For students, teachers, families, the impact of the pandemic on education has been all too clear. For our education system as a whole and policy makers, the long-term effects of the largest educational disruption in history are today not as easy to assess.
What can we know about how our responses to the COVID-19 pandemic will impact students and education over the long-term? And what can we do now to prepare for what is to come?
To get a window on the potential impact, we might start with the long-term effects of local natural disasters in the past.
Educational displacement after Hurricane Katrina, for example, which displaced over 300,000 students, resulted in long-term increases in stress for teachers, students, and families, higher incidences of mental health problems for all, and lower academic performance, test scores, graduation rates, and college placements for students.(1)
A few years later, researchers at Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health found that more than a third of Katrina’s displaced children were at least one year behind in school for their age.(2)
Widespread mental health impacts were identified following Katrina, but COVID-19 educational displacements are far more widespread and longer-lasting, and affecting an exponentially larger number of students. In an effort to assess the mental health impact on children the CDC issued data comparing Emergency Room visits for mental health problems from January 2020 through October.
“…the proportion of mental health–related ER visits increased sharply beginning in mid-March 2020 (week 12) and continued into October (week 42) with increases of 24% among children aged 5–11 years and 31% among adolescents aged 12–17 years, compared with the same period in 2019.”(3)
Disability Disparity
As a service based on programming for the individual needs of each student, special education represents one of the most significant grounds for disparity during the COVID-19 response. The span of potential services and their intensity, a hallmark of the rights and responsibilities conferred by IDEA, has proven a significant challenge during the pandemic.
One student may require a little help with reading or math. Another with a hearing or visual impairment needs access to specific technologies and real time support. Another needs all-day intensive hands-on intervention for multiple disabilities, behavior management or medical issues. Providing this full range of services via distance learning has been difficult.
A November report(4) from the US Government Accountability Office has examined how schools managed special education and services for English learners and students with disabilities during the switch to distance learning in the spring of the 2019-2020 academic year, finding that by and large, they struggled.
The report identified issues including:
- the broad range of needs among students with disabilities
- the variety of services called for in their IEPs
- the capacity of parents or caregivers to assist in delivering specialized instruction, and
- delivering related services—such as occupational therapy, physical therapy, or speech therapy—for students with complex needs.
In the spring USDOE declared that no special education waivers would be issued during schools’ COVID-19 responses. Everything within IDEA — all timelines, services, and regulations — remained in force. Around the same time it issued guidance urging flexibility under the law during school closures, and many parents heeded that advice. But schools and parents continue to struggle with exactly how to do that, with wildly varying results.
An informal survey by Parents Together of nearly 1,600 families nationwide revealed that 39% of responders with children in special education are not receiving any services at all. Just 20% reported receiving all the services their children are entitled to. 35% reported that their children are doing little or no remote learning, compared to 17% of their non-disabled peers.
Special education assessments and evaluations, too, have been delayed in some districts, owing to schools’ being overwhelmed with providing distance or hybrid learning services for all students. The result in some districts has been backlogs in developing IEP’s and providing timely special education services to students new to the system.
The question of how compensatory education, the remedy for service shortfalls guaranteed under IDEA, will be provided remains open and thorny.
As the pandemic continues to disrupt education nationwide, several lawsuits, some pleading for class status have sought systemic responses to the need for compensatory education. But legal experts and cases already heard suggest that the IDEA’s focus on individual program efficacy will limit courts’ willingness and likelihood of assigning broader class status to these cases. Read about such a case brought in the Southern District of New York in CommonGround.
COVID-19 and the Digital Divide
Twenty-first century learning absolutely requires technology and access to the internet. Distance learning required during the pandemic has glaringly highlighted disparities among students in access to digital devices and internet connectivity. For students with disabilities, the rapid change to intensive distance learning and reliance on technology presented additional — and exaggerated — challenges.
New Jersey’s announcement in July of its initiative to bridge the digital divide – the disparity between students who do not have access to digital devices and connectivity, and those who do. This disparity presented significant challenges to providing distance learning to students, and particularly special education students in the spring.
The initiative requires schools to continuously share information on the number of Pre-K to Grade 12 students needing devices and/or internet connectivity, and leverages support from private partners and approximately $60 million in CARES Act and Coronavirus Relief Fund (CRF) funds for public and nonpublic schools to purchase devices and services for students.
