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A new study suggests that charter schools heavily prioritized student engagement and instruction in the early days of the pandemic, with many navigating a quick transition to online learning and beginning to embrace a hybrid model by the beginning of the 2020-21 school year. This facile response, especially in comparison with traditional public schools, owes much to the organizational flexibility afforded to schools of choice, researchers argued.

The paper was released this morning by the Center for Research on Education Outcomes (CREDO), a research organization at Stanford University that examines education reform and school effectiveness. Its prior releases have often shown the academic performance of charter schools comparing favorably against traditional public schools.

In a call with reporters, Macke Raymond, CREDO’s director and a distinguished senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, called the findings “a remarkable case study of what happens when schools are in this kind of operating framework.”

“It makes me wonder what would happen if we gave that opportunity to other public schools,” Raymond added.

The study is a continuation of earlier work that focused exclusively on remote learning in New York charter schools during the first few months of the pandemic. In this paper, survey data from New York charters was combined with that of two other states, California and Washington State. In all, CREDO sent questionnaires to over 1,700 charters in all three states; they received 524 responses from schools enrolling roughly 225,000 students. All of Washington’s 13 charter schools responded to the survey, while 21 percent of California’s and 64 percent of New York’s did the same.

The polling delved into the specifics of each school’s reaction to the emergence of COVID-19 and resultant switch to remote learning, first between March and June of 2020, then during the 2020-21 school year. The questions touched on how long it took for schools to complete that switch, how they altered instruction, how learning modes changed over time, and what kind of training they provided to employees during the pandemic’s first year.

At that time, charter leaders reported focusing overwhelmingly on how to keep delivering instruction and maintaining contact with families. Measuring priorities among respondents, the study showed that 86 percent listed the transition to digital learning as “very urgent”; 81 percent said that establishing connections with families was very urgent, and 78 percent said the same of maintaining student engagement. By comparison, a smaller group characterized the provision of meals (55 percent), developing protocols for positive cases (37 percent), or ensuring student housing (35 percent) as very urgent.

The drive to move online was reflected in the speed with which charter schools got up and running after state-mandated closures began. On average, charter leaders reported an interval of just 3.5 days between closing their physical campuses and reopening for online instruction. California charters took an average of four days to manage this transition, while those in Washington said they accomplished it in just two. By contrast, at least one contemporaneous account held that less than 40 percent of teachers in district schools were in daily contact with their students by the end of that March.

The relatively shorter transition time for charters was previously noted in a July 2020 report from Tulane University’s National Center for Research on Education Access and Choice. The slight lag displayed by traditional public schools was one the few differences between traditional public, private, and charter schools in that research.

Raymond described the swiftness of charters as “amazingly different” than what was occurring in district schools at the same time. “What we’re looking at here is literally hundreds of schools all doing the same thing,” she said. “They’re all getting a plan, getting into motion, and doing it quickly.”

Charters responding to the CREDO survey also reported moving gradually to a hybrid learning model throughout the 2021 school year. While roughly 80 percent of respondents said they were operating in fully remote status in April 2020, only about 50 percent were still fully remote by February 2021. The other half had moved to a hybrid model by that time.

Somewhat disturbingly, a sizable number of survey participants said they were forced to change academic classes during the initial months of the pandemic. In the spring of 2020, 12 percent said they had dropped courses entirely, but that number jumped to 22 percent during the following school year. During 2020-21, 18 percent of respondents said they had altered high school graduation requirements, 40 percent said they had modified promotion requirements between grades, and 55 percent said they had reduced course content overall.

Changes to academic content also made their impact on learning time. Some 60 percent of charter leaders surveyed said they had reduced the length of their school day relative to the year that preceded the pandemic. Around 15 percent reported extending the school days, while over 30 percent said they had made “other calendar changes,” including moving back the start of the school year, shortening vacations, or moving to a year-round schedule.

With few exceptions, charters additionally offered help to their teachers while negotiating the sudden switch to Zoom classrooms. In total, 97 percent of survey participants reportedly provided professional development to staff related explicitly to online learning, the report found. By comparison, a September 2020 report from the Center on Reinventing Public Education found that most district reopening plans for the 2020-21 school year made no public commitment to increasing time for professional development.

This freedom to tinker with the structure and delivery of academic content was attributable to what Raymond described as the fundamental nature of the “charter bargain”: Schools of choice are afforded more flexibility than their more traditional counterparts, and so are continually adapting throughout their existence. Once the pandemic began, she argued, they were amply prepared to roll with its uncertainties.

“When we kept pulling back from the data and seeing the patterns, what appears so surprising to us is that across different political contexts, different authorizing environments, different financial situations, what you have here is this practically universal response from the charter schools: Extremely fast, extremely focused on maintaining instruction, making tough trade-offs, mobilizing networks, getting all hands on deck as quickly as possible.”

This article was published in partnership with The 74. Sign up for The 74’s newsletter here.

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700 days.

That’s about how long it’s been since more than half the nation’s schools crossed into the pandemic era.

On March 16, 2020, Los Angles Unified and other districts across 27 states, encompassing almost 80,000 schools, closed their doors for the first long educational lockdown. Within nine days, the nation’s remaining districts followed suit.

Since then, schools have reopened, closed and reopened again. The effects have been immediate — students lost parents; teachers mourned fallen colleagues — and hopelessly abstract, as educators weighed “pandemic learning loss,” the sometimes crude measure of COVID’s impact on students’ academic performance.

To mark what will soon stretch into a third spring of educational disruption, LA School Report spoke with educators, parents, students and researchers about what Marguerite Roza, director of Georgetown University’s Edunomics Lab, called “a seismic interruption to education unlike anything we’ve ever seen.” They talked movingly, often unsparingly, about their missteps and occasional triumphs, their moments of despair and fragile optimism for the future. [You can scan through our expanding archive of testimonials right here.]

As spring approaches, there are additional reasons to be hopeful. More children are being vaccinated. Mask mandates are lifting. But even if the pandemic recedes and a “new normal” emerges, there are clear signs that the issues surfaced during this period will linger. COVID heightened inequities long baked into the American educational system. The social contract between parents and schools has frayed. Teachers are burning out.

“There are kind of two camps,” said Beth Lehr, an assistant principal of Sahuarita High School, south of Tucson, Arizona. “There’s the one camp of ‘This too shall pass,’ and then there’s the other camp of ‘Yeah, it’s going to pass, but I don’t know if I want to wait for it to.’”

But none of this was on anyone’s mind on March 16, 2020.

The World Health Organization had declared a pandemic only five days earlier. Two days after that, then-President Donald Trump called a national emergency. And in the Northshore School District, a system of 22,000 students northeast of Seattle, schools had already been closed for over a week. In late February, one of its schools shut for deep cleaning after an employee traveled out of the country with a family member who had become ill. The district’s closure offered a glimpse into what many thought would be a short-term disruption.

‘I realized it wasn’t science fiction’

Susan Enfield, superintendent of Highline Public Schools in Washington: A very good friend of mine who works in the Northshore School District called me, end of February, and said, “I think we’re going to close … and I think the rest of you won’t be far behind.” I said, “No way, there’s no way they’re going to close schools.” I mean, I really was incredulous.

Robin Lake, director of the Center on Reinventing Public Education: I was having brunch with my sister in Kirkland, Washington, when the news broke that there were multiple cases and deaths at the Life Care Center nursing home just a few miles away. My husband sent me a text telling me to get out of Kirkland right away, and everything felt ominous.

Marguerite Roza, Seattle-based director of the Edunomics Lab at Georgetown University: My daughter and I were driving to go pick up some fish for dinner. In the car, they announced the governor’s order — it was with a bigger lockdown kind of order — and we walked into the fish market place, and the guy behind the counter goes, “Have you heard anything yet?” We were like, “Yep.” And he goes, “What did he say?” We said, “Lockdown.” And he [grunts], “Uhhhh.” Already, the streets were pretty empty, and the first person we talked to was the guy packaging up our salmon.

Bothell High School in the Northshore School District, near Seattle, was the first in the nation to close due to COVID-19. (Karen Ducey / Getty Images)

Tony Sanders, superintendent, School District U-46, near Chicago: I was asked to serve on a statewide panel of superintendents … to provide guidance to school district leaders across the state. Our first meeting, held on Sunday, March 15, was attended by prominent legislators, state health officials, the deputy governor for education and state superintendent of schools. Hearing the projections of worst-case scenarios should we not “flatten the curve” was surreal. At the conclusion of that meeting, where we worked to socially distance, but had no idea yet about the need to wear a mask, I made the four-hour journey home in complete silence and disbelief.

Michael Mulgrew, president, United Federation of Teachers, New York City: We started tracking this during the Christmas holiday. We had some teachers who were in China. We had them quarantine when they came back. I didn’t realize [things had changed] until March 16, the day after the New York City public schools closed. I was in my car driving around the city and I was shocked that the streets were empty. That’s when I realized it wasn’t science fiction.

Bridgette Adu-Wadier: freshman, Northwestern University, graduate of T.C. Williams High School in Alexandra, Virginia: By the end of March, Gov. Ralph Northam basically announced that all the schools would be closed due to the pandemic for the rest of the school year. I watched the livestream, and I was texting my friends. One of them was actually really upset and crying about it, just because it was such a stressful situation to be in — like, things are never going to be the same again.

‘We were completely unprepared’

Parents, superintendents and others — many in a state of shock — had little time to plan as events unfolded at frightening speed.

Toni Rochelle Baker: family liaison for Oakland REACH, a parent advocacy organization, Walnut Creek, California: They gave us curfews in our city and then they told us to stock up for food. I don’t live my life like that. I’m a single mother. I go grocery shopping when I can. We get what we need, and now you’re telling me to stock up on food? That was scary. I didn’t have a deep freezer. I didn’t have extra money just laying around [to] go spend $300 on food. I didn’t have Wi-Fi at the time because I didn’t really need it. I have my phone, and now I need Wi-Fi for three people.

A mother tries to get out of bed in the morning after continuous news of a pandemic, isolation at home and school being canceled for her two children, on March 17, 2020 in Brooklyn, New York. (Andrew Lichtenstein / Getty Images)

Maria Amado, family child care provider, Hartford, Connecticut, who opened her program for school-age children during remote learning: [Translated from Spanish] Educators, including myself, sewed masks for the children, and we looked for resources to support each other. Some gave fabric to make the masks, others the elastic. It may not have been in big ways, but they all contributed. And now I remember this and think, “Where did I find the time to make the masks?” It was the adrenaline to survive, knowing this would protect me and I had to do it.

Tony Sanders: We needed to place emergency orders for Chromebooks and other devices. We had to completely transform our approach to food service so that by March 17 we were feeding our students and community at food pickup locations throughout the district. There were decisions that had to be made that I would never have thought of. We had to determine how we would ensure employees would continue to be paid. During the first days of the pandemic, I recall sitting alone in my office. The view from my window was a large parking lot with one vehicle.

Sherrice Dorsey-Smith, deputy director of programs, planning and grants, San Francisco Department of Children, Youth and Their Families: I had to figure out how we were going to open what we called emergency child and youth centers. These were spaces for essential workers to leave their children for the day while they were at work. Child care centers were closed, schools were closed, but some people needed or were required to continue working. They needed a safe place for their children during the day. I had to figure out how to get breakfast, lunch and snacks to all the sites. I remember working through the weekend nonstop, literally 48 hours.

Michael Mulgrew: It was a mad scramble to get everyone trained quickly how to get their classrooms up. How do we teach parents how to help their kids? It was non-stop. It was hundreds of decisions every day. Even though everything was closed, we were still moving stuff literally, like laptops and iPads and different things, trying to get them to our members’ houses so they had something to work off. [Former] Mayor [Bill de Blasio] had resolved never to close the schools, so he would not allow the Department of Ed to put any contingency plans in place. On the Friday before the schools closed, at 3 p.m., the mayor would be banging on the table saying he was going to keep the schools open. And that Sunday afternoon he closed the schools. So we were completely unprepared.

A teacher from Yung Wing School P.S. 124, who wished not to be identified, remote teaches on her laptop from her roof on March 24, 2020, in New York City. (Michael Loccisano / Getty Images)

School, interrupted

As the deadline for lifting lockdown kept slipping away, some took longer to grasp the new reality: Life wouldn’t be returning to normal anytime soon.

Mariela Garcia: freshman at the University of Houston, graduate of Eastwood Academy High School in Houston: It was during spring break when we ended up having two weeks instead of one. And two weeks turned into three. This went on for a couple of weeks before we noticed that we weren’t going to go back to school. Stores started closing down, schools started closing, many things started closing because everyone was scared. That’s when I noticed that this was becoming very serious.

Dale Chu, senior visiting fellow at the Thomas B. Fordham Institute: I realized everything had changed … on May 10, 2020. How do I remember the date? My at-the-time 5-year-old daughter — after nearly two months on Zoom — drew a picture of her class for me. Seeing Kellan’s classmates through her eyes on a Zoom grid really hit things home for me.

Almost two months into remote learning, Dale Chu’s daughter Kellan drew a picture of her Zoom class. That’s when the gravity of the pandemic hit him. (Courtesy of Dale Chu)

Ricardo Miguel Martinez, president, Latino Parents for Public Schools, Atlanta: I had people worried about getting kicked out, evicted, lights being turned off, not having groceries. These are people who weren’t making excuses. The people who are fighting masks and stuff, they have a choice to either follow the data or not follow the data. God bless them in their fight. But these people didn’t have a choice. They got thrown into the chicken factories and died. They got thrown into manufacturing and died so that we could have chicken at the grocery store.

Mourning the lost

Some felt the pandemic’s effects up close: sick parents, dead teachers. This month, the number of deaths from COVID-19 in the U.S. reached 900,000, with an estimated 2,200 of them educators. Many of the effects have been harder to measure, but are certain to leave lasting damage. Recent RAND Corp. data shows four out of five secondary school principals experienced “frequent job-related stress” last year, and educator surveys show increasing concerns over students’ mental health, including anxiety and suicidal thoughts.

Susan Enfield: We lost two middle school students to suicide early in the pandemic. We lost staff members.

A woman attended an October 2020 vigil to remember her sister, a sixth grade teacher in the Bronx, New York, who died from COVID-19. (Andrew Lichtenstein / Getty Images)

Michael Mulgrew: I had to read the names of our members who passed away. I had to make the phone calls to those families. We lost a lot of members, and I always think that if we could have closed earlier, how many more would we not have lost.

Shawnie Bennett, a COVID-19 investigator, Oakland, California: I lost my brother [from COVID] in May of 2020. He was only 32. As a family, when we would gather to try and go see him or just sit outside the hospital window. We were afraid to touch each other, so it was hard to comfort each other. [My son] came home [from college] for Christmas, and he saw me so weak and broken. He had always seen a very strong Black woman as a mother. I was gone, emotionally wrecked, mentally, physically, and it broke him down to the point that he did not want to return to school. He’s in Atlanta now, got an apartment and he’s just trying to figure life out. He was very close to my brother. That loss, on top of what he physically saw me go through, was detrimental for him.

David Brown, principal, Hillcrest Heights Elementary, Prince George’s County, Maryland: Family vacations, going out to eat, visiting family — I think all of those things disappearing created a milieu where it was tough to manage. And when you’re in charge of leading a large group of individuals, how do you help and support them? How do you keep your teachers upbeat? Because the mental health of every adult who receives a paycheck from our county impacts the mental health and the wellness of children who are just simply here to learn. I remember there was discussion that we’ll be able to eat and enjoy ourselves come the 4th of July, and then that didn’t happen. You’re holding out hope that it’s going away, but it’s not, and [you’re] trying to remain that positive, invigorating leader that the principal has to be.

