The COVID-19 Pandemic and Education

Article by Annan Uddin

It's no secret that the COVID-19 pandemic has had a myriad of short-term and long-term negative effects on our students. These changes are pervasive throughout their lives, including at home and in the classroom. First and foremost, the pandemic has caused a major loss of learning for most children. This first issue is already quite multifaceted. According to a brief by Santiago Pinto, key issues that could be potentially responsible for this include lower school enrollment during the pandemic and quite infamously, the transition into online schooling during the pandemic. 

Absenteeism during the Pandemic

Although lower enrollment can partially be explained by demographic shifts into homeschooling and private schooling, it can also likely be attributed to absenteeism, which is not unique to just students dropping out. It also includes enrolled students having lower attendance on average during the pandemic. According to an AEI article written by Nat Malkus, “chronic absenteeism surged from 15% in 2018 to 28% in 2022”. Chronic absenteeism is defined as the number of students missing 10% of their classes in a given school year. Absenteeism rates remain higher than ever even after the pandemic’s effects have largely subsided, signaling that this may be part of a long-term shift in student mentalities rather than a temporary short term result of online schooling or the pandemic itself. Even in 2023, rates of chronic absenteeism in schools remained “substantially elevated”, being at least “75% higher than the pre-pandemic baseline” according to Malkus.

Furthermore, these shifts were higher in disadvantaged districts and amongst poorer students too, worsening the preexisting gap even further than before the pandemic.

Chronic absenteeism is highly problematic for a number of reasons. If students aren’t in school, then they just aren’t learning, and many times this comes with the side effect of not reaching key milestones. In younger children, this can mean falling behind suggested reading level for their age, and for older students, it might mean that they don’t graduate on time, or at all. According to the US Department of Education, a single year of chronic absence in schools can multiply the chances of a student prematurely dropping out of high school by 7x. At all levels of schooling, it’s important to keep kids in school and attending classes, or else those effects may stack up and multiply over time, making kids’ lives that much worse off in the long-term.

Loss of Instructional Time

Unfortunately, it’s not just the case that students have been skipping out on their classes. During the pandemic, students have also lost significant amounts of effective schooling time, which can be attributed to many factors. Many schools faced closures during the pandemic, and had to cut instructional time as a result. Many students will remember how their schools may have struggled with making the switch to online learning, oftentimes because their schools lacked a strong preexisting infrastructure to support online learning. Start and end times for schools, as well as time spent in class, may also have been significantly reduced due to other pandemic related struggles.

This is highly problematic, specifically because decreasing instructional time negatively impacts student test scores as well as a wide variety of educational metrics according to Santiago Pinto and John Bailey Jones. Without a minimum of quality instructional time for students in schools, students just aren’t able to learn what they should have. This issue has similar effects to chronic absenteeism, except this isn’t in the control of the students. Rather, it is usually because of a widespread systematic failure of the schools or the government. If students aren’t in school with effective learning time throughout the day and the year, students’ test results suffer as well. The research is clear: decreased instructional time is bad for kids' learning and test scores, and so instructional time needs to be kept at a minimum to ensure quality learning.

Students and Remote Learning

The difficult transition to remote learning remains the most controversial and infamous aspect of the pandemic’s impact on children’s education. As a result of worldwide quarantines, many schools had to shift to online learning on last-minute notice without any reasonable alternative. However, online learning has now been understood to be in many ways a poor alternative to traditional in person instruction. According to a publication by the International Journal of Educational Development, lockdowns and subsequent remote learning resulted in significantly negative trends in academic performance, including performance in subjects such as reading and language. Standardized testing scores generally declined across many subjects during the pandemic, and schools across the globe felt the impact of the pandemic and the abrupt shift towards online learning.

There are many reasons for this change: students find it more difficult to pay attention in remote environments, may feel unmotivated to complete assignments on their own, or just struggle without the in-person component of learning. Many students experienced feeling unable to pay attention, or just not being used to the remote format and struggling to adjust. Indeed, many students have to fundamentally change their working strategies and methods to adjust to online learning platforms. Furthermore, students may struggle with the greater independence associated with remote learning, lack of teacher or peer interaction, and limited resources in making the shift.

Students and their Mental Health

Although the effects of the pandemic on students’ academic performance are much easier to measure, the impact to students’ mental health is much more difficult to do so. Yet, there seems to be a broad consensus in the scientific literature that the pandemic, especially remote learning in lockdowns, has had widespread negative effects on students’ mental health. Remote learning can cause significantly reduced face-to-face interaction amongst peers and teachers. Students don’t have the opportunity to engage with one another, and can feel isolated as a result of this.

In younger age groups, the pandemic has caused a broad array of negative mental health effects on students. There has been a notable increase in depression, anxiety, social isolation, reduced attention spans, and stress in virtually all age groups of students. Students are so much more isolated and struggle much more to pay attention in class, and don’t receive social support or interaction that they need at their developing ages as a result of remote learning. Unfortunately, it doesn’t appear that these trends have stopped even as the pandemic has ended. Global rates of mental illness are still higher than their pre-pandemic levels.

Solutions

In short, none of these problems are particularly easy to solve. Many of them are incredibly multifaceted with no easy solution. Any potential solutions for all of these problems might have to include a mix of approaches varying from policy, district interventions, changed educator strategies, or just the plain old ability to adapt and overcome the face of new challenges, which isn't unique to the modern era.

If anything, it's become much more important for educators and policymakers to fully focus on the individualized needs of students. The pandemic made it clear that a single "one size fits all" approach is not enough to meet the unique and varying needs of each individual student and the challenges they may be facing. In light of that, in the post-pandemic age, we need to ensure that students' needs and challenges are being addressed, both in the classroom and beyond it.