Here are some facts about remote and in person learning that have emerged during the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic. When we put this evidence together, we get a clear picture: in-person learning is essential and irreplaceable. Teachers and staff at public schools in particular are performing some of the most important jobs in the city. Remote learning is creating immense, unreasonable and unjust costs, especially to low-income, minority, or high-needs children and their families. Note that in the first semester in Cambridge Public Schools about 50% of low-income students and students of color was in remote learning and 50% in in-person school (see this Table from the Superintendent’s Oct 6 2020 presentation).
The Educational Toll
There is enormous amount of evidence now available regarding the cost of long-term remote learning. A now well-known study in Fairfax, VA has shown a huge increase in failing grades, where they more than doubled for students with disabilities, English learners, and the worst overall performance for Latinx children. Another study in Montgomery County, Maryland, found failing grades in English and math are up as much as 6-fold for Black, Hispanic, and poor students. Nationwide studies show a massive drop in math skills, especially for poor and minority children, with significant declines in those students even showing up for formal assessments. As early as the start of this fall, national data demonstrated that Hispanic, Black, and low-income students had lost an average of nine to twelve months of learning. The same results repeat over and over and over again. The disproportionate effects on low-income, minority students is so bad that some now speak of a lost generation.
These results are shocking, but unsurprising, since remote learning places impossible demands on families, especially those with fewer economic resources, who lack necessary language skills, who are required to be in-person at work, and who continue to have serious internet and other access issues. Despite herculean efforts by teachers to make remote-learning as engaging and accessible as possible, survey-after-survey of teachers shows that only around 60% of students engage regularly, those students are on average less engaged than normal, and that “teachers of low-income students and students of color were much more likely to report that their students were not regularly engaged in remote learning.” Surveys of teachers show affluent schools have much higher participation rates for students than in poor schools, while surveys of parents show the same. In Boston and elsewhere, absentee rates for online learning have been highest among high-needs, English learner, homeless and minority students. In-depth reporting paints a similarly grim picture.
The Emotional Toll
The effect on children’s mental health is troubling. There is mounting evidence of dramatic increases in psychiatric distress and worsening behavioral health among children, which is why the American Pediatric Association and public health experts continue to recommend schools be open. The CDC reports 24-31% increases in mental-health related admissions to emergency rooms for children. In Massachusetts, the Boston Globe reports many emergency rooms are seeing about “four times more children and teens in psychiatric crisis weekly than usual.” That means more children are going to hospital ERs than normal, in severe mental distress, and then getting exposed in those ERs to coronavirus. Already in April, only a month into school closures, the Lancet had reported that 83% children and young adults with mental health conditions had experienced serious worsening, largely because of the isolation. The toll on parental mental health is also affecting children. Everyone has seen the effects even in the increase in smaller scale behaviors – children sitting in the dark, hiding under covers, compulsive eating or refusing to eat, shutting down, hysterical tantrums, endless hours on screens. Everywhere, the reports are the same: the social isolation from school closures is terrible for children’s mental health and social development.
The pandemic has also affected the parent mental health. The impact on parent mental health during the pandemic on child health is discussed here.
Socio-Economic Toll
The costs to children and families are not just academic, they are also social and economic. There is the declining access to the other social services connected to in-person schooling, at the very moment when there is a dramatic increase in poverty, disproportionately affecting minority families. Some parents are pushed to the edge, or forced to quit their job to manage at-home care duties, which has hit single-family homes especially hard, and which has contributed to a “female recession.” Schools frequently demand that parents monitor children who are disrupting remote learning, but that is not possible for many parents, especially those who are not affluent enough or don’t have enough job flexibility to do so. Many Cambridge parents have reported these problems.
Cambridge Coalition for Public Education 