Bridgette Adu-Wadier: Graduation was a really tough time. I don’t remember enjoying it, honestly. Just collectively, it was like a year or so of the pandemic, and then also, my family was impacted a lot financially, which was stressful. I was basically helping my two younger brothers through virtual school for the whole year. I had a lot more family responsibilities, and it took a toll on me mentally. I had trouble balancing things, especially with Zoom class sessions while my brothers needed help or were playing loudly in the other room. I relied on music and audiobooks as a form of escape.

Ashiley Lee, tech and operations coordinator, Para Los Niños, a Los Angeles charter school, where last year she taught seventh-grade history: I remember being in a class full of blank screens, because we no longer required cameras on, and then after that, putting my grades in for the semester and realizing just how low they were. I was trying to brainstorm with my team: What is something, anything, we can do to encourage our students to at least get the one assignment we post a week in by the end of the semester? My kids, it was so funny, we started a joke where I would call on a student to answer a question and they wouldn’t be there — kind of a ghost in the call. And the kids would comment in the chat, “Ghostbuster! Ms. Lee caught him.”

Marguerite Roza: The hardest part was when it looked like there was no reopening school. This was November of 2020. The governor had established these metrics by which you could open schools, and as far out as the modelers had modeled, it was never going to reopen. My then-high school daughter [a cross-country runner] was getting more and more discouraged. You could just see it was really not healthy for her, just to be home all alone every day. And you, as a parent, start to feel desperate. I used to listen to press conferences constantly. You could see that there wasn’t going to be any movement. I was very worried about her. The sports season had come and gone. School was online. I think that was probably the darkest time, which coincides in Seattle with it being really dark, [at] like 3:45.

Mariela Garcia: Hundreds and thousands of people were dying because of COVID, and I was scared. I remember I had no interactions with the outside world for — I kid you not — at least three months straight. My family just did not want to leave our home. At the time, we had to adjust to online school. I had no Wi-Fi or laptop at the time, so it was hard to be in class and even submit assignments from my phone. It was definitely a very hard time, especially when family members started to get COVID.

Toni Baker: I had two kids at the table with computers doing virtual learning and I had no idea what that meant. They told us to sign on to some Zoom that I’ve never heard of before. I’m in love with my kids, but my kids were on my last nerves during the pandemic. Those four walls just weren’t enough.

Couch sitting, watching ‘Friends’

The monotony of being stuck at home sparked new coping strategies: Cooking, at-home workouts, walking the dog — and of course TikTok dances. Some took long couch breaks. Others became entrepreneurs. Mariela Garcia started baking and ran a business from a local farmer’s market.

Mariela Garcia: My family actually bought the DVD set of “Friends” and we just watched “Friends” over and over and over. We’ve already seen each episode at least 10 times. We just keep it playing throughout the whole day because we don’t have any Wi-Fi or anything at home. I would not have started my business if it wasn’t for being in quarantine. I had so much more free time. I hate being that person, but the first time I ever tried my empanadas, they came out great, and I have not changed anything.

Susan Enfield: A group of female superintendents from around the country — we refer to ourselves as “sister supes” — had a standing Sunday afternoon Zoom where we would just check in and get together. In the early months, that proved to be incredibly helpful, just remembering that we weren’t alone. Going for walks with my husband and also, frankly, allowing myself to feel pain and to grieve. I think as leaders we do need to inspire hope and let people know it’s going to be OK and be strong, but we also have to balance that strength and courage with vulnerability. There were weekends where I didn’t get off the couch. I’ve been pretty honest about that in conversations with others. I said to someone once, “If one more person says, ‘You got this,’ I’m gonna smack ‘em.” A year and a half ago, I didn’t “got this,” and people were just lying. I’m sorry, they were just lying. I don’t think we do ourselves or our colleagues or anyone any service by faking it.

Beth Lehr, assistant principal, Sahuarita High School, Sahuarita, Arizona: I do not check my email at all on the weekends.

Malchester Brown IV, 6, takes a photo of the rainbow he painted to submit to his teacher online at his home on Monday, March 15, 2021 in Oakland, California. (Gabrielle Lurie / Getty Images)

Toni Baker: I had a support system. They gave us vouchers for food. They gave my kids free computers. They gave us Wi-Fi. They had these teachers — I don’t even know where they found these beautiful teachers with these loving hearts for these kids. There was a teacher who had a grandma’s touch and a mom’s heart, and she was just so warm. This is through a computer. I’ve never met this woman to this day in real life. I had the community of Oakland REACH behind me. I wouldn’t have made it without them.

David Brown: When we were in person, I had “lunch bunches” where I would eat lunch with the kids. So I went back to eating lunch virtually with the kids, and I found that really gave me a lot of positive energy. You find that you are equally, if not more, excited to see them in this virtual world than they are to see you. So it’s the, “Hey, Mr. Brown.” It’s the big smile. It’s the camera coming on. It’s the home environment. It’s the parents waving in the background. I think all of that does a good amount to lift your spirits.

‘The system itself is not changing’

Confusing guidance and vitriolic debate left many parents feeling lost. They watched helplessly as their children disengaged from learning, but also worried that their kids would get sick if they returned to school. School leaders were caught in what felt like a non-stop, high-volume war of words with unions, parents and state officials. 

Pedro Martinez, CEO, Chicago Public Schools; former superintendent, San Antonio Independent School District: Texas did not prioritize teachers [for vaccines] in the first round, but they were pushing hard and threatening districts about keeping schools open. Meanwhile, the positivity rate, I remember in San Antonio, was over 21 percent. The death rate was five times higher in my district than it was in the more affluent parts of the county. I just remember the frustration. You want these things, but yet you’re not providing vaccines to my staff, who actually want to keep the schools open.

The polarizing debate over mask mandates escalated into an intense legal battle in Texas. (Sergio Flores / Getty Image)

Michael Mulgrew: The city doctors are telling us it’s going to be nothing but a cold and the schools could remain open. The kids are going to be fine. They’re not going to get it, and we’ll create herd immunity, and we’ll be safer faster than everybody else. Literally, that’s the conversation I was having with the mayor and his doctors. Our doctors are telling us the absolute opposite. They’re saying, “Listen, children might not be getting this at this point in time, but this is a serious virus and people are going to die.” The big conflict was that first one.

Marguerite Roza: I’m a data person. I really study the numbers, and I didn’t understand how a lot of people were driven by fear and couldn’t recognize what I was seeing. [They’re saying], “Your child could die,” and I was like, “Well, not really. The numbers here say, really, your child isn’t going to die. I promise you, driving to Grandma’s is more dangerous for your kid than this thing.” You’re having two different conversations if you’re talking about numbers and you’re talking about fear. The fear was so dominant that the numbers people probably felt, out of respect, we should step back and be quiet. I don’t want to tell somebody who’s having a panic attack, “You’re overreacting.” Looking back on it, I think that I probably kept my real views about the data quieter than I should have. I thought people were going to bounce out of it.

School children are spaced apart in one of the rooms used for lunch at Woodland Elementary School in Milford, Massachusetts, on Sept. 11, 2020. Milford was one of the first school districts to reopen in the state. (Suzanne Kreiter / Getty Images)

Mariela Garcia: We were able to pick whether to go back in person or stay online. I definitely wanted to go back. I missed my friends. I missed having class with a teacher right in front of me. My parents thought it was not a good idea. I was conflicted in making a decision, but for the good of my family, I decided to stay online for my whole senior year. That also meant no sports. I was so heartbroken because sports meant everything to me. I was unable to play my senior year. I had already claimed the captain position in my previous year playing, and I was looking forward to a great season.

Parent power

The pandemic has dramatically changed parents’ relationships with their public schools, prompting some to seek new options and others to demand more from the schools their children attend. “I think the pandemic has created some sort of awakening in parents that we’ve not seen before,” Roza said. “I don’t think there’s any putting that genie back in the bottle.” 

Wendy Neal, executive director of My Child My Voice, a Houston-based advocacy group: I’m not saying the teachers are bad, I’m just saying that the parents were finding creative ways of being more of a teacher to their own child. Some parents were like, “Well, if you’re not going to help my child, I’m pulling my kid out of your school. Either I’m going to homeschool, go to an education pod or go to a private school.” Some of these parents really didn’t believe in charter schools either, and then all of a sudden, they’re putting their kid in a virtual charter school.

Volunteer Jill Ause helps a 5-year-old kindergartner learn about sounds and the letters of the alphabet at a learning pod for homeless children, located in the carport at the Hyland Motel in Van Nuys, California. (Mel Melcon / Getty Images)

Marguerite Roza: In March of 2021, [my daughter’s school] finally got around to having their cross-country season outside, and they banned all parents from coming. They run three miles. They’re outside. It just got to the point where it was eye roll upon eye roll. A lot of parents showed up anyway, ’cause how are you going to keep parents off of a three-mile course, right? And we’re popping out of the bushes waving at each other. [It had been] a year, and we knew better. I should have marched out and said, “The evidence suggests we’re fine here,” but they were going to ban you and ban your team if you weren’t cooperating.

Sonya Thomas, executive director, Nashville PROPEL, a parent advocacy group: You would think that a pandemic would bring about a sense of urgency. We’re talking about decades of educational inequities, and what I’m seeing is that the system itself is not changing. It has actually grown richer in money. It has grown more savvy in messaging. And it’s hurtful. I’ve got tears coming down my face now. I just had a friend who died this weekend. He couldn’t read. And I have to ask myself, “What has changed?”

Toni Baker: When this school year came around, the COVID was just everywhere. The previous year, they did the COVID tests, they did the sanitizer, they did the masks, they did all these precautions. And when school started back the next semester, all of that went out the window. I let it slide the first two days of school, but by the third day, I’m like, “What’s going on? Where are the masks? Where is this? Where is that? We’re still in this stuff, and it’s worse now.” I had to make an executive decision as a parent. My kid’s class got exposed and I didn’t like the safety of it. I was worrying, like I had knots in my stomach. I had to remove my children from there. [My son’s] class went on quarantine for a week and then I just never took them back.

Beth Lehr: I have one teacher. This is her ninth year. She has already resigned for next year. She said, “I can’t do this anymore. I dread coming to work every day.” She goes, “You know, I love the day-to-day of being in front of our kids. The second I have to open my email or grade their assignments is when I realize why I resigned.” The emails. The constant onslaught of the very vocal unhappy parents. We have some amazing families, but we don’t hear the “Thank yous” as often as we hear the “You sucks.”

Lost learning

Educators love jargon. It’s not surprising, then, that lockdown introduced new terms like “COVID slide” and “pandemic learning loss” to describe the academic fallout students experienced from months of remote learning. In June 2020, researchers at nonprofit assessment group NWEA were among the first to predict the extent of the chaos. The return to in-person learning helped. But as recently as December, data from McKinsey & Co. showed that academic recovery has been uneven and gaps between Black and white students have widened. Educators also report challenges with student behavior, which many attribute to the lack of socialization during remote learning.

Beth Lehr: The learning loss is going to be there. There’s going to be a new norm, but trying to jam more and more and more down their throats is not helping. Continuing to create these high-stakes environments and making kids feel less than because of something that was totally out of their control is not helping. Meeting kids where they are is. Why do they have to learn all these things, right? They have to learn it to be successful in the future. Great, what does that success look like? How are we redefining success, because honestly, right now, for some of these kids, success is getting out of bed and showing up.

Mariela Garcia: I’ve always struggled in math, and since it was online I feel like I wasn’t really learning as much as I could. When I got to college, I took trigonometry, and it was difficult. I had to get a tutor or stay after school. I had to study more on my own time. I had to take a test in person for the first time in two years. I struggled the first couple weeks, but once I got help and once I started studying, it’s just like riding a bike.

Ricardo Martinez: Seems like we’ve already stopped talking about it. A lot of people refuse to acknowledge it. They’re trying to change the conversation to CRT [critical race theory], anti-CRT. Let’s not worry about what’s not really happening and worry about what’s actually happening. Kids are getting more aggressive. They’ve lost social skills. We’ve lost a lot of learning, and I don’t think that the parents have been able to help because we barely know how to do what they’re asking us to do. I hope that we’re talking about learning loss until we catch back up, which should be in a few years.

Beth Lehr: [Students are experiencing an] emotional stuntedness, for lack of a better term. Freshmen are notoriously immature, but what we’re used to seeing as freshman behavior isn’t even freshman behavior. The “devious licks” stuff [a TikTok challenge that included school property damage] — that was 100 percent only freshman. Oh my God, the soap dispensers were destroyed over and over and over again. We had to replace sinks. We had to replace toilets — not because they were stolen, but because they were destroyed. The older students were super-annoyed by the freshman because then we ended up having to lock our bathrooms during lunch. We’ve also had an increase in sexual infractions — not necessarily assaults. It’s consensual, but it’s much more frequent on our campus this year. This is my seventh year as assistant principal, and this year, hands down, we have had more issues with kids getting caught in positions that high schoolers should not be in.

Hosea Born, art and robotics teacher at Hope Academy of Public Service, Hope, Arkansas: We will be talking about it as long as there is the overwhelming reliance on standardized testing. The pandemic has shown us that adaptability is key, yet we are still measuring our students on how well they can take a test. Teaching a non-tested subject has allowed me to see the flexibility and amazing ways that students learn when there isn’t a looming requirement hanging over their heads. Some of my students haven’t had an art class since the start of the pandemic, but it is key for students to be able to create, and when given the opportunity, they have jumped right back in, and to me, are exceeding all expectations.

A student picks up his diploma during a graduation ceremony at Bradley-Bourbonnais Community High School on May 6, 2020, in Bradley, Illinois. (Scott Olson / Getty Images)

Pedro Martinez: Last year, our district had 100,000 students who were disengaged, including seniors who would have dropped out. We got the majority of seniors to graduate. Same thing happened in San Antonio. What I heard from teachers directly was, “These kids are coming every day. These are the same students who we couldn’t get to engage in remote. They’re coming every single day.” I saw the first-quarter grades. There are still gaps, but significant improvements over the remote year, and specifically with our kids of poverty and kids of color. That gives me a lot of hope. When we have the children in our schools, they actually do perform better.

Robin Lake: I think we will grapple with [learning loss] for as long as the COVID generation is alive. We’ll be looking at the immediate impacts for probably a decade, but there are sure to be lasting effects on individuals and on the economy for many decades unless we can change the trajectory of our response. The question is how we’ll be talking about it. Will the story be that we failed this generation of children, or will it be that we pulled together and found solutions for this generation, and designed a better education system for future generations?

A ‘five-alarm crisis’ for teachers

As they looked back, some recalled moments of doubt about perservering. According to recent data from the National Education Association, the nation’s largest teachers union, more than half of teachers intend to leave the profession sooner than they originally planned. While some are dubious about “the Big Quit,” NEA President Becky Pringle called teacher burnout and staff shortages a “five-alarm crisis.”

Michael Mulgrew: I think most people in this profession thought of quitting throughout this thing. There were some really really tough times. The only way out of this is to go through it.

Susan Enfield: I don’t think I ever thought of quitting. There were moments where I thought I don’t know if I can do this, but that’s different than quitting. I never just was like, “I’m out of here,” and my decision to leave Highline was not a response to the pandemic. I’m ready for a fresh challenge and Highline is ready for a fresh leader.

