Education Week - March 25, 2020 - 12

'It's months of learning potentially gone.'

When America's Schools Shut Down, We All Lose
This was the week that American schools across
the country closed their doors.
It was the week that our public schools-often dismissed as mediocre, inequitable, or bureaucratic-
showed just how much they mean to American society by their very absence.
The unprecedented shutdown public and private
schools in dozens of states last week has illuminated
one easily forgotten truism about schools: They are
an absolute necessity for the functioning of civic culture, and even more fundamentally than that, daily
life.
Schools are the centers of communities. They provide indispensible student-welfare services, like free
meals, health care, and even dentistry. They care for
children while parents work. And all those services
do much to check the effects of America's economically stratified systems of employment and health
care on young students.
These insights came into focus last week as the
nation's governors, in the absence of a coherent
message from federal officials, took charge and
shuttered tens of thousands of American schools,
affecting tens of millions of students, in an effort to
curb the menacing spread of the new coronavirus,
or COVID-19.
Education historians and researchers struggled
to come up with a historical precedent to this brave
new school-less world. The only certainty, they said,
is that the long-term impacts for students will be severe, and most likely long lasting.
Student learning will suffer in general-and longstanding gaps in performance between advantaged
and vulnerable students will widen, they predicted,
a combination both of weakened instruction and
the other social consequences of the pandemic.
"I don't think we've had a shock to educational
systems of this magnitude, at least to instructional
time," said Joshua Goodman, an associate professor
of economics at Brandeis University. "And part of
that is the number of weeks and months of school
students are going to be missing. But it's also the
fact that a bunch of parents will be unemployed, or
that their savings will have vanished, or that someone in their family is sick.
"It's a shock to school life-but it's also a shock to
home life," he said.

Gregory Bull/AP

By Stephen Sawchuk

Joyce Dagner, a support
manager in Prince
George's County Public
Schools, hands a
"Grab and Go" sack
lunch to a student
at Kenmoor Middle
School in Landover, Md.

No Element Spared
No element of the K-12 system has been untouched by COVID-19 and the wave of mass school
closures that followed it.
Long-term financial impacts are likely: With the
economy in a tailspin, school funding-highly dependent on state and local sales taxes, property
taxes, and other fluctuating revenue sources-will
start to dry up. One economist last week estimated
the cost of extended school closings on the economy
could be at least $50 billion.
Annual testing, the linchpin of two decades of
school reforms, is coming to a screeching halt,
as state after state cancels the exams used to rate
schools and prioritize interventions to improve them.
State rules about the length of the school year,
credit hours, and graduation requirements are
crashing against the reality of hundreds of hours
of lost instructional time. All are likely to be examined, waived, or even rewritten within the next few
months.
School districts' hourly workers and those who are
not typically included in labor contracts, like their
peers in other low-wage jobs in the United States, are
facing reduced hours and layoffs. For educators, the
12 | EDUCATION WEEK | March 25, 2020 | www.edweek.org

job has morphed radically. Superintendents and principals have, in effect, become social-service coordinators -organizing child care, providing meals for students, cobbling together internet access, and trying to
arrange continued learning opportunities for students.
They're committed to the task, even as the duty
of modeling effective leadership is starting to take
its toll.
"There is always that strong sense of how can we
help our students. That has been consistent, and
probably even more pronounced," said A. Katrise
Perera, the superintendent in the Gresham-Barlow
district near Portland, Ore., who like others, has
been focused on keeping food services and socialemotional learning supports in place. But, she added,
"This is stressful. I'm trying to maintain myself, and
keep a level head, and be an example to my employees by staying calm and collected, even though inside, I may feel like I'm falling apart."
Principals echo those sentiments.
"I think my role shifts completely into this symbolic keeper of hope," said Paul Kelly, the principal at
Elk Grove High School in Elk Grove Village, Ill., "My
role in this family is to make sure that we know that
we are trying to get them whatever they need, having staff members feeling like we care about them as
humans and as families, and all of the details of their
professional lives will get resolved."
And the message for students?
"We are here," Kelly said. "We are still going to be
here. We're going to pick up the phone. We're going
to answer the emails. School is such a critical cornerstone of a stable society, and ... a principal needs to
be a big part of that."

Perhaps more than in any other affected country,
the COVID-19 pandemic has also underscored the
harsh reality that in the United States, school quality
and resources tend to reflect the relative wealth and
poverty of the communities they serve.

Deep Divides
Take the inevitable discussion over "remote" or
online learning. There is no good national gauge of
how many districts are planning to attempt to deliver
meaningful instruction via online platforms, and
many districts don't have the capacity to do it at all.
Many areas of the country lack the broadband access necessary even for a basic online-learning program. Those that could at least theoretically assume
access for students don't always have "one-to-one"
devices or link-ups so each family and student can
access their teachers. And those that manage to
cross those hurdles are frantically trying to source
appropriate materials for each grade level-even as
it's clear that some topics, like highly structured sequences for early reading, appear to be nearly impossible to teach well online.
A nationally representative survey of school leaders, conducted by the Education Week Research
Center earlier this month as the epidemic took hold
in the United States, found that districts serving high
proportions of needy students reported being less
able to offer remote learning than wealthier ones,
among several other disturbing disparities. And on
the whole, 41 percent of leaders said they couldn't
support online learning at all.
Those inequities are only the beginning of the

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Education Week - March 25, 2020

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