dubious claim at best to “celebrate.” The simple truth is that all the educational setbacks forecast by myself and other have come to fruition, and to quote Choudhury again: “I was not surprised by what I saw. I was just waiting for this moment.”
Numbers, though, do not tell the whole story. It’s not just learning skills students are missing coming into schools this year; their emotional and intellectual stamina to engage in learning has weakened as well. I have seen it in my own high school students as we have returned to in-person learning, watching them struggle to rebuild the mental “muscles” required to deal with workloads and pace-of-day that more closely resemble pre-pandemic times. Yet mine at least had something to build back up. Our youngest learners have not even had the chance to start building those “muscles” in the first place. Preschoolers, for example, are arriving at schools expecting instant gratification, struggling with basic skills such as sharing and waiting one’s turn, and even something as rudimentary as toilet training has regressed because “children ages 3 to 5 have never been to a bathroom outside their own home” (Mugele). As a result, “the development pace of almost everything related to our youngest learners has slowed, and the transition to school life is taking longer” (Bowie).
“Longer,” though, is more than a little problematic for this age-group of children because as the neuroscience and education research of institutions such as the Center for Advanced Study of Teaching and Learning at the University of Virginia have shown, the most dramatic learning takes place prior to third grade. These are the critical years in which the foundation for all future learning is laid, and with the pandemic interrupting the normal brain development of our youngest learners for three academic years now, we have genuine grounds for concern about their long-term academic success. Toss in the possible epigenetic changes I wrote about recently, and as Superintendent Choudhury argues, “if we don’t get this right, then it will affect their trajectory in life. So we have to get this right.”
Moving Forward?
What, though, will it mean to “get this right?” What will that look like? What should it look like? Spokespersons and stakeholders for the Blueprint for Maryland’s Future (our new multi-billion dollar education reform program) have presented the case that it should look primarily like funds for tutoring and other forms of direct remediation to get kids caught up, along with staff development for addressing their emotional and mental health needs brought on by virtual and hybrid learning. All of which are fine, but these all assume a “fix it” approach to the problems the pandemic has created in education—as in, “fix it and forget it.” It is a solution that employs the dysfunctional mechanistic, Cartesian approach to teaching and learning that started this whole education project of mine in the first place, and what no one in education (or society at large for that matter) seems to want to address is that the very nature of the pandemic is not going to allow a “fix it and forget it” solution to how to “get this right” for anything, including schools.
For example, the need for the Prince George’s County schools to return to virtual learning until mid-January due to the explosion of new COVID cases is only the most recent example of the fact that this virus is not going away, and its disruptions to our society are permanent. No matter how badly all of us in schools (and the rest of life) may desire to “return to normal”—to “fix it and forget it”—the reality is that the dynamic interactions of SARS-CoV-2 with the human body are inherently ecological in character, and ecological relationships are, by definition, perpetually in flux, ever changing.
Which means that the kind of change needed to “get this right” is not about fixing; it is about adapting. As Nancy Mugele, Head of Kent school has remarked: all of us in education “have had to be flexible, patient, and ready to teach skills that students would normally come to school possessing.” What I will argue, though, is that this extra flexibility and patience is the new normal. The speech delays, for instance, which Mugele has observed in their youngest students is going to continue to require her teachers to focus “more on intentionally developing language skills, letter sounds, and pronunciation” for the foreseeable future because the environmental conditions of the pandemic that have generated this delay are not abating. That was the illusion presented with the roll out of the vaccines: that here was a magic genii that would make everything right again. Ecological relationships simply don’t work that way, and therefore, we aren’t simply going to “fix” the educational damage our children have endured; we are going to have to adapt to managing it.
However, adaptation puts the emphasis on teaching and learning’s qualities, not its quantities, and the problem here is what UT Austin professor, J.W. Traphagan calls our society’s obsession with “quantocracy”—the “idea that everything must be counted and then judged on the basis of how many of something we have accumulated” (and where the one who dies with the most “wins”). Simply look back to where I started this post: with statistics about the Maryland Comprehensive Assessment Program and the pandemic induced drop in test scores. Even the economics of our schools are about quantity, with the number of “butts in seats” directly determining the amount of state funding a given school receives.
Yet, the truth is that those stats tell us very little about the individual students or their character as learners, and the refusal of so many parents to return their students back to pre-pandemic schools may say something about the quality of education they realized their child was receiving when they could see it firsthand on a screen. Regardless, the disruption of the pandemic is here to stay, and it is going to fundamentally alter the availability of any kind of quantity; so “getting it right” is going to require a different approach to the problem than simply the availability and distribution of resources.
But that brings me back to what started the Light a Candle project in the first place: that the metaphor and paradigm we need for education is an ecosystem, not a machine. And the truth is that ecosystems of any kind are intricate, non-linear structures that either adapt as an entire collective of relationships or perish. Hence, we can start recognizing the nuanced complexities in our schools as well as society brought on by the realities of the pandemic and start adjusting our behaviors accordingly (e.g. providing noise cancelling headphones to 3-5 year olds to help them cope with anxiety about using public toilets). Or we can stay the course of one-dimensional attempts to “fix & forget” we are currently on toward the kind of civil breakdown historian Jill Lepore discusses in her thought-provoking piece, “Is Society Coming Apart?“
I will examine the challenges facing how we might accomplish the first choice in my next post.
References
Bowie, L. (Dec. 9, 2021) Dramatic Drop in Student Test Scores. The Baltimore Sun. https://www.baltimoresun.com/education/bs-md-maryland-test-scores-20211208-wk5aen5r5bfx5eag2p57pamjcy-story.html.
Bowie, L. (Dec. 14, 2021) Kids Are Coming Back to Schools. The Baltimore Sun. https://digitaledition.baltimoresun.com/html5/desktop/production/default.aspx?&edid=fd7d909a-ba04-4d6e-9449-b67b84df593b.
Lepore, J. (Nov. 25, 2021) Is Society Coming Apart? The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/society/2021/nov/25/society-thatcher-reagan-covid-pandemic?utm_source=pocket&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=pockethits.
Mugele, N. (Nov. 9, 2021) How COVID-19 Affects the Youngest Learners. NAIS. https://www.nais.org/learn/independent-ideas/november-2021/how-covid-19-affects-the-youngest-learners/?utm_source=tw&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=mc&utm_content=hw#.YYw1vKg6RrU.linkedin.
State of Maryland (2020) Maryland Commission on Innovation & Excellence in Education. http://dls.maryland.gov/pubs/prod/NoPblTabMtg/CmsnInnovEduc/2019-Interim-Report-of-the-Commission.pdf#page=11.
Traphagan, J.W. (Dec. 5, 2021) We Should Want Quality, Not Quantity. The Baltimore Sun. https://digitaledition.baltimoresun.com/html5/desktop/production/default.aspx?&edid=1e402ed8-cf55-4ae4-a6e5-07bdcbfb5901.
Light a Candle 