Beth Lehr: I’m so torn. I’ve applied for a principal position within the district, but at the same time I’m like, “Why? Why did I just do that? What am I thinking?” I haven’t yet gotten to the point where the stuff that I dislike about my job has outweighed the stuff that I like about it, but it’s hit or miss on a daily basis.

‘I don’t use the term normal anymore’

Like a sequel to a bad horror movie, the Omicron variant arrived just as educators and families thought they’d made it through the worst of the crisis. The variant sparked a spike in cases, resulting in further school closures and quarantines. But now, with increasing vaccination rates and a recent decline in positive cases, some states are lifting mask mandates. The nation’s three largest districts aren’t ready to let masks go, but some are starting to use a word they haven’t uttered in a while: hope.

Pedro Martinez: We’re now at a point where cases have been very steadily declining. Our city is now close to an over-70 percent vaccination rate. There are still gaps within my district, but I’m seeing good momentum, especially with 5- to 11-year-olds. We’re close to maybe half of our district that should be fully vaccinated within the next couple weeks. Over 90 percent of my staff are fully vaccinated. So it really gives me hope that we’re on the other side of this. There’s a chance that by springtime we could be talking about not wearing masks.

Susan Enfield: I am hopeful that in the coming weeks and months we are going to collectively adapt to a way of living, a way of working, that will feel more familiar to what we knew prior to the pandemic. I don’t use the term “normal” anymore. I think entering that phase gives me hope.

Michael Mulgrew: The buildings built after the last pandemic have these really big windows. They actually were built that way so that you could open them to keep ventilation in case there was another pandemic. That literally became part of the code for schools after the pandemic of 1918. For a period of time last year, the teachers kept opening up the windows the whole way, and it’s like 7 degrees out. So, we had to produce this video for all the teachers about how you only have to open like half the windows about 3 inches each and you’ll be fine. One of the first cold days when we got back last month, I was in a school, and one of the teachers had windows open all the way. And I’m looking at the windows, and she touched my arm and she goes, “I know I don’t have to open it that much, but my team teacher for 20 years died of COVID a year ago.” I said, “You keep that window open any way you want.”

Shawnie Bennett: I don’t think I will ever take off my mask.

Kate Kahn, 5, Savannah Harper, 5 and Elyse Kahn, 7, from left, pose with their iHealth COVID-19 Antigen Rapid Tests, provided by the state of California, after receiving them at Tulita Elementary School, in Redondo Beach, on Thursday. (Jay L. Clendenin / Getty Images)

Mariela Garcia: I’ve always been the type of person to talk to anybody, but it was different seeing people that I’ve never met before [at the University of Houston]. People have been socially awkward, and it’s hard to start a conversation. With my personality, I’m a happy person and I talk to anyone. So I’m going up to someone [last fall] like, “Hi, nice to meet you,” and they’re just like, “Whoa, 6 feet apart.”

Beth Lehr: It’s so hard to see the end, and it’s so overwhelming. What I’ve heard more this year from my teachers than anything is, “We thought that last year was hard. This year is 10 times harder.” We’ve had very, very low turnover. I do not foresee that being the case next year. There are kind of two camps. There’s the one camp of “This too shall pass,” and then there’s the other camp of “Yeah, it’s going to pass, but I don’t know if I want to wait for it to.”

‘A true hunger for doing things differently’

Two years of scrambling and false starts has offered ample opportunity to think about what has — and perhaps more to the point, what hasn’t — worked for schools. If there’s another pandemic — and scientists say there undoubtedly will be, and soon — will anything change?

Christopher Nellum, executive director, Education Trust West: I think we now appreciate mental health in a different way. The past two years have been traumatic. We have been scared, sick, overworked, unemployed. We have missed vital human connection and even lost loved ones. We have witnessed a surge in racially motivated hate crimes and a national reckoning over police brutality toward Black and brown Americans. It’s OK to be struggling to feel OK in the face of all of that. It’s OK to talk about it. And we all deserve access to the resources we need to address it.

Sonya Thomas: Parent engagement is not what we want. When you engage us, what you’re doing is bringing your own agenda and you’re saying, “This is what we’re going to do, so get with the program.” That’s what engagement means, right? “I’m bringing something to you, this is what you’re gonna get and you gotta just walk in line with it.” I think what they’re learning is that we’re not going anywhere and we want parent partnership. We don’t want to be engaged. Throw that in the trash. That has never gotten anything for our children. What we want is true partnership. We want school districts to partner with us, intentionally take our feedback and use it. That builds trust. It’s not a talking point or a PR move.

Dale Chu: If anything, we’ve learned what doesn’t work. For example, asynchronous learning [without live teaching ] — homework, study hall — stunk. We also learned that huge doses of it left millions of students isolated from their peers, the toll from which we’re just starting to come to grips with.

Robin Lake: I hear a true hunger for doing things differently. People are saying, “You know, the way we ask teachers to teach alone in a classroom, trying to be expert in all things and serve vastly different needs, is crazy.” I believe there is a powerful confluence of parents, educators and civic leaders who know things have to change and are determined to make that happen.

Michael Mulgrew: We never said [remote learning] was going to be the be-all-and-end-all. It was always a way for us to keep in contact, to keep our students engaged. Through the end of that [2019-20] school year, it really was more of a lifeline between teachers and students and their families. We thought it should have been more of a centralized process, but [the department] figured it’s better off to just let every teacher do their own thing. The majority of students really do regress in a remote setting. There was a small percentage of students who actually thrived in remote, so that says there’s something there we have to look at. If there’s a subset of children who were not doing well when they were going to school — and there’s all sorts of different reasons for that — who all of a sudden did really well in a remote setting, we have to look at this going into the future.

A National Guard member drives a school bus around the base with a safety trainer in Reading, Massachusetts, on Sept. 15, 2021. The state deployed 200 members to help get students to school. (David L. Ryan / Getty Images)

Marguerite Roza: We have seen districts jump in and be nimble in a way that we never thought districts could be nimble before. People always say, “You know, turning a district around is like turning an aircraft carrier.” I’m like, an aircraft carrier turns around in a day. Why is everybody using that as something that’s slow? I was in the military. [From 1988 to 1992, Roza served at the Navy Nuclear Power School in Orlando.] Aircraft carriers are pretty maneuverable. There are thousands and thousands of people on an aircraft carrier, and that thing could spin around and change direction with the wind. I do think that we had thought districts couldn’t adjust, and many of them did.

Beth Lehr: I’ve had a lot of teachers really rethink their philosophies — some of my most dyed-in-the-wool [teachers]. This has truly opened their eyes when they’ve seen the disparities. Not everybody’s home looks the same. When we first started doing all of the remote, we had a lot of really serious conversations about requiring cameras to be on or not. A lot of our teachers were like, well, “Why wouldn’t the camera be on?” They never took into account that there might be 10 people in a two-bedroom house. There might be somebody being slapped, hit, cut, whatever while they’re there. They might be embarrassed because they’re doing your class from their car in the McDonald’s parking lot.

‘So long and so short’

Seven hundred days have flown by for some and painfully dragged on for others. For many, it’s been a bit of both. 

Michael Mulgrew: It feels like 7,000 days.

Laurie Corizzo, counselor, Ridge Ranch School, Paramus, New Jersey: This whole pandemic, the virus, the water cooler conversations are never-ending. If someone isn’t discussing a vaccine, a booster, the virus, who has it, who had it, who passed, it seems that conversations are stagnant. My point is, it encompasses every single aspect of our lives. It is as if there were some sort of imaginary force field that prevents any semblance of any other conversation to happen anywhere on the planet. In a word, it is quite exhausting.

Christopher Nellum: I hope that 700 days in, we are seeing our education systems for what they are and what they have been for a long, long time: profoundly inequitable.

Susan Enfield: I didn’t know that 700 days could both seem so long and so short simultaneously. I think the last couple of years have felt like a lifetime in and of themselves, and yet, at the same time, it feels like it’s gone by in a flash.

Zadie Williams, 8, gets her temperature checked before entering summer school in the fourth grade at Hooper Avenue School in Central Los Angeles on June 23, 2021. (Carolyn Cole / Getty Images)

Marguerite Roza: I mean, wow — what a seismic interruption to education unlike anything we’ve ever seen. Normally, we would say a 1 percent change in enrollment from one year to the next is earth-shattering to finance. We’re seeing 3, 4, 5, 6, 10 percent enrollment shifts in some districts. And some of those are large districts. Those kinds of things are going to change the structure of education forever.

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Shanikia Johnson, a teacher in a classroom for 3-year-olds at Little Flowers Early Childhood and Development Center in Baltimore, Maryland, helped Magjor Jones clean up a puzzle. (Getty Images)

Child care centers in which children wear masks are less likely than others to shut down because of COVID-19 outbreaks, according to what’s believed to be the first large-scale, year-long study of child masking in the U.S.

Conducted by researchers at Yale University, the study — involving more than 6,600 center- and home-based child care providers — showed that masks on children were associated with a 13- to 14 percent reduction in closures, while social distancing of 6 feet reduced the chances of closure by just 7 percent.

With young children still not eligible for vaccinations — and shots for those under 5 possibly still months away —  the study supports experts’ recommendations that children 2 and up wear masks, especially with Omicron still causing frequent outbreaks, the authors wrote in an American Medical Association journal.

At a time when masking continues to incite protests, the findings, they said, “have important public health policy implications for families that rely on child care to sustain employment.” While the spike in cases due to Omicron has led to staffing shortages in centers, masking, the researchers added, can keep programs from having to close.

COVID-19’s impact on child care has had serious ramifications for the nation’s economy and families with young children. Thousands of mothers left the workforce when their children’s programs shut down. About 3 percent of child care centers failed to reopen after lockdowns, according to one analysis, and many young children lost an important source of playtime and language development.

But requiring young children over 2 to wear masks, as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention currently recommends, is arguably even more controversial than such mandates are for kids in kindergarten and beyond. Opponents argue the masks make it hard for young children to recognize facial expressions and develop language skills, while others say those concerns are unfounded.

“We know children as young as 2 can safely and consistently wear masks if adults make that a routine expectation,” said Dr. Dean Blumberg, a pediatric infectious disease specialist at the University of California, Davis. He said masks may soon become optional as spring and summer approach, but added it’s important to remember why masks were recommended in the first place. “This was a completely novel virus that nobody had any immunity to,” he said.

The Yale study is different from most because it asked teachers about their masking practices in the spring of 2020 and followed up with the same teachers a year later, said Walter Gilliam, a child psychiatry and psychology professor at Yale and co-author of the paper.

It was also “a much larger study than most and takes into account many different types of programs in a wide variety of communities,” he said.

Policing mask use

The results, however, come as the COVID-related restrictions of the past two years have started to ease. Some states, for example, no longer recommend contact tracing.

In a Tuesday Washington Post op-ed, three physicians wrote that schools should begin to phase out mask mandates. The CDC’s latest guidance, which describes the benefits of  upgraded masks, such as N95s, they wrote, offers a “pathway to compromise” in which those who are at higher risk protect themselves.

“Time and energy that staff spend policing mask use is far better spent on teaching and supporting children,” they wrote, also citing research that summarizes potential impacts of masks on young children’s development, particularly those that might have hearing loss.

The Yale paper addresses concerns that masks may inhibit children’s social and speech skills. The data is “very mixed and any negative impacts on children reading social cues is very small,” Gilliam said. “It’s COVID-19 that’s harmful, not the masks that prevent its spread.”

Blumberg at the University of California added that young children are not with masked adults all of the time and have “plenty of opportunities to develop these language skills and look at people’s lips moving.”

Even so, mask opponents are unlikely to be persuaded to drop their objections, noting that the World Health Organization generally recommends against mask use for children under 5.

“The harmful effects are amplified with young children,” said Sharon McKeeman, founder of Let Them Breathe, a California advocacy group that sued the state over its mask requirement in schools and is backing preschools and child care centers that defy the state’s indoor mask requirement. “Child care providers are starting to stand up for their rights and Let Them Breathe is here to support them.”

A sign at the Kentucky Freedom Rally on Aug. 28, 2021. Demonstrators protested several issues, including Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear’s management of the pandemic, abortion laws and the teaching of critical race theory. (Getty Images)

‘Always trying to catch up’

California still has a strict indoor mask mandate that includes child care centers. New York, where a judge restored the state’s mandate this week, is another. But in most cases, “parents likely choose programs that align with their beliefs with respect to mask wearing,” because child care centers are generally private businesses and not run by public boards like schools, said Lynette Fraga, CEO of Child Care Aware, a nonprofit that advocates for child care policies and supports local efforts to help families find care.

She noted that while opinions on masking in child care settings are as varied as they are in K-12, requiring masks is relatively inexpensive compared to other mitigation strategies like upgrading ventilation systems or social distancing, which can require more staff and smaller class sizes.

The Yale study showed that in the early months of the pandemic, only 9 percent of centers and child care homes in the sample required children to wear masks, likely representing “highly vigilant programs.” the authors wrote. A year later, about a third of the programs had a mask policy for children.

One factor that contributes to the pushback against masking children — whether it’s in child care or K-12 — is that families rarely know when the requirement will be lifted, said Benjamin Linas, a Boston University epidemiologist,

With Omicron still prevalent, he agrees that both schools and child care centers should currently require masks as much as possible. Dr. Thomas Murray, the lead author of the Yale study, noted the increased rate of child hospitalizations associated with Omicron. At the beginning of January, an average of 672 children were being admitted to the hospital each day — a pandemic record.

But Linas said families need to know upfront what’s triggering masking rules and what conditions would allow such requirements to lapse. He co-authored a paper last year that includes a tool to guide districts in making such calls. The same process could be used in programs for young children, he said.

Public health and district officials “typically do not make the goals of masking policy clear,” he said, “and so the policies are inherently stagnant and always trying to catch up.”

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Scott Olson / Getty Images

Children under 5 years old may be eligible for coronavirus shots as soon as the end of February — much earlier than previously expected.

On Tuesday, Pfizer and BioNTech announced that they requested the Food and Drug Administration authorize a two-dose regimen of their vaccine for children under 5. Meanwhile, the companies will continue to research the efficacy of a third shot.

In December, disappointing trial data showing that two smaller doses were safe for youngsters but, in children ages 2 to 4, did not produce a strong enough immune response threatened to extend the timetable before which young children would be eligible for COVID vaccines. But the FDA urged Pfizer-BioNTech to submit their initial trial data so that regulators could begin the review process, then to later submit numbers on a third shot once those become available, The Washington Post first reported. Results from the study of a three-dose regimen are expected to arrive in late March at the earliest.

“If they get the two-dose approved, then they can get going. And by the time the first round of two-dose people are ready to boost … if they have a third dose approved, then they’ll get through this course,” explained Benjamin Linas, professor of medicine at Boston University. “But if they wait until they have all the data for the three-dose course, then they won’t even be able to get started.”

Even if three shots prove to be the optimal vaccination level for the age group, the Massachusetts doctor reassures parents that two doses provide far more protection than zero.

“Absolutely, it should give families some peace of mind having their children two-dose vaccinated,” he told The 74.

The news may bring some long-awaited relief to parents of children under 5 for whom the Omicron surge has been particularly frightening and stressful between spikes in pediatric hospitalizations and widespread day care center closures.

“As a parent of a 3-year-old, this news does feel like light at the end of (the) tunnel,” said Jorge Burmicky, assistant professor at Howard University, in a tweet sharing The Washington Post story.