Between October 1 and December 2, 2020, the NJDOE Grants Management Office reported that it has reduced the number of students in need (59,603) by nearly half (to 31,560).
While access to devices and connectivity has improved, advocates point out that the technical support for distance learning lags in most schools, and more work is needed.(5)
And for students with disabilities, access to the technology is only part of the story. For some students receiving hands-on instruction and therapies, the technology itself is a barrier.
Education and Naked Social Inequity Under COVID
Educational responses under COVID restrictions have laid bare the broader social inequities in our children’s lives outside of school. In order to learn, children and families need a wide array of effective supports, both in and out of school.
In recent decades our educational system has borne the responsibility of compensating for these inequities. Now the pandemic has highlighted the fact that when these supports are lacking, not only educational advancement is compromised.
Nationwide, an estimated 17 million children — many largely cut off from free school lunches — are now in danger of not having enough to eat. That’s an increase of more than 6 million hungry children compared to before the pandemic. (6)
Without onsite supports that ameliorate poverty, food deficits, housing instability, inadequate access to health and mental health care, students and their families have been left to fend for themselves.
Taken together, these fact make clear that we will need comprehensive educational recovery and remediation strategies in the wake of the educational response to the COVID-19 public health crisis. We will also need to address long neglected educational disparities and social inequities, the persistence of which have exacerbated the effects of COVID-19’s educational disruption and impact.
The political climate will of course affect our capacity to grapple and respond to these issues. How to measure the learning loss caused by the pandemic is already meeting resistance. A bill introduced by Senators Ruiz and Turner in December (S3214), requires districts to provide data on learning loss and the Commissioner of Education to report to the NJ Legislature. At a December 7 hearing in the Senate Education Committee, which Ruiz chairs, representatives of various education groups raised a surprising number of concerns, most of which on their face focused on the burden the collection of data would impose. The Committee released the Bill despite the objections and the Senate passed it 10 days later. As we publish this article the bill is awaiting Second Reading in the Assembly. Read more about S3214 in CommonGround.
Based on what we know of lesser educational displacements of the past, our approach to the understanding of learning loss today should not wait. Nor should we delay addressing the systemic educational disparities that the pandemic has so glaringly highlighted. The futures of a generation of young people is at stake.
Footnotes:
(1) Social Impacts of Hurricane Katrina on Displaced K–12 Students and Educational Institutions in Coastal Alabama Counties: Some Preliminary Observations, Steven Picou, University of South Alabama, Mobile, Alabama, USA, Brent K. Marshall, University of Central Florida, Orlando, Florida, USA [link – https://www.researchgate.net/publication/237295127_Social_Impacts_of_Hurricane_Katrina_on_Displaced_K-12_Students_and_Educational_Institutions_in_Coastal_Alabama_Counties_Some_Preliminary_Observations]
(2) Legacy of Katrina: The Impact of a Flawed Recovery on Vulnerable Children of the Gulf Coast A Five-Year Status Report, Irwin Redlener, MD, Caroline DeRosa, Kelly Parisi. [link – https://academiccommons.columbia.edu/doi/10.7916/D8H420TK]
(3) Mental Health–Related Emergency Department Visits Among Children Aged <18 Years During the COVID-19 Pandemic — United States, January 1–October 17, 2020. Weekly, November 13, 2020, 69(45);1675–1680. Rebecca T. Leeb, PhD1; Rebecca H. Bitsko, PhD; Lakshmi Radhakrishnan, MPH; Pedro Martinez, MPH; Rashid Njai, PhD; Kristin M. Holland, PhD [link – https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/69/wr/mm6945a3.htm]
(4) United States Government Accountability Office Report to Congressional Committees, Distance Learning: Challenges Providing Services to K-12 English Learners and Students with Disabilities during COVID-19, November 2020. GAO-21-43 [link – https://www.gao.gov/products/GAO-21-43]
(5) Digital Divide and 2020 NJDOE Technology Data Collections, NJ Department of Education, Office of Grants Management [link – https://www.nj.gov/education/grants/digitaldivide/techsurveys.shtml]
(6) Feeding America, The Impact of Coronavirus on Food Insecurity, October 30, 2020. [link – https://www.feedingamericaaction.org/the-impact-of-coronavirus-on-food-insecurity/]
