Shallow are the souls that have forgotten how to shudder.
—Leon Kass
Three years ago this month, the entire social world shattered. Schools emptied; hospitals filled; quarantines began. Fear of the unknown filled the media, and simply walking past one another on the street became an exercise in social distancing. It was a time—as the fables and fairy tales of yore might have put it—of great darkness and uncertainty, and I think few of us could have imagined the enormity of scale of the loss of life and pelf that has happened since. To say that it has been a challenging few years would be to insult the dead and living alike, and as we emerge from this natural disaster, it is hard not to look at the consequent “rubble” and wonder if we can ever fully rebuild.
Nowhere is this truer than in education right now. The situation and statistics I’m about to share are simply depressing to those of us who have dedicated our lives to schools and children. But like a patient in need of medical attention, until one has the proper diagnosis, the proper treatment cannot be applied, and so I offer today’s essay to challenge all of us—educator and layperson alike—to confront the pandemic’s damage head on in order that our current educational system might successfully arise out of its own rubble.
And there is a lot of rubble. As NYT columnist David Brooks recently wrote, our schools right now face shrinking enrollments, academic regression, increased absenteeism, exacerbated discipline problems, worsening inequality, and that’s just the tip of the proverbial iceberg. In fact, it was reading Brooks’ column that started me researching education’s current state in more detail, leading to this post. Little in schools is working well right now, and until our society confronts this, we are in serious trouble.
Let’s start with the learning loss. It is what keeps making all the headlines because it is the easiest to shorten into sound bites: “reading scores on national assessments down by 6% among 3rd graders,” “losses in math twice that of reading,” “a third of a year’s worth of learning gone.” Yet what’s lost in all that abbreviating is the full scale of what is fundamentally at stake. A recent white-paper from the National Bureau of Economic Research has determined that between 2019 and 2022, students in this country “forfeited 40% of the [academic] achievement of the past 3 decades” and that if this loss is:
allowed to become permanent, our findings imply that the recent losses would represent a 1.6 percent decline in present value of lifetime earnings for the average K-12 student (or $19,400), totaling $900 billion for the 48 million students enrolled in public schools during the 2020-21 school year.
That’s a lot of shekels! Moreover, the portion of it coming from the greater decrease in math skills (as much as 20% here in Maryland) is more problematic than simply a total earnings loss of $900 billion. We live in an age where our entire economies depend on scientific, technological, and engineering disciplines and where the path to higher wage jobs lies almost exclusively in these fields—all of which demand extremely well-developed skills in math and the kinds of critical reasoning which learning math nurtures. Hence, any degree of failure to address children’s learning deficits in math has the potential to undermine a country’s entire economic future competitiveness—including our own.
But the extensive student learning loss isn’t the only very serious challenge facing education today; it is just the flashiest from a media standpoint because we have systems dedicated to tracking student progress. Similar systems don’t really exist for the adults in the classroom with those same children, and yet without these adults, the magnitude of the educational damage the pandemic has caused will remain unchanged—especially in schools where the student populations were already struggling before the pandemic and where we are already seeing threat of a K-shaped recovery (where those with means rebound while those without sink further). The ugly truth is that even in our most well-funded schools, the quantity and quality of people seeking to enter the teaching profession is dropping precipitously. Twenty-six percent of schools report having a shortage of teachers (which goes up to 58% for substitutes!), and 56% are seeing fewer applicants for all teaching positions. In addition, 42% report that the candidates who do apply are weaker and less qualified than those prior to COVID (a reality I have witnessed firsthand when trying to hire in my department).
However, what is perhaps most telling of all about the teaching situation in schools are the statistics about well-being and attrition. More than 40% of schools report an increase in staff taking sick days and requesting additional personal days, and 36% report that they are now regularly having teachers and administrators leave before the end of the school year. Add in the Ron DeSantises of this world—along with numerous Republican-led state legislatures—passing one law after another in an effort to ban intellectual freedom of any kind, create voucher programs at the expense of publicly funding schools, and try in general to protect the privilege of a bunch of middle-aged white Americans, and is it any wonder that a once-considered-noble profession is on the ropes? No business model of any kind can survive the kind of morale problem found in today’s schools, and thus, while we already had a pre-pandemic problem with the teacher supply-chain in this country, we now risk facing an actual collapse of our entire education system.
Which some, like David Brooks, want to cheer. They see a potential for massive reinvention of how teaching and learning take place in the United States and are upset that no one in the political realm is stepping up to lead the way. However, while I am sympathetic (since this whole project is about how I think we need to reform and repair education in this country), I am also always leery when folks like Brooks start using the word, “revolution.” As I once challenged one of my students—and which was apparently the one thing she remembered me teaching her as she brought it up decades later in an alumni forum—revolutions damage; they dismantle and destroy. No one endures a revolution unscathed. Furthermore, the harm done can rival the harm restituted: as The Who cynically sang, “meet the new boss; same as the old boss.”
Therefore, though the state of education in 2023 is a grim one (and I’m not even addressing the infrastructure issues here, focusing instead solely on the human part of the equation), I do not think turning the existing rubble into ash is going to cause a phoenix-like resurrection of our schools and our children’s learning. Instead, I think it is going to take a societal paradigm shift where adults from all ages and walks of life start to care more about our children and their future than they do their own adult wants and whims—something psychologist Dacher Keltner points out, our brains have evolved the capacity to do.
But in today’s world of narcissistic technological habits, this capacity remains underdeveloped in critical masses of our citizenry, and that is the dilemma for the current state of education: we know what needs to be done to fix things; can we generate the will to make it happen? I wish I were more optimistic about the answer to that question, but then, as my regular readers know, I think there is always hope, and for now, that work of hope will have to be enough. After all, there are children in my immediate direct charge, the very future in my hands; I am and remain a teacher.
References
Allen, G. (July 13, 2022) Florida Gov. DeSantis Takes Aim at What He Sees as Indoctrination in Schools. NPR Morning Edition. https://www.npr.org/2022/07/13/1110842453/florida-gov-desantis-is-doing-battle-against-woke-public-schools.
Brooks, D. (Feb. 16, 2023) America Should Be in the Middle of a Schools Revolution. The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/16/opinion/america-schools-revolution.html.
CDC (2023) Youth Risk Behavior Survey. https://www.cdc.gov/healthyyouth/data/yrbs/pdf/YRBS_Data-Summary-Trends_Report2023_508.pdf.
Doty, E.; et al. (2023) What Do Changes in State Test Scores Imply for Later Life Outcomes?National Bureau of Economic Research. https://www.nber.org/papers/w30701
Ghorayshi, A. & Rabin, R.C. (Feb. 13, 2023) Teen Girls Report Record Levels of Sadness, C.D.C. Finds. The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/13/health/teen-girls-sadness-suicide-violence.html?searchResultPosition=1.
Keltner, D. (March 3, 2023) Happiness 2.0: The Reset Button. Hidden Brain. https://hiddenbrain.org/podcast/happiness-2-0-the-reset-button/.
Mahnken, K. (Feb. 1, 2023) Global Learning Loss: Top 4 Takeaways from Latest International COVID Research. The 74. https://www.the74million.org/article/global-learning-loss-top-4-takeaways-from-latest-international-covid-research/
NAIS. (Feb. 13, 2023) NAIS Snapshot. https://www.nais.org/getmedia/e12240f3-e77-486c-b3b3-5964312eaa16/NAISsnapshotSurveyTurnover021723.pdf
Reed, L. (Jan. 27, 2023) How Students Scored on State Tests in Spring. The Baltimore Sun, pp. 1-2.
Light a Candle 