But nationwide, rates of pediatric vaccination remain low. As of Jan. 26, just 20 percent of children ages 5 to 11 were fully immunized, while 55 percent of those ages 12 to 17, who have been eligible for shots for longer, had received two doses, according to data published by the American Academy of Pediatrics.

As of November, nearly a third of parents of children ages 5 to 11 said they would “wait and see” before immunizing their kids in the most recent poll administered by the Kaiser Family Foundation on parents’ vaccine attitudes.

For this decision around immunizations for children 6 months to 4 years old, Linas believes federal agencies must be upfront about the expected authorization process. Without clear messaging that young kids may ultimately need to receive three shots — but that the initial authorization of a two-shot regime allows youngsters to safely get started — he worries the eventual pivot could erode some parents’ faith in the shots.

“If you don’t talk about it … it just creates this opportunity for misinformation, lack of trust, and then people shut down,” he said. “This is all about trust right now.”

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This article is part of a collaboration between The 74 and the USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism.

Los Angeles families are divided along racial lines and income levels over how well the Los Angeles Unified School District handled remote learning and other issues during the pandemic, a new poll shows.

The annual poll by Great Public Schools Now of 500 Los Angeles families found 43 percent of “very low income” and 27 percent of families of color did not believe the quality of remote learning was good; while just 7 percent of higher income and 27 percent of white families experienced similar problems during the 2020-21 school year.

“Many low-income and families of color feel positive about what is going on in public schools in general; but not at the same level as higher-income families and white families in the school systems,” write the authors of the report.

“One resounding finding is that ensuring all students and their families have access to the same quality experiences is still not realized,” the report concluded.

When classes went remote in the spring of 2020, many L.A. students faced challenges such as not having devices or wifi access, the poll found. Concerns were also expressed about student mental health services and educational resources, with white families often reporting better interactions with the school system.

Here are 5 key findings from the report:

1. Opinions on mental health support for students varied by race and income

78 percent of the respondents said schools handled mental health support well, but racial and income gaps persist: While 80 percent of white families approved of how student mental health supports were handled, just 61 percent of Black families felt that way.

2. Opinions on the quality of remote learning were also mixed

More than 80 percent of higher income, and 63 percent of white families said remote learning made things better for their children, while just 30 percent of very low income and 57 percent of families of color had that experience.

3. Students faced struggles accessing the internet at home — an issue that was true for students from all backgrounds

According to the survey 84 percent of families encountered internet connection issues at home. This issue transcended race and income with 25 percent of Latino families reporting “poor access to good internet” compared to 24 percent of white families; and 18 percent of Black families.

4. Survey showed gaps in family perspective on school decisions

A majority of the respondents (81 percent) reported feeling listened to when it comes to school decisions, but not everyone feels heard equally. Families with higher incomes overwhelmingly felt they had more influence on school decisions than those poor families; while fewer low income families felt this way.

5. Across the board, Los Angeles families wanted a better quality of education

Looking ahead, Los Angeles families uniformly wanted more and better educational resources; with tutoring at the top of the list; followed by after school programs that offer both academic and non-academic support, and out of school time support.

It’s a question that education experts have been asking since the emergence of COVID-19, and one whose answers are gradually becoming clearer. With federal sources reporting that 99 percent of students have now returned to classrooms, newly available data are showing how students were affected by spending long stretches of the last two school years at home. And the signs are not good.

Perhaps the most disturbing news yet was found in a working paper released last month by the National Bureau of Economic Research, which found that state test scores dropped significantly in both reading and math during the pandemic. In a discovery that will reopen questions about the wisdom of keeping schools closed, economist Emily Oster and her co-authors found that learning loss was far worse in districts that kept classes fully remote, and that declines in reading scores were greater in districts serving predominantly poor and non-white students.

Oster, a Brown University professor and popular author, has won both adulation and criticism in the COVID era as an advocate for school reopenings. One study she co-authored, examining the spread of coronavirus in 250 Massachusetts districts last winter, helped persuade officials at the Centers for Disease Control to reduce the recommended social distancing requirement in schools from six feet to three.

In an interview, Oster said that while the pandemic’s academic impact was “probably larger than [she] expected,” the differential effects related to closure policy were not unexpected.

“Certainly I do not find the direction surprising, or the fact that there was a significant difference across these groups,” she noted.

The study makes use of two huge sources of information. One, the COVID-19 School Data Hub, was launched in September by Oster and her colleagues to track the different learning models (virtual, in-person, or hybrid), enrollment trends, and public health outcomes that prevailed in schools during the 2020-21 school year.

The other was assembled from the 2021 math and English scores for students in 12 states between the third and eighth grades. The states studied (Colorado, Connecticut, Florida, Massachusetts, Minnesota, Nevada, Ohio, Rhode Island, Virginia, West Virginia, Wisconsin and Wyoming) were chosen because their student participation rates in state tests remained above 50 percent this spring, and they offered at least two years’ worth of testing data from the period before the pandemic.

The researchers found that overall student pass rates — the rate at which students score at or above “proficient,” however that is designated by the state administering the test — dropped in all 12 states, though with a wide variation in the size of the declines. In Wyoming, pass rates fell 2.3 points compared with prior years; in Virginia, they plummeted by 31.9 percent.

What’s more, the scale of learning loss was far more substantial in areas that kept schools closed longer.

The team specifically targeted the effects of school closures by dividing all school districts in their sample into three groups: those that offered in-person learning for at least two-thirds of the 2020-21 school year, those that went in-person for less than one-third of the year, and those that fell somewhere in-between. Then they compared changes in test performance among schools that fell into the different categories.

The total effect of a district shifting from 0 percent in-person learning to 100 percent would be to reduce the drop in math pass rates by 10.1 percentage points (or more than two-thirds the average amount they declined during 2020-21, 14.1 points), Oster and her collaborators calculated; the same change would reduce the drop in English pass rates by 3.7 percentage points (more than half the average amount they declined over the same period, 6.3 points).

The downward movement on achievement was also somewhat linked to student background. By indexing the decline in scores to district demographic information, the authors found that in districts that enrolled over 50 percent African American or Hispanic students, the effect of switching from fully in-person classes to fully remote was associated with a drop in pass rates of 9 percentage points. Meanwhile, in a district enrolling no African American or Hispanic students, that switch only brought about a drop of 4.3 points.

Those disparate trends find support in other research. Recent results from the online i-Ready assessment, administered to over 3 million elementary and middle schoolers across 50 students by Curriculum Associates, showed that students in majority-African American schools have fallen behind those in majority-white schools by a full 12 months of learning during the pandemic. Black students, on average, have enjoyed much less access to in-person classes during that time, studies have demonstrated.

One lingering question is the extent to which the results were influenced by the cross-section of students who sat for tests this spring. With a sizable number of students either opting out of state-required testing or simply leaving public schools entirely, some have wondered whether the students who participated in the exams offer a representative sample from which to draw conclusions.

Oster said that the high participation rates in states that were selected for the study (all above 80 percent, and most above 90 percent) gave her “more confidence” in the effects she found. If anything, she said, the groups that were underrepresented in spring testing — disproportionately English learners and special education students — made it likely that the study was underestimating the damage wrought by the pandemic.

“You see pretty consistently across states that there was less participation among English language learners or special ed students. That makes me think that…these numbers could be even larger if we sampled those groups at higher rates also.”

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NWEA

Over the past two years, virtually every American has suffered loss. Many have lost loved ones. Others have lost jobs or homes. In most instances, the only option is to accept fate and try to return to a sense of normalcy.

However, when it comes to addressing students’ learning loss, we must resist the temptation to try to get back to normal. Returning to a normal school routine, without addressing lost learning opportunities, would leave millions of students permanently behind. Doing what’s right by kids will require a massive national effort — over and above what’s considered normal — to provide additional instructional time over the next two years.

It’s difficult to convey the magnitude of students’ learning loss in a manner that galvanizes action. The nonprofit testing company NWEA reported last month that the median student in grades 3 to 8 returned to school this fall 9 to 11 percentile points behind in math and 3 to 7 percentile points behind in reading. For most people, such numbers fail to convey the magnitude of the loss and the scale of the effort needed to address it. It’s like hearing that the price of gas is rising, denominated in Albanian leks or Algerian dinars.

One way to make the magnitude more tangible is to restate the loss in terms of students’ future earnings. Using the relationship between achievement test scores and earnings among those already in the workforce, a 9 to 11 percentile point decline in math achievement (if allowed to become permanent) would represent a $43,800 loss in expected lifetime earnings. Spread across the 50 million public school students currently enrolled in grades K to 12, that would be over $2 trillion — about 10 times more than the $200 billion Congress set aside last year to help schools respond to the pandemic.

Another way to express the loss is in terms of typical academic growth per week during a normal school year. In grades 4 and 5, it would take an additional eight to 10 weeks of instruction to cover the loss in reading and math, respectively. In grades 6 through 8, where the material is more complex and students’ rate of progress slows, it would take an additional 14 and 19 weeks of instruction to cover those losses in reading and math, respectively.

Schools could compensate for that deficit without literally extending the school year: with tutors, extra periods of instruction in math and reading, Saturday academies and afterschool programs. However, no one should expect to produce the equivalent of eight to 19 instructional weeks just by asking teachers to run a few review sessions and to generally pick up the pace. Yet, for most students, that’s what the academic catchup strategy seems to be so far.

Here’s a more disturbing fact: A large body of evidence is showing that students in high-poverty schools, students of color and white students who were scoring below grade level before the pandemic have lost the most ground academically. Perhaps most surprisingly, those white and Asian students who were scoring in the top quartile before the pandemic have returned to school this fall on track — with no loss in expected growth — as if there had been no pandemic! In other words, communities of color and those experiencing poverty have not only borne the brunt of job and wage losses, but their children have borne the brunt of the academic losses as well.

In many places, local schools are still bogged down with immediate concerns, such as whether to require masks, whether to shut down in the face of COVID outbreaks and how to get back to normal. Federal and state policymakers can help, by requiring local leaders to look down the road and begin planning more ambitious catchup efforts for this summer and next school year.

To start, states should quantify the magnitude of pandemic learning losses. They should suspend their old accountability measures and replace them with specific targets for each school and district to bring students back up to their pre-pandemic performance by spring 2024 — as a floor, not a ceiling. For the next two years, all eyes should be focused on getting students back to pre-COVID academic levels.

Second, state governments should be preparing to target their remaining federal dollars to schools and student groups with continuing achievement losses. Last spring’s American Rescue Plan required states to allocate 90 percent of the new federal dollars using established formulas — but that was before anyone knew which schools and students had lost the most ground over the past two years. States should hold back much of the remaining 10 percent until the achievement data clarify which students are still lagging behind.

Third, education leaders should use this summer and next fall to track the efficacy of their recovery efforts. The federal government is largely to blame for the absence of a learning plan; it did not specify which data districts should be collecting. In the coming months, the Biden administration should provide guidance to districts about tracking the attendance of students in each type of intervention and linking those data with student outcomes.

Local leaders must be prepared to update, adjust and expand their academic recovery efforts over the next two years. To do that, they will need to know which students are engaged in each type of intervention and which approaches are associated with the largest achievement gains.

Our research team is working with 12 large public school districts to compare the achievement growth of students receiving various types of interventions, from tutoring to Saturday academies to afterschool programs. We are proud that our district partners — even without federal guidance — foresaw the need for better tracking so they could adjust their plans by scaling up their most effective programs. We will be sharing what we learn as we go.

Teachers, parents and students are exhausted. Even if their schools return to a normal schedule, most students will remain behind at the end of the current academic year. But rather than wait for next spring’s state tests to confirm that news, local school districts should be planning now to ramp up their catchup efforts this summer and next fall — to provide supplemental instruction at a scale necessary to make students whole. Meanwhile, state and federal governments should make sure they have a plan in place to determine which local interventions are making the most difference, and to share what they are learning with local decisionmakers. If we do not act decisively now, if we try simply to get back to normal and allow these learning losses to become permanent, we will be solidifying what’s been a dramatic increase in educational inequity.

Dr. Dan Goldhaber is director of the Center for Analysis of Longitudinal Data in Education Research at the American Institutes for Research. Thomas J. Kane is the Walter H. Gale Professor of Education and Economics at Harvard University and faculty director of Center for Education Policy Research, which works with school agencies through its Strategic Data Project, Proving Ground, National Center for Rural Education Research Networks and other research projects. Andrew McEachin is director of the Collaborative for Student Growth at NWEA, a nonprofit assessment provider.

Parents and students gathered for a Statewide School Sit Out in Whittier, California, Nov. 15 to protest the state’s vaccine mandate for students. Despite these demonstrations, new polling data shows most parents don’t consider conflicts over masks, vaccines or quarantine policies to be a major problem in their children’s schools. (Getty Images)

Less than two-thirds of parents give schools an A or B for their handling of students’ academic and social-emotional needs during the pandemic, and almost 60 percent said they haven’t seen or heard anything about additional resources their schools can provide to address these issues, according to a new poll released last month.

Sixty-one percent assigned top grades for how their child’s school is “addressing any learning challenges related to the pandemic,” and 60 percent gave an A or B for “providing resources to support students’ mental health.”

Schools get higher marks, however, for keeping parents updated on school policies, assessing where children stand academically and even requirements regarding vaccines, masks and quarantines. Almost three-quarters of parents give schools an A or B in these areas.

Keri Rodrigues, president of the National Parents Union, which conducted the survey, said the results suggest parents are “still in the trenches with teachers” but have less faith in the nation’s leaders to make bold improvements to schools. Thirty-eight percent of the sample of just over 1,000 parents give President Joe Biden an A or B on handling schools’ responses to the pandemic, and thirty-six percent give Education Secretary Miguel Cardona high grades on that question.

Over half of respondents said they’ve heard “not much” or “nothing at all” about federal relief funds or how they can be used for education.

“Why does everything look and feel the same?” Rodrigues asked. “[Parents] are not feeling the impact of this money.”

Conducted 20 times since the beginning of the pandemic, the advocacy organization’s poll captures parents’ opinions on the most pressing COVID-related issues facing schools and families — from parents’ willingness to vaccinate their children to how well they think schools are serving students with special needs. Over time, Rodrigues said she has seen parents consistently say they’re concerned about their children’s well-being, but that overall, schools “failed to listen to us.”

Some district leaders say they’re hearing the similar concerns about students’ emotional and behavior needs from their staff. In the Anoka-Hennepin School District in Minnesota, Superintendent David Law noted that focusing on students’ mental health needs is a top priority for teachers.

“Students are needier than they were in the past,” he said, adding that in his district of 37,000, the 20 percent that did not return to in-person learning last year are “really struggling with the transition” this year.

But even though schools now have the money to hire more counselors and social workers, “the personnel can’t be had,” said Daniel Domenech, executive director of AASA, the School Superintendents Association. Addressing those behavioral and emotional needs is “falling more and more on the shoulders of classroom teachers.”

The latest results, gathered by Echelon Insights, which conducts opinion research, show 40 percent of parents consider staffing shortages to be a major or moderate problem at their child’s school. Almost the same percentage responded that student behavior issues are affecting learning, and about a third said behavior issues were serious enough to create safety risks.

While parent protests and disruptions at school board meetings have dominated the news, just 16 percent of parents responding consider conflicts over masks, vaccines or quarantine policies to be a major problem in their children’s schools. More than half answered that disagreements over these issues are either a minor problem or non-existent.

But in some parts of the country, those debates are more intense, and Domenich said superintendents losing their jobs over mask mandates don’t view the issues as minor.

“In [the Houston Independent School District], we definitely saw the divide with parents on mask mandates after Superintendent [Millard] House and the school board voted for mask mandates,” said Wendy Gonzales-Neal, a National Parents Union delegate in Texas and the executive director of advocacy group My Child My Voice. “Parents are fighting with schools and our elected officials to keep our kids safe.”

Despite districts’ increasing use of test-to-stay policies — which allow close contacts of students who test positive for COVID-19 to avoid quarantine — just over half of parents, 53 percent, still think students who have been exposed should stay home from school for at least 14 days.

About a third said schools should allow students to come back to class as long as they test negative multiple times in a week, and 5 percent said schools shouldn’t do anything if students are exposed.

Parents just want consistency, Rodrigues said.

“Quarantines are a toss up. They can change from school to school,” she said. “We can’t control COVID, but parents need to know what is going to happen.”

Disclosure: The Walton Family Foundation, the City Fund, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, the Charles and Lynn Schusterman Family Foundation and the Carnegie Corporation of New York provide financial support to the National Parents Union and The 74.

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Nearly 40 percent of 669 educators who serve English language learners around the world said they should have repeated last school year because of pandemic-related learning loss, according to a recent survey.

More than 56 percent of respondents said these students’ formal education was significantly disrupted, but they were not the only children to have suffered: Most did not believe they were disproportionately affected as compared to their English-speaking peers, despite evidence to the contrary.

The answers were gleaned from a survey conducted in October by Off2Class, a company that provides curriculum, assessments and professional development tools to ESL teachers. The seven-year-old for-profit is headquartered in Canada but serves more than 90,000 students in 120 countries.

Nearly three-quarters of survey respondents were teachers: The others were tutors. Roughly half live in the United States though many are Americans living and working in other countries.

Off2Class

Several of the questions were answered on a sliding scale though teachers were able to write their responses to open-ended queries. The results reveal their concerns about the long-term consequences of lower expectations for English language learners — and about their backsliding, especially in the area of grammar.

Some respondents were concerned about students’ mental health and the return of behavioral problems usually seen in elementary school — getting out of their seat at inappropriate times and name-calling — while others wondered whether students’ enthusiasm for school would return.

“Most of them just logged in on Zoom, left the computer and pretended not to care,” one educator wrote. “My main concern is that it has made them less interested in studying/engaging in future classes.”

Still others focused on the difficulty of learning a new language without close interaction with school staff.

“I think ESL learning is extremely difficult over the internet when it comes to pronunciation,” another educator said. “Students benefit from being able to mimic mouth movement and that can get lost on video chat.”

More than 44 percent of survey-takers said their schools supplied them with sufficient technology to weather the shutdowns. But more than a quarter disagreed.

It’s not surprising, then, that more than 62 percent of respondents paid out of pocket for some of the tools they needed to serve their students during the pandemic: They spent hundreds — or, in some cases, even thousands of dollars — on additional materials, including books, computers, routers, printers, webcams, headsets and memberships to online educational resources.

Off2Class

But no matter what they purchased, problems persisted. Motivation was a significant hurdle for students learning at home. Not only did they face a massive disruption in their lives because of school closures, but they also wrestled with a faltering economy and in many cases, lost wages for themselves or their families.

Educators said they, too, felt the strain: While many respondents reported an even greater passion for their work — one said the pandemic, “has only increased my desire to improve myself so I can be of further use to my students” — some were clearly overburdened.

Not all teachers received the help they needed from their schools. While more than 48 percent said they were supported by their employers during the crisis, nearly 20 percent strongly disagreed with the statement. More than 58 percent of respondents said their stress levels rose sharply during the crisis.

“The way we are treated, the amount of work versus pay, the disrespect and disregard of teacher’s mental health,” one teacher began, “I feel like quitting for good every single day.”

Despite the burnout, there were bright spots: Nearly half the respondents — 46 percent — said their confidence in online teaching skyrocketed during the pandemic. Kris Jagasia, CEO and co-founder of Off2Class, was glad to see teachers build their skills in this area.

“Looking forward, now that ed tech is here to stay, it’s really important that technology be considered very purposefully to make sure the right investments are being made for ELLs,” he said.

Some respondents were reached through a Facebook group founded by Off2Class while others were contacted by email through the company’s customer database. Most use its software and were incentivized to participate through T-shirt giveaways and/or a $25 credit toward the purchase of the company’s goods.

The 74 contributed several questions to the survey, including those on student retention.

The results, collected between Oct. 22-29, were telling: While some educators might have wished for English language learners to have repeated a grade, only 22 percent recommended this for their own students.

Off2Class

Tim Boals is the founder and director of WIDA, an organization that provides language development standards, assessments, and resources to those who support multilingual learners. Based out of the Wisconsin Center for Education Research, WIDA has 41 member states and territories which use their language standards and follow their guidelines for teaching these children.

Boals is well aware of the disproportionate impact of the pandemic on traditionally underserved populations, including multilingual learners, but does not believe retention is the answer: He said schools should remember language acquisition takes time.

The real problem, he said, is some educators’ lack of faith in these children: If teachers label them unsuccessful, the children themselves will believe they are destined to fail.

“If we see kids as ‘behind their peers,’ the danger is that it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy that denies them the future opportunities they need,” he said. “There are plenty of anecdotal examples of people going through most of their school careers at the bottom and then something happens that shows them their potential greatness and they turn it around.”

Success depends on a schoolwide buy-in, with every adult on campus working to create a welcoming and engaging environment for newcomer children and committing themselves to helping them learn English while they master content subjects. All this, Boals said, while respecting and building upon their students’ own languages and cultures.

“It’s a big job, but there are plenty of examples of schools that are succeeding,” he said. “We need to share those examples and ensure that educators have the resources and understanding to create and sustain those learning spaces for multilingual learners.”

This article was published in partnership with The 74. Sign up for The 74’s newsletter here.

(Michael Locciasano / Getty Images)

Charlotte Collins was a kindergartner in name only last year — enrolled in a San Antonio charter school, but not “super participating” in remote learning, her mother said.

“Having a kindergartner sit at a computer to do online school was not a thing I was willing to make her do,” said Alison Collins.

But she didn’t want her daughter, who is still behind in reading, to repeat the grade either. With a November birthday, Charlotte is already one of the oldest students in her first grade class.

“Then she would be almost two years older than her peers,” Collins said. “She didn’t get a fair shake.”

Seven-year-old Charlotte Collins of San Antonio, Texas, went on to first grade this year even though she’s behind in reading. Her mother Alison Collins opted not to have her repeat kindergarten. (Alison Collins)

The injustices stirred by the pandemic prompted some policy experts to suggest early on that holding kids back — “retention” in education parlance — would be a good option for students who fell behind. Collins’s home state, Texas, was among five that passed legislation this year to make it easier for parents to request their children repeat the grade they were in 2020-21.

But a review of data obtained by The 74, supported by interviews with parents, researchers and district officials, suggests that families largely rejected this emergency option. Knowledge of the laws sometimes didn’t trickle down to parents and others counted on students getting extra support through tutoring, summer school or small group instruction.

“​​Kids have been through enough these last two years,” said Gabriel DellaVecchia, a researcher at the University of Michigan who has studied retention laws. “I think families recognize that, and don’t want their children to endure any additional trauma.”

In Florida, one of the states that passed a one-year, pandemic-related retention law, the Miami-Dade district — with over 326,000 students in K-12 last year — received just 11 parent requests to hold kids back, said Gisela Feild, administrative director of data management. In the Hillsborough County district, only five parents asked that their child repeat last year’s grade, according to Terry Connor, chief academic officer.

While the number of parent requests was not always available, it’s clear that retention was not widely used in some districts. The Los Angeles Unified School District, for example, retained less than 1 percent of students before the pandemic and held back even fewer this fall — 266 out of 286,027 students in first through eighth grade, according to data obtained by The 74 through open records requests. And in Newark, New Jersey’s largest district, the retention rate has dropped from less than 3 percent before the pandemic to less than 2 percent.

A new poll from the National Parents Union suggests that even if such legislation had been more widespread, most parents would have balked at the opportunity. In a sample of 739 parents questioned by Echelon Insights, a public opinion research firm, 81 percent said they would not have asked schools to retain children experiencing learning loss.

National Parents Union (Meghan Gallagher for The 74)

Holding students back wasn’t very popular among administrators either. Less than 10 percent of 957 principals favored retaining students in a spring 2020 RAND Corp. survey. When the researchers checked back in the fall, only 1 percent responded that they were retaining more students than in 2019-20.

But now that students with gaps in both academic and social skills have returned to their classrooms, some educators are changing their tune.

“The biggest struggle we’re seeing is with second graders,” said Lee Ann Wentzel, superintendent of the Ridley School District, outside Philadelphia. Many were kindergartners when schools closed down for the pandemic. Re-adjusting to the routines of school, she said, “gets in the way of the learning.”

‘The modern circumstances of COVID’

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis was the first to sign legislation in early June allowing parents of students in the elementary grades to request that their children repeat last year. By July, governors in California, New Jersey, Pennsylvania and Texas had followed suit.

But the push in those states — home to seven of the nation’s 10 largest districts — came despite research showing retention doesn’t have lasting benefits and can actually contribute to students dropping out. Lorrie Shepard, an education professor at the University of Colorado, Boulder, called it an “ill-fitting way of thinking that you’re individualizing instruction.”

Sociologists, she said, have found the stigma of being overage in a grade is one factor that can push a student out of school, and among teens, the need to work can pull them away — pressures that disproportionately fall on low-income, Black and Hispanic students.

Those who support the measures say the unique circumstances of the pandemic justify the extreme response. Patricia Morgan, executive director of JerseyCAN and one of 18 advocates who pushed for the option in New Jersey, said opponents of retaining students shouldn’t treat past studies “as gospel.”

Retention, she said, should be “looked at again under the modern circumstances of COVID and this global lockdown.”

One of the more provocative plans came from Michael Petrilli, president of the conservative Thomas B. Fordham Institute, who argued that Title I elementary schools keep students in the same grade they were in when the pandemic began.

Petrilli acknowledged the poor returns from previous research, noting that retention “rarely helps students catch up.” He proposed instead that districts combine individualized learning plans and tutoring to get students back to their appropriate grade level by the end of the year. He added in an email that it’s “a shame” districts haven’t tried this.

But at least one is implementing his recommended mix of review and acceleration.

In the Ridley district, three students who would have been first graders this year split their day between kindergarten, where they work on social skills, and first grade, where they participate in language arts lessons. A fourth student is repeating sixth grade. The results, Wentzel said, are mixed.

“We’re really trying to target what the child’s needs are,” Wentzel said. “I don’t want to refer to it as retention.”

Barbara Travalini is a kindergarten paraprofessional at Lakeview Elementary School in the Ridley School District in Pennsylvania. Three students in the district are splitting their days between kindergarten and first grade — a modified version of retention. (Ridley School District)

‘Glued to their phones’

Teachers, however, aren’t shy about suggesting many of their students could have benefited from repeating last year.

“I think there are a lot of students who should have been held back,” said Ferlencia Staten, a literacy specialist at Gulfton Secondary, part of the YES Prep charter network in Houston. Assessments, she said, show English learners have lost literacy skills, likely because they were using their home language more during remote learning. Some have been placed in remedial classes.

She remembers teaching virtually last year while students had Netflix playing in the background.

“These kids were glued to their phones for almost two years,” she said, adding that some now sit in class with an AirPod in one ear. “It’s hard [for them] to sit in a classroom for 90 minutes.”

The results of a small survey of educators conducted for The 74, in partnership with Off2Class, a company that provides resources to teachers of English learners, echo Staten’s concerns. Twenty-two percent said they recommended some students repeat last year, and nearly 40 percent said they now have students in their classes that they think should have been held back. About half of the sample of 669 educators, made up of teachers and tutors that use the company’s curriculum and assessment materials, work in the U.S.

In an October survey conducted for The 74 by Off2Class, almost 40 percent of teachers and tutors — about half of whom work in the U.S. — said they have students this fall they think should have been retained. (Off2Class)

In some districts where few parents opted to hold their children back, retention rates nonetheless rose above pre-pandemic figures. In Hillsborough County, the 2.3 percent retention rate is higher than in the previous three years. Connor, the district’s chief academic officer, attributed the jump to learning loss.

“The pandemic has contributed to more students not meeting minimum performance criteria due to interruption in instruction,” he said. “This has led to increases in course failures and less opportunities for students to meet graduation requirements.”

In Houston, more than 5 percent of K-12 students are repeating a grade this fall, compared to around 3 percent before the pandemic. But the district was unable to provide data on the number of parent requests.

Having ‘academic successes’

Not all parents thought retention was a bad idea. In the National Parents Union poll, about 100 of the 263 parents who had the option of retention said they took it. The sample is too small to be nationally representative, but it shows some parents thought their children should get another shot to do well instead of spending the year playing catch up.

Los Angeles mother Tracey Pontelle felt her son Aaron needed to be “socialized back into school.” She saw the chance for him to repeat first grade as an opportunity to repair damage left by a disrupted school year.

Tracey Pontelle with sons Aaron (in front) and Joshua. She opted to have Aaron repeat first grade this year. (Tracey Pontelle)

Pontelle did what she could to make remote learning as engaging as possible last year, but Aaron, who has ADHD, wasn’t responding. He would focus for about five to 10 minutes at a time.

“It was just tears and throwing things,” she said. “Academically, he wasn’t reading, not even attempting to read.”

She said she received “zero pushback” from her son’s school, Dixie Canyon Community Charter, when she asked that he repeat first grade. He was even able to get the same teacher — making it feel as though the 2020-21 school year almost didn’t happen. Aaron wasn’t initially sold on the idea, but that changed when a friend from down the street turned up in the same class.

A few weeks after school started this fall, he was reading small words. Then he read his mother an entire “decodable” story — a text for beginning readers — about frogs and bats in a pond.

“He’s seeing that he’s having these academic successes,” she said. “He’s proud of himself.”

Aaron Pontelle in music class at Dixie Canyon Community Charter, part of the Los Angeles Unified School District (Tracey Pontelle)

In Aaron’s case, his parents were able to choose whether their son repeated last year. That’s the way DellaVecchia, at the University of Michigan, thinks it should be — and not just because of the pandemic. He’s writing a book about third grade retention laws, including the one in Michigan, where even if a family doesn’t want their child retained, superintendents have the final word.

“I don’t like the fact that it’s the government that tells [parents], ‘We’re going to retain your kid,’” he said.

He’s among those who argue the pandemic didn’t put a pause on students’ progress.

“This idea that you can’t learn later or get caught up is false,” he said. “The kids did learn something. They weren’t vegetables.”

This article was published in partnership with The 74. Sign up for The 74’s newsletter here.

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Even before the World Health Organization labeled the Omicron coronavirus strain a new “variant of concern” Friday, school closures were continuing to increase across the country.

Last week, 621 schools across 58 districts announced new closures for a variety of reasons including teacher burnout, staffing shortages and virus outbreaks, according to counts from Burbio, a data service that has tracked school policy through the pandemic. Since the start of the academic year, 9,313 campuses across 916 districts nationwide have added extra days off.

The numbers suggest that nearly 10 percent of the nation’s roughly 98,000 K-12 schools have experienced closures this year. In Maryland, more than 3 in 10 schools have been affected by at least one day of disruption this academic year. In North Carolina, where such events have been most frequent, the number is above 4 in 10.

Now, schools already struggling to keep classrooms open could face further challenges should the recently identified Omicron variant, which has already begun to show up in U.K. schools, fuel a COVID surge this winter.

“This is only going to make matters worse,” Dan Domenech, executive director of the School Superintendents Association, said. “We already see that most districts are short-handed.”

Earlier in November, lack of substitute teachers forced multiple large school systems to announce unplanned closures as teachers took additional time off around Veterans Day and Thanksgiving.

“If they have a staff that’s on the verge of burnout and they keep pushing them, they’re only going to lose more staff. And that’s going to result in more closures and fewer kids being in person.”

Now, with K-12 staff stretched thin in districts across the country, health experts are scrambling to understand the threat posed by the new variant, which Moderna’s President Dr. Stephen Hoge described as having a “Frankenstein mix” of mutations.

In South Africa, where Omicron was first identified Nov. 24, the strain has contributed to a sharp spike in cases, leading doctors to believe that it is more transmissible than previous versions of the virus. But whether those cases are more severe, and exactly how much protection is delivered by the vaccines, remains unclear.

The South African doctor who first discovered the variant told the BBC on Sunday that symptoms have generally been “extremely mild.” But other experts point out that these initial observations are only based on a very small sample size.

“This variant is a cause for concern, not a cause for panic,” said President Joe Biden in an address to the nation Monday morning.

Health experts, the president said, including Dr. Anthony Fauci, believe that existing COVID vaccines will continue to provide a degree of protection against the new strain, especially for individuals who have upped their immunity through booster shots. But it will be one to two weeks before scientists gain more precise results on just how effectively antibodies built up through vaccination neutralize the Omicron variant, Dr. Kavita Patel, a nonresident fellow at the Brookings Institution, told CNBC on Monday. Still, there’s reason to be hopeful, she said.

“The current vaccines don’t just generate the variant-specific antibodies. They try to generate kind of a broad antibody response,” said the Washington, D.C.-based physician.

Because of the Omicron variant, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on Monday strengthened their language on booster doses to recommend that all adults “should,” rather than “may,” receive a third shot six months after their second. Meanwhile, The Washington Post reported Monday evening that Pfizer-BioNTech plans to request that extra vaccine doses be authorized for 16- and 17-year olds, after initial booster data out of Israel showed positive results within that age group.

While the details of the new variant come into focus, Atlanta-based pediatrician Jennifer Shu said K-12 buildings need to keep their guard up to stave off in-school transmission.

“It’s important for schools to continue protective measures such as masking, hand washing, physical distancing when possible, disinfecting, optimizing ventilation, etc. to limit the spread of COVID-19,” the doctor wrote in an email.

At this point, Domenech said he is not aware of any school leaders within his network having changed their safety procedures in response to the emergence of the Omicron variant.

Over the course of this school year, many districts have moved to introduce ‘test-to-stay’ measures that allow students potentially exposed to the virus to skip quarantine, provided they test negative for COVID on a rapid test. The WHO confirmed Sunday that existing PCR tests do accurately detect infection from the Omicron variant, but studies are ongoing to determine the effectiveness at recognizing the new strain of the rapid antigen testing employed in most test-to-stay schemes.

Since September, there have been over 1.7 million new pediatric coronavirus cases, and in the week before Thanksgiving, children accounted for about a quarter of new infections, according to the American Academy of Pediatrics. Weekly youth cases are on the rise, up 32 percent as of Nov. 18 over the previous week to 142,000, but they are well below their peak in early September of 252,000.

Over 19 million youth have received at least one vaccine dose, President Biden said in his Monday address. Over 99 percent of schools nationwide are now open for in-person learning, he pointed out, compared to less than half this time last year.

The new strain further underscores the importance of continuing efforts to boost vaccination rates within school communities, said Domenech, and raises the stakes for immunizing newly eligible children.

“The bottom line here is that unless we get to the point where the majority of people are vaccinated, where we can get to that herd immunity point, these variants are going to keep coming [and] kids are going to get infected,” he said.

This article was published in partnership with The 74. Sign up for The 74’s newsletter here.

Mentoring programs across the country responded swiftly. With committed staff and volunteers and creative shifts to virtual mentoring, programs worked hard to limit lapses in the relationships, supports and services that young people needed more than ever as new challenges and traumas came their way.

Experts in e-mentoring have long known the value of virtual connection. iCouldBe, a leading national organization in this work, has provided students ages 13 and up with online mentors for 20 years. Immediately following the COVID-19 outbreak, iCouldBe and Mentor partnered to develop and launch the Virtual Mentoring Portal, an online entry point that enables mentor/mentee matches to continue their relationships online. Later, CricketTogether, an e-mentoring platform for youngsters 12 and under, joined up to expand the service.

The demand was intense: At one point during the pandemic, more than 400 mentoring programs from around the country, serving nearly 100,000 young people, asked iCouldBe about moving their in-person services to the platform.

Although many mentoring programs made the pivot to virtual to fill a gap in an emergency, they quickly realized the unique, long-term possibilities of virtual connections: Technology could help match mentor/mentee pairs; online connections could span time zones and eliminate transportation issues for hard-to-reach youth; and the data generated could allow for detailed tracking and evaluation of tutoring’s reach and effectiveness.

So far, the data shows it’s working: In a national study, adult mentors were asked about the impact the pandemic had on their relationships with mentees. Almost half reported that virtual mentoring worked for them and their mentee, and about a third reported that the pandemic led to a positive impact on their mentoring relationships, likely because of more frequent check-ins and and a broadening of support to include challenges happening outside of school.

With the return of in-person learning, schools and organizations are largely keeping the virtual components of their mentoring programs for these very reasons. But it’s also critical that programs share valuable lessons about what’s working and why.

For example, Zoom fatigue appeared to be negatively affecting engagement among students in Fresno, California, even as they continued to gravitate toward social media platforms to stay in touch with peers. If young people were to open up, they needed online spaces where they felt free to be themselves.

In response, Fresno Unified School District and iCouldBe developed a program where high school juniors and seniors mentored middle school students. Peer mentoring became the key to developing early trust and quickly identifying students who needed the most support — whether navigating the college application process, working through a challenging class or looking for social-emotional check-ins. These peer connections enabled deeper relationships and engagement: Fifty mentees connected virtually with their peer mentors more than 750 times throughout the 2020-21 school year and completed nearly 500 activities in the iCouldBe curriculum.

Early in the pandemic, Big Brothers Big Sisters of Palm Beach and Martin Counties’ School to Work Program shifted from in-person to fully virtual services. Suddenly, students had mentors from throughout the country in diverse professional fields not necessarily available in their towns. Those in rural areas without transportation could connect with experts in a range of fields who could provide support for career exploration, financial literacy, employability and other life skills. And with new glimpses into their mentees’ lives, virtual mentors found themselves meeting more of the kids’ holistic needs that affected their educational thriving and striving.

In South Florida and throughout the country, virtual mentoring in concert with schools expanded a key concept in helping students succeed — that relationships are an integral part of the student success puzzle. To buoy students through difficult times and bolster them for success, relationships with mentoring adults should be tracked and measured as robustly as academic performance.

Virtual mentoring platforms provide real-time data: about mentee and mentor participation; the ratio of mentee to mentor posts (an indicator of qualitative relationship-building conversations); and average days between communications (an indicator of responsiveness). This information helps staff, teachers and administrators easily identify places to intervene, as well as high-engagement relationships to celebrate.

Research on successful strategies for transitioning to e-mentoring continues, even as the pandemic begins to wane. iCouldBe, Mentor and the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health have joined forces to research what support systems need to be in place for in-person mentoring programs to transition to virtual, and to outline the impact e-mentoring programs have on youth outcomes.

Researchers have already found that, at the beginning of the pandemic, traditional mentoring programs had mixed results in quickly transitioning to some form of virtual support. Despite barriers due to technological limitations, staff retention and buy-in and access to facilities, mentoring programs met these challenges with determination and creativity. These findings could help close the gap for the one in three young people who are growing up without a mentor.

One lesson from the pandemic is that with virtual mentoring, physical distance does not have to result in social disconnection. In fact, it improves both the accessibility and types of mentors, and heightens the impact that a web of supportive relationships has on young people, especially in a time of crisis.

Kate Schrauth is executive director of iCouldBe, an early e-mentoring innovator that has matched more than 24,000 students with mentors for career discovery and development. David Shapiro is CEO of Mentor, the unifying national champion for expanding quality mentoring relationships for young people.

Curriculum Associates

Despite promises to focus on the growing racial and income divide among the nation’s students, new fall testing data show academic gaps have worsened, falling heaviest on some of the most vulnerable children.

While education researchers have sounded the alarm for more than a year — that pandemic learning hurts low-income students and students of color most severely — recent scores suggest education solutions cannot come fast enough.

“More students are two or more grade levels below their actual grade level this fall than before the pandemic began,” according to Curriculum Associates’ November “Understanding Student Learning” report, which analyzed 3 million students’ fall 2021 i-Ready scores against averages from 2017-19.

“This means that teachers will not only have fewer students beginning the school year on grade level, but they will also have more students in need of intensive intervention and support.”

In both math and reading, fewer students are ready for grade level work — across all first through eighth graders.

Most concerning was the report’s finding that the pandemic has been especially detrimental for four groups: students beginning conceptual math in early middle school; students learning to read; students in predominantly Black and Latino schools; and students in lower-income zip codes.

This is the report I was tweeting about earlier this week. Things are not good. They may be getting a bit better as kids go back in person, but there are huge dips, and these are especially concentrated among those who were already behind, already underserved.

— Morgan Polikoff (@mpolikoff) November 4, 2021

More than half of third grade students in predominantly Black and Latino schools are testing two or more grade levels behind in math.

And for children learning to read in second and third grade, 7 to 9 percent more students are two or more grade levels behind as compared to pre-pandemic levels. These rates are even higher for students in lower-income and predominantly Black or Latino schools.

Here are four key findings from the report.

For some visuals, only third grade is spotlighted as researchers say it’s a pivotal year for student learning, and one that can help predict high school outcomes. 

1. Roughly half of third graders in predominantly Black and Latino schools are 2+ grade levels behind in math and reading — 11-17% more than pre-pandemic.

Curriculum Associates

Unfinished learning is most stark in lower-income areas, but drops are across the board. In areas where families earn an average more than $75,000, roughly a quarter of students are two or more grade levels below. For areas with average incomes less than $50,000, there are double the amount of students below grade level.

Disparities by income may corroborate concerns of inequitable access to technology, tutoring and one-one support.

3. In reading, early elementary schoolers appear most impacted by the pandemic. 9% more second graders are 2+ grade levels behind.

Curriculum Associates

The greatest changes from pre-pandemic levels are for second through fourth graders, when many children learn key reading skills.

Curriculum Associates

Upper-elementary and middle schoolers, who typically already know how to read and write longer texts, are testing closer to pre-pandemic levels. Still, only about a third are at or above grade level benchmarks.

4. In math, upper elementary and early middle school students appear most impacted by the pandemic. From second to sixth grade, 10% more students are 2+ grade levels behind.

Curriculum Associates

The proportion of students behind grade level increases as students continue through middle school — this year 50 percent of 8th graders, for instance, will require intensive support to get back on track.

Part of the reason may be due to content differences, according to Curriculum Associates’ analysis. Algebraic and conceptual thinking, introduced as students leave elementary school, is typically harder for students to grasp than number fluency in earlier grades.

Curriculum Associates

These findings are consistent across racial backgrounds; sixth through eighth graders testing below grade level at higher rates than their peers in earlier grades.

This article was published in partnership with The 74. Sign up for The 74’s newsletter here.

A student at Brandeis Elementary School in Louisville, Kentucky, is tested for COVID-19. (Jon Cherry / Getty Images)

In the “isolation room” at Indian Springs High School — the command center for any COVID-related issues on campus — Janak Kaur seals the school security officer’s swab sample in a plastic bag. Meanwhile, the officer fills out a registration on a website where he’ll get his results in a day or two.

As the school’s COVID liaison — one of 76 based at each of the San Bernardino City district’s schools — Kaur sometimes handles 20 tests a day, but she’s expecting to get a lot busier. California’s mandate that all school employees be vaccinated or get tested weekly went into effect Oct. 15. San Bernardino County includes the least-vaccinated zip code in Southern California, and its overall 49 percent rate is lower than that of many counties in the state. Kaur said some residents think “COVID isn’t real.”

Janak Kaur was working in her family’s sign business before taking a position as a COVID liaison at Indian Springs High School in the San Bernardino City Unified School District in California. (Linda Jacobson for The 74)

Fearing that testing and contact tracing would take staff members’ time away from instruction, the district is spending $12.6 million in federal funds on a contract with a public health staffing agency, AM LLC, to place a liaison in each school.

“We’re trying to stay in the business of education and not dabble in the business of public health,” said Eric Verete, the district’s safety and emergency manager. He frequently hears from administrators in other districts who are struggling to manage the process on their own. “We were well ahead of the game,” he said.

But many districts across the country are behind. As the Biden administration urges states to increase testing in schools — and take advantage of $10 billion in federal funding earmarked for that purpose — and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention promotes test-to-stay programs as a way for students exposed to COVID-19 to avoid quarantine, schools are under pressure to ramp up testing. Some have reassigned staff members and hired more specifically to manage the testing process, while others are pushing back against the additional burden. And though a vaccine for elementary school students is expected soon, some experts say the need for testing won’t disappear.

“Some sort of testing will be part of our lexicon going forward,” said Mara Aspinall, a professor at Arizona State University. Especially in districts without mask mandates, she added, weekly surveillance testing — swabbing a random sample of a school’s population — could be an effective way to minimize outbreaks.

‘Caught flat-footed’

Districts that started testing programs last school year, such as Baltimore, Los Angeles and San Antonio, were able to resume or expand them this fall.

Shari Camhi, superintendent of the 4,500-student Baldwin Union Free School District, near New York City, decided to implement testing because of her own frustration in December, when there was an uptick in positive cases.

She found herself “going to five different places … and couldn’t get tested anywhere,” she said. “We just needed to make it easier for people.”

A staff member with ATC Healthcare Services gives a Baldwin Union Free School District staff member a COVID test. (Baldwin Union Free School District)

Mastery Schools, a network of charters in Philadelphia and Camden, New Jersey, began offering surveillance testing in February, through a federal program that preceded the $10 billion allocation. That’s what local private schools were doing, said Laura Clancy, Mastery’s senior adviser of health and safety. Adding that it’s hard to find free testing in the community, she called the program “an additional layer of assurance for staff and parents.”

But districts that didn’t test last school year — and maybe thought the virus was going to be mostly under control this fall — were “caught flat-footed, with no time to prepare” when school reopened, said Leah Perkinson, pandemics manager at the Rockefeller Foundation. She described testing in school for the first time as “taking your entire school on a field trip to a place that no one has ever been to before.”

The foundation launched a program this year to match schools with testing vendors. But Aspinall, who advises Rockefeller, said obstacles remained in many communities despite the availability of federal funds. And now, increased demand is straining both districts and vendors.

Some resistant officials had a change of heart after it became clear the Delta variant would continue to interfere with in-person learning. Idaho lawmakers turned down the state’s portion of the $10 billion in the spring, but Gov. Brad Little later made other relief funds available to school districts. In New Hampshire, the Conway School District initially opted out of the state’s Safer at School Screening program, but this month changed course after several student athletes tested positive.

In Massachusetts, Gov. Charlie Baker has asked for the National Guard’s help because the state’s testing vendor is short-staffed and schools were using their own employees to test and contact-trace.

“Nurses were becoming overwhelmed because of the demands on their time,” said Thomas Scott, executive director of the Massachusetts Association of School Superintendents. The state considered bringing in more vendors, he added, but said other companies were having the same challenges.

In New Mexico, Joshua Landry, a nurse at Chaparral Middle School in Alamogordo, said COVID testing and tracing now “consumes the majority of my day.” He has less time to work on individualized education plans for students with disabilities or to follow up with children who have asthma, diabetes or other health conditions that require medication and monitoring.

He’s had to call an ambulance three times this school year for emergencies, such as a student with asthma who didn’t have an inhaler at school.

In other states and districts, leaders have decided they can’t spare staff members for testing-related responsibilities when they’re still adjusting to having all students back at school. In Pennsylvania, less than 400 of the state’s 5,000 public and private schools have reportedly opted into the testing program. And in Colorado’s Poudre School District, Superintendent Brian Kingsley said this month that participating in the state’s program would divert staff members’ time away from their “core business” of educating students.

While the state health department “provides a lot of resources to stand up these programs in public schools across the state of Colorado, it’s not enough to do it without having a significant impact on schools, on staffing,” he said at a board meeting. “Students don’t walk themselves to a testing center.”

In the Mastery network, Clancy said parents with younger students are more comfortable participating if they already know the school nurses and health aides conducting the testing. Older students swab their own nostrils in class, overseen by their teachers, because it wasn’t feasible to test students at lunch or as they entered school in the morning.

But getting permission is a challenge for schools serving populations where “huge chunks of our parents don’t have an email address,” Clancy said, adding that lack of internet access is especially problematic when a child has symptoms. “If you can’t get that person on the phone, you’re not going to be able to get consent.”

Lingering misconceptions about the role of testing are another ongoing challenge, she said. Some parents think that if they consent to their child being tested, they’re also agreeing to a vaccine. Older students have said they feel they can put off vaccination until college because they’re participating in their school’s testing program.

‘Highly complex environment’

Balancing the interests of parents, school board members, children and school staff has been a challenge for vendors as well, Aspinall said, calling a school a “highly complex environment.”

“Working with schools is not the same as working with businesses or retail pharmacies,” she said. “You have to have a lot of patience because you’re dealing with an institution that was not built to be a health care provider.”

David Savitsky, CEO of ATC Healthcare Services, which provides testing in the Baldwin district and hundreds across the country, said his teams try to set up outside, weather permitting, to minimize the impact on schools. Currently, his sites are testing more unvaccinated employees than students, but he expects that to change with the Thanksgiving and winter holidays approaching, because students could be exposed to more people.

He added that the availability of vaccines for younger students, expected within days, could prompt more districts to add surveillance testing for families who choose not to get their children inoculated.

“We’re not going to be part of that discussion, but hopefully we’re part of the solution,” he said.

In San Bernardino, Verete said he wasn’t even sure what he needed when he first reached out to AM LLC. He just knew contract tracing was going to eat up a lot of time. At the high school, it can take Kaur at least an hour to confer with a student’s teachers, advisers and — if the student is an athlete — coaches. Then she has to reach the students’ families.

Kaur, who works for AM LLC, earned her undergraduate degree in public health and, as a former intern at the Los Angeles County Department of Health, learned to stand up to vaccine opponents.

“I’ve had my fair share of people fighting back,” she said.

Opposed to vaccines or not, parents were concerned about sending their children back to school this fall, and she was bombarded with questions about active cases on campus until the district launched its COVID-19 dashboard.

She handles required testing for student athletes and unvaccinated employees, but also sees walk-ins wondering whether their sore throat or headache is COVID-related.

The district’s original contract with AM LLC was for six months. But Verete extended it for the rest of the school year.

“It’s beneficial to have someone there, knowing their job is to deal with COVID,” he said. “It’s not going away like we wanted it to.”

This article was published in partnership with The 74. Sign up for The 74’s newsletter here.

President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris tour the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta, Georgia in March 2021. (Eric Baradat / Getty Images)

As schools work to mitigate COVID spread in classrooms and get a handle on how many teens have been immunized, they may not be able to rely on vaccination data published by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

In many cases, CDC numbers clash with locally reported vaccination rates, an analysis from The 74 reveals, including multiple instances of double-digit gaps between local and federal counts. In some counties, the agency’s data indicate that the share of 12- to 17-year-olds who have received at least one vaccine dose is impossibly high — 101 percent in Miami-Dade County, Florida, and 104 percent in San Francisco County, California, for example.

The lack of clarity takes on heightened significance as the country moves to vaccinate another swath of the K-12 population, with coronavirus shots for children ages 5 to 11 currently under review by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration and expected as soon as early November.

Inaccuracies in CDC data could have implications for the nationwide understanding of vaccine uptake among young people. The widely cited youth COVID immunization rate calculated by the American Academy of Pediatrics, for example, is based on CDC numbers.

“Our method is to clearly state the source of our data,” Suk-fong Tang, senior database analyst for the AAP, told The 74. But due to time limitations and the vast quantity of information, she said, “it is not possible at this time to validate everything that we use.”

“We work with [CDC] data with the faith that the data really captures the large trends,” the AAP expert continued. “It may not be, you know, accurate down to the single-digit counts.”

While the CDC does not publish youth immunization data directly, it releases vaccination rates and raw counts for those over 12 and those over 18 by county. Using those numbers, The 74 calculated the rate of inoculation for 12- to 17-year-olds via a method that Tang confirmed produced a “highly similar” youth vaccination figure as the AAP. (Click here to see the math.) Those rates frequently deviated from local reports, indicating possible flaws in the federal agency’s vaccination counts, population counts, or both.

For example, CDC data downloaded by The 74 Sept. 30 indicate that in Queens County, New York, 86 percent of teens have received at least one vaccine dose, while NYC Health said the county’s figure was actually 74 percent. In an especially extreme case, federal data for Coconino County, Arizona, indicate a 93 percent one-dose vaccination rate for 12- to 17-year-olds, while Coconino Health and Human Services reported a 57 percent rate.

Coconino County officials explained the gap in an email, saying they use a “more enhanced data cleaning process” than the state or the CDC.

Other areas such as Fairfax County, Virginia; Marin County, California; and Howard County, Maryland, reported youth vaccination rates that closely aligned with federal counts, differing by under 5 percentage points.

The CDC did not respond to the discrepancies identified by The 74, and did not provide comment when asked for the reasons behind them, despite over a half-dozen requests made over more than a two-week span. The agency did send a link to information on its vaccination data reporting protocols, which explained that their population counts are based on the Census Bureau’s 2019 estimates, meaning that their percentages could be inaccurate if individuals moved counties in the last two years.

Population shifts may not completely account for the discrepancies. Outside experts also said issues such as double-counting vaccinations or delays in reporting data upstream to the federal government could contribute to inaccuracies.

‘Flying blind’

Data woes have plagued the CDC throughout the pandemic, said Ali Mokdad, who, after years monitoring vaccine coverage at the federal agency, is now a professor of epidemiology at the University of Washington.

“We’re flying blind,” he said, pointing out that U.S. decisions around Pfizer booster shots were based on data from Israel and Qatar, where vaccination numbers are collected in a more standardized fashion, due to a dearth of reliable U.S. data.

From the CDC’s decision to scale back tracking for breakthrough infections to their flip-flop on indoor masking for vaccinated individuals, the agency has come under fire at multiple points throughout the pandemic.

In past months, the epidemiology professor said, many Americans received unauthorized booster doses by crossing state lines or lying about their vaccination status thanks to lax immunization tracking. “We don’t know [exactly how many people are] vaccinated or not, and what types of vaccines they have received and when.”

That can become a life-or-death problem, said Mokdad. “When you know how many people are vaccinated, you know what immunity you have in your community,” he explained. “[But if you don’t] know how many people are vaccinated … you can’t get a handle on how many people are susceptible in your own community and then that will sustain a surge.”

In instances where local vaccination numbers are above CDC counts, it’s possible that states have been slow to report their most recent immunization data, Emily Pond, a researcher for the Johns Hopkins University vaccination tracker, told The 74 — she calls that glitch “data lag.” Where the CDC count is higher, Pond explained, federal overseers may have access to vaccination counts that local departments of health do not, such as coronavirus immunizations that occurred at army bases or on tribal lands through the Indian Health Service.

In Navajo County, Arizona, for example, Assistant County Manager Bryan Layton said via email, “We openly acknowledge the inherent challenges of tracking and reporting case data and vaccine rates in a rural county that is home to 3 different sovereign tribal entities: the White Mountain Apache Tribe, the Hopi, and the Navajo Nation …. The Navajo Nation … uses a series of service areas that do not necessarily conform to county or state jurisdictions.”

Still, local reports in Navajo County say 19 percent of residents under 20 years old have received at least one dose of the vaccine, compared to CDC numbers that put the rate for 12- to 17-year-olds at 98 percent — a gap that likely can’t be fully explained by Indian Health Service data absent at the local level.

“I have a red flag when any [vaccination rate] is above, like, 90 percent,” said Pond. Differences between CDC and local figures, she said, can be rather common.

‘A lot of moving parts’

To get a better sense of the frequency of discrepancies between local and CDC vaccination rates, The 74 queried a random sample of 10 U.S. counties, a small sliver of the over 2,600 in the full dataset and separate from the analysis of the counties with the highest reported rates. Seven returned data for comparison against federal numbers, some using slightly different age boundaries for youth vaccination than The 74’s 12- to 17-year-old range.

Out of those seven counties, three had rates that diverged from CDC numbers by more than 5 percentage points. Hood River County, Oregon, reported that 72 percent of youth ages 12 to 17 had received at least one dose of the coronavirus vaccine while the CDC reported an 80 percent figure. Sullivan County, Pennsylvania, reported a 23 percent rate for youth ages 12 to 19 compared to a 30 percent 12- to 17-year-old rate from the CDC. And Schoolcraft County, Michigan, reported that 32 percent of youth ages 12 to 15 and 47 percent of youth ages 16 to 19 had received at least one dose, compared to a 13 percent CDC rate for youth ages 12 to 17. Both Sullivan and Schoolcraft counties have populations under 10,000, meaning small inaccuracies could have an outsized impact on their vaccination percentages.

The inconsistencies don’t surprise Michael Kurilla, director of the National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences at the National Institutes of Health. The U.S. has a decentralized health care system, he pointed out, meaning that providers can’t easily share data. For example, someone sick with COVID who leaves the hospital too early and re-admits to another facility could easily be counted as two cases, said Kurilla.

Further, the reporting systems themselves are often antiquated, the NIH expert explained.

“Some places are still paper based, some are using fax to transmit information,” he said, adding — only half joking — that it wouldn’t surprise him if some local health agencies still used floppy disks.

On top of technological woes, the many different settings offering COVID-19 shots can compound reporting challenges, explained Phil Chan, medical director for the Rhode Island Department of Health. It’s easy to document doses at state-run vaccination clinics, he said, but vaccinations delivered at doctor’s offices or pharmacies can be harder to track.

“It’s a lot of moving parts,” he said. “The devil’s really in the details.”

Vaccination sites can use this form when they lack internet. (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention)

When those details are mishandled, inaccuracies in the data arise. In mid-September, the CDC adjusted their report of the share of people 12 and older in West Virginia who had received at least one dose of the coronavirus vaccine from 74 percent to 67 percent, after discovering that they had double-counted certain data streams for over three months.

On the flip side, increased data transparency may well translate into increased accuracy. In Maine — the only U.S. state to publicly report student and staff COVID vaccination data for school districts, according to the University of Washington’s Center on Reinventing Public Education — youth vaccination data reported by the state for each of its 16 counties align closely with federal numbers.

“We need to be transparent, you need to show exactly what you do,” said Mokdad, the UW epidemiologist who spent two decades at the CDC.

He wishes his former employer would be more forthcoming about its raw numbers and any possible shortcomings in its data pipeline. In his own COVID research, Mokdad said, he relies on infection counts from the Johns Hopkins tracker, because he finds it more reliable than the federal numbers.

“There is a big problem at CDC right now,” said the epidemiologist. Mokdad himself was involved in a high-profile incident in 2004 where he co-authored a CDC paper that overestimated the number of annual deaths caused by obesity. The health expert said he left the centers in 2008 for unrelated reasons and on good terms with all his co-workers.

“I criticize CDC because I love CDC,” he said.

This article was published in partnership with The 74. Sign up for The 74’s newsletter here.

Housing rights advocates gathered in Columbus, Ohio, June 30 to protest the end of the federal eviction moratorium. The ban was extended another month until the U.S. Supreme Court ended it. (Getty Images)

Most of the students at Monte Del Sol Charter School live along what is known as the Airport Road corridor in Sante Fe, New Mexico — a high-poverty, mostly immigrant community where “trailer parks hide behind fake adobe walls,” said Cate Moses, the school’s homeless liaison.

These are the families she had in mind last fall when she wrote the city council about parents who faced eviction due to pandemic-related job loss. “We now have close to 60 students who qualify as homeless under federal … law.,” she wrote. “As the pandemic drags on, their situation worsens.”

In response, the city signed her up as a “navigator” — a community member who connects residents to social services — and gave the school $20,000 from the Coronavirus Aid, Relief and Economic Security, or CARES, Act to help families pay overdue rent and utility bills. She spent six weeks filing paperwork and helped about 40 families stay in their homes.

Cate Moses, homeless liaison at Monte Del Sol Charter School in Santa Fe, New Mexico, stands near the school’s greenhouse and gardens where students in a sustainable college and career readiness program grow produce for school lunches and a food bank. (Cate Moses)

Financial arrangements like those at Monte Del Sol — between local governments and those who understand the housing needs of students — helped prevent eviction among thousands of families with school-aged children, according to experts on student homelessness. But after emerging under the CARES Act last year, they’ve mostly disappeared under the newer Emergency Rental Assistance program, run by the U.S. Department of the Treasury. Parents applying for assistance are now directed to centralized websites run by state and local governments.While liaisons like Moses can still show parents how to sign up for rent relief, they aren’t involved in distributing the funds, which can lead to bureaucratic obstacles. Experts say it now can take months instead of weeks to receive assistance.

“It is really striking that schools are left out of [the] Biden-Harris … response to the housing crisis, when they are best poised to get assistance to families,” said Barbara Duffield, executive director of SchoolHouse Connection, a national advocacy organization working to prevent student homelessness.

Duffield is advocating with the administration and members of Congress to get schools included as grantees eligible to distribute rental assistance funds. “For all the ‘re-imagining’ that is being done in the pandemic, this is a necessary change,” she said.

The tedious application process — requiring extensive documentation — is one reason why the bulk of the $46 billion in federal funds for rental assistance has gone unused. In late August, just as the U.S. Supreme Court was about to end a Biden administration ban on evictions, the White House announced an “all-of-government approach” to help Americans at risk of being evicted, but schools weren’t mentioned. The push to speed up assistance included efforts across multiple federal agencies, including agriculture, veterans affairs, health and human services, and housing and urban development — but not education.

A recent analysis of Census Bureau figures showed that almost a quarter of renters with children are behind on payments, and according to federal data, about 1.4 million students are homeless. Some districts have hired additional staff to help families navigate the online application process. Moses, for example, brought on a part-time employee to assist parents and help them gather the documents they need to prove they qualify.

But Duffield added, “It would be even better if the [rental] assistance weren’t so hard to navigate in the first place.”

Before the eviction ban ended, seven progressive Democrats in the House, including Jamaal Bowman of New York, Cori Bush of Missouri and Ilham Omar of Minnesota, wrote a letter to President Joe Biden and Education Secretary Miguel Cardona, asking them to prioritize students’ housing-related needs.

In a statement to The 74, Bowman said, public schools should be “allowed to take on a more deliberate role in administering the Emergency Rental Assistance Program.”

A missed opportunity

Efforts to prevent evictions and help families cover their housing costs began with the federal government’s early response to the pandemic. The CARES Act, passed in March 2020, included two streams of funding, under the Department of Housing and Urban Development, that states and local governments could tap for rent relief. Local authorities that had existing relationships with schools and nonprofits enlisted them in the effort to quickly distribute the funds — a strategy researchers found effective.

But when Congress designed the new program, Republicans and former President Donald Trump, who multiple times recommended cuts for affordable housing programs, gave control to the treasury department. The National Low Income Housing Coalition, an advocacy organization, pushed to keep the program where it was “given the agency’s deep expertise in housing and the unique needs of the lowest-income and most marginalized populations,” said President and CEO, Diane Yentel.

Now state and local finance departments are fielding applications and managing the newer treasury department program, which, Yentel said, “has led to unfortunate and unnecessary restrictions that have made it more difficult for tenants behind on rent to receive needed assistance.”

The treasury department did not respond to requests for comment.

Star-C, an Atlanta nonprofit that provides afterschool programs in apartments near low-performing schools, distributed $4.3 million last fall, helping 3,000 families with school-aged children and targeting efforts to schools ranked in the bottom third of the state’s accountability system. Cobb County, in the metro Atlanta area, still subcontracts with Star-C to distribute funds, but other counties have brought the process “in house,” said Margaret Stagmeier, the organization’s founder. “The [treasury] program is much more complex than our first … eviction relief fund, which allowed us to focus specifically on our edu-housing mission.”

On Sept. 14, the House financial services committee, chaired by Rep. Maxine Waters, D-Calif., advanced a bill that expands grantees to include nonprofits and courts, but not school districts.

Duffield said the treasury department missed an opportunity “to capitalize on the single best distribution system for reaching families. If schools can distribute food assistance, why not rental assistance?”

‘Who you know’

Bush, one of the House members who signed the letter to Biden and Cardona, drew national attention to families and children at risk of eviction in August when she and others slept for five days on the U.S. Capitol steps, in protest of Congress allowing the eviction moratorium to expire.

Rep. Cori Bush slept outside the U.S. Capitol to protest Congress adjourning without extending the federal eviction ban. Marilee Hill-Anderson of the Sumner-Bonney Lake School District in Washington state, joined the protest for a few hours. (Joshua Roberts / Getty Images)

Marilee Hill-Anderson, director of community engagement for the Sumner-Bonney Lake School District, near Tacoma, Washington, was among those who joined the demonstration.

In Pierce County, where the district is located, the rental assistance website tells applicants the turnaround time on funds could be as long as 88 days. But last fall, under the CARES Act model, Hill-Anderson worked with Sumner city officials to distribute checks within a two-week period. In all, the district helped families pay rent and utilities totalling $34,000.

“Sometimes it’s who you know and who you have relationships with,” said Hill-Anderson. “We are incredibly grateful for the federal money. But given the fact that we’ve been able to do things more flexibly because of political will, I think there are some other models we can use.”

This article was published in partnership with The 74. Sign up for The 74’s newsletter here.

According to a paper circulated earlier this month by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, body mass index (a common measure of weight relative to height) in a sample of 430,000 children increased between March and November 2020 at nearly double the rate that it did before the pandemic began. The changes were especially prevalent among elementary-aged children, as well as those who were already overweight or obese.

Dietician Michelle Demeule-Hayes, the director of a clinical weight-loss program at Baltimore’s Mt. Washington Pediatric Hospital, called the trends “staggering.”

“It’s never been this bad,” she added. “So the research is definitely accurate.”

The CDC’s findings echo those of other research released in the past few months. A study published last month by the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) showed that rates of overweight and obesity have soared among children measured in California between the ages of 5 and 17. Two others — one published in The Lancet and another appearing in the journal Pediatrics — found that the weight gain was greater for certain demographic subgroups, including Hispanic, African American, publicly insured, and low-income children.

The spate of publications suggests a national spike in pediatric weight gain as kids have been restricted in their movements outside the home.

Corinna Koebnick, a nutrition scientist at Kaiser Permanente Southern California and a co-author of the JAMA paper, wrote in an email that it was “safe to say” that children have gained weight during the pandemic, and that it was unclear whether opening schools to in-person learning will be enough to reverse the trends that have taken hold.

“The increase in obesity over the 11 months [we] analyzed compares to the increase seen in national data over almost the last two decades,” Koebnick said. “Children who have social and financial disadvantages, who live in school districts with less money or…less access to parks and meal programs may have additional challenges returning to healthy weights.”

Koebnick’s study used Kaiser Permanente electronic health records for over 190,000 children whose body-mass index (BMI) was measured during a medical visit both before and during the pandemic. Researchers divided patients into three age groups (those between the ages of 5 and 11, 12 and 15, and 16 and 17) and studied their tendency to be overweight (at or above the 85th percentile of BMI for age) or obese (at or above the 95th percentile.)

Children in all three age groups gained more weight during the pandemic than they did before. But elementary-aged kids saw the biggest relative gains, with an average increase of BMI of 1.57, compared with an increase of 0.91 for the next-youngest group and 0.48 for the oldest. Adjusted for height and translated into actual weight, those figures indicate average gains of 5.07 pounds, 5.09 pounds, and 2.27 pounds for the respective groups.

Overall, the portion of 5-11-year-olds who are classified as overweight or obese is now 45.7 percent, up from 36.2 percent before the pandemic. The same figures rose by 5.2 percent among 12-15-year olds and 3.1 percent among 16- and 17-year-olds.

Demeule-Hayes, said that the wave of research on pandemic-related weight gain reflected the reality she and her colleagues face every day. Some patients referred to her, none older than 17, weigh as much as 400 pounds, and it has become typical to treat children diagnosed with what are typically seen as adult ailments, such as hypertension, high cholesterol, diabetes, and osteoarthritis.

Several papers presented earlier this summer already showcased the rising prevalence of type-2 diabetes. In both Washington, D.C., and Baton Rouge, Louisiana, researchers discovered that pediatric diagnoses of the dangerous and chronic condition approximately doubled in the year after school closures began. Among children diagnosed during that period, one study found that 60 percent required hospitalization for complications like severe hyperglycemia, compared with just 36 percent in the year before COVID emerged.

But Demeule-Hayes said that another common health complication of obesity, obstructive sleep apnea, poses particular risks for K-12 students.

“There are a whole lot of sleep disturbances with these kids because they’re tired, they’re not getting good-quality REM sleep,” Demeule-Hayes said. “So they’re coming home and taking naps, which just perpetuates that sleep-disturbance cycle — they can’t get to sleep later because they’ve taken a three-hour nap after school.”

Experts are still investigating how the coronavirus changed the lifestyles of both children and adults. Consumer figures have shown that sales of packaged and processed foods shot up in the early months of the pandemic, and survey evidence from Europe suggests that consumption of fresh foods declined. Demeule-Hayes pointed to the monthslong stillness that followed school closures, during which she watched her own young children learn from inside the house.

“Having them be on a computer literally all day, not having any of the recess or the steps outside or even just walking up and down the halls — they’ve been so, so sedentary,” she lamented. “Pre-pandemic, even if they were getting driven to school, they were still at least walking around the school and walking up one or two flights of stairs to classrooms.

According to tech firm SuperAwesome, the time children spent on screens each day went up by as much as 50 percent after COVID-related closures began; 40 percent of kids aged 3-9 said they spent “much more” time on screens. Respondents to a 2020 survey of Canadian youth reported lower levels of physical activity, less time spent outside, more sedentary behaviors, and more sleep than before the pandemic.

As school districts around the country reopened for full-time, in-person learning, educators have welcomed back students whose lives were meaningfully — and perhaps permanently — altered by COVID. The extent of the academic damage is thought to be extensive, and hospital records suggest that many children may have suffered prolonged abuse while separated from their schools. On top of those severe setbacks, the bodily changes that some have undergone may prove long-lasting: Obese children and adolescents are vastly more likely to be obese as adults.

Koebnick recommended that parents limit screen time and encourage their kids to exercise and drink lots of water. Demeule-Hayes said that she recognized that some parents might still be leery of outdoor play given the dangers of the Delta variant. Still, she said, there was much that families and educators could do to combat further weight gain.

“As much as teachers and administrators can work [movement] into school time, they should. For parents, it’s taking walks as a family, after dinner, whenever you can work it in. Our message is always to make changes as a family so there’s not a stigma around a child’s ‘weight issue’; it’s really about making healthy changes for the family.”

This article was published in partnership with The 74. Sign up for The 74’s newsletter here.

Kindergarteners play during recess at Montara Avenue Elementary School on the first day of school, Aug. 16, in the Los Angeles Unified School District (Allen J. Schaben/Los Angeles Times via Getty Images)

It wasn’t long after school started in California’s Solana Beach School District that some classrooms shifted to remote learning because of positive COVID-19 cases. During the first four weeks of school, there were 19 positive cases among students and staff and eight classrooms in quarantine.

But on Aug. 30, the 2,800-student district began requiring students to wear masks outside as well as in the building — and hasn’t had to send a whole classroom home since. The new policy was prompted by the state’s revised quarantine protocols for unvaccinated students, which allow asymptomatic students to stay in school if they meet several conditions, including wearing masks both inside and outside.

“We are optimistic it is working,” said Kristie Towne, manager of board and superintendent operations for the Solana district, part of San Diego County. “The policy is meant to keep as many children in school [and] in class as much as possible.”

With the recent rise in positive cases due to the more transmissible Delta variant, districts like Solana Beach are now enforcing additional measures — policies that go beyond recommendations from most state health departments and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which says masks aren’t needed during recess. The Los Angeles Unified School District was among the first to institute the practice and several other California districts have followed suit. Others as far as Vermont and North Carolina have instituted similar measures but are targeting them to younger students or athletes. One problem: The research behind such moves is pretty thin.

“Outside, there’s an infinite volume of air to dilute the virus,” said Dr. Dean Blumberg, a pediatric infectious disease expert at the University of California, Davis.

Dr. Benjamin Linas, a Boston University epidemiologist, warns that outdoor masking could even be counterproductive.

“If there is any hope of successfully implementing masks when we need them — indoors during Delta surge — then we cannot insist on masks when we do not need them, and we should not routinely ‘round up’ when not certain,” he said. “Too much masking is real.”

Advocacy groups that were already fighting the state’s mandate that students wear masks indoors argue that requiring them outdoors further hinders children’s social development.

• Read more: ‘The first big domino to fall’: Los Angeles district mandates student vaccines as Biden unveils aggressive COVID testing plan

“Outdoors our kids need to be breathing fresh air. They need to have social interaction and share smiles,” said Sharon McKeeman, who founded Let Them Breathe and in July filed a lawsuit, with Reopen California Schools, against California Gov. Gavin Newsom, the state health department and other officials. “These restrictions are arbitrary, and they are infringing our kids’ rights.”

The measures came as some districts faced criticism for quarantining too many students without symptoms.

In August, thousands of students in Los Angeles and other districts missed class and did not always have access to remote learning. Other California districts requiring masks outside include the 12,000-student Palo Alto Unified School District, where the most recent data shows two cases districtwide, and the 9,600-student Alameda Unified School District, which had 27 cases in August and seven so far in September.

‘The benefits are uncertain’

Some opponents of mask requirements note that the World Health Organization, which President Joe Biden rejoined as soon as he became president, doesn’t recommend masks at all for children 5 and under.

A growing body of research on transmission of the virus shows that the proportion of cases originating outside are well below 10 percent and could be even less than 1 percent, according to a June article in the Journal of Infectious Diseases.

International studies provide further evidence of significantly low risk. A Chinese study found that out of 7,300 cases, one outbreak resulting in two cases was linked to an outdoor conversation between two people. An Irish study showed that about one in 1,000 cases was due to outdoor transmission.

Most outdoor cases are linked to lengthy interactions between people or crowded events, studies show.

“I am having a very hard time thinking of when a school would generate such an opportunity for transmission,” Linas said. “It is not recess or outdoor classwork. Perhaps if a school had an outdoor pep rally in a relatively small stadium with full bleachers and kids on the field, too. I am struggling to come up with a realistic scenario.”

Experts stress that with the Delta variant, local vaccination rates of those 12 and above should guide decisions about whether additional caution is needed.

That’s why Andrew Hayes, a school board member in the Lakeside Union Elementary School District in San Diego County, questions the governor’s inside mask mandate to begin with.

“The state is bragging about being at an 80 percent vaccination rate, but we are still having all these mitigation strategies everywhere,” Hayes said. “I understand that people want to follow the experts, but they aren’t allowing the experts in education to make decisions.”

His district has not yet required masks outside, but surrounding districts have.

Chase Beamish, 12, listens to a speaker during an anti-mask rally outside the Orange County Department of Education in Costa Mesa, California, on Monday, May 17. More than 200 people came out to protest children in school being forced to wear masks. (Jeff Gritchen/Orange County Register via Getty Images)

Hayes is among district leaders in California who want to loosen local mask requirements in violation of the statewide mandate requiring students to wear them indoors. The California Department of Public Health on Aug. 23 sent districts a letter stating they could face fines and civil lawsuits if they don’t enforce masking.

The dynamic is the opposite of that in Florida, where districts mandating masks are locked in a protracted legal battle with a Republican governor who says parents should choose.

California isn’t the only state where some districts are going above and beyond CDC guidelines, which state: “In general, people do not need to wear masks when outdoors” for play, recess and physical education. But other examples are more targeted.

The Essex Westford School District, near Burlington, Vermont, requires masks outdoors for students in K-5 if they can’t socially distance. The Madison, Wisconsin district is requiring masks outside for elementary and middle school students, and the Wake County district in North Carolina requires athletes to wear masks outside when they’re not actively participating in a game or practice.

In California, McKeeman, with Let Them Breathe, said even in districts that don’t require students to wear masks outside, “there’s still a lot of enforcement to keep it on anyway.”

Some experts recognize the challenges teachers and other school staff members face when children are constantly taking masks on and off. Blumberg, who said he still wears a mask when he goes to the farmer’s market, noted that many classroom buildings in the state’s schools are connected by outside hallways.

For the sake of consistency, he said, “It’s easier to just say, ‘Mask while at school and don’t think about it.’”

This article was published in partnership with The 74. Sign up for The 74’s newsletter here.

Rebecca Wurtz, Ishminder Kaur, Amruta Padhye, Janet Englund, Benjamin Linas, Kristina Deeter

Not so long ago, it seemed the data on COVID-19 held a degree of comfort when it came to children: not too many of them got infected, fewer still got sick and almost none were hospitalized. As for schools, they were not believed to be super spreaders of the virus, for either adults or students.

And then came the Delta variant.

Pediatric coronavirus cases have now surged above 250,000 for the first time since the start of the pandemic, according to recently released data from the American Academy of Pediatrics. Hospitalizations of children stricken by the highly transmissible strain are reaching alarming levels and some tens of thousands of students across the country last week were quarantining away from schools that had just barely begun. With a swiftness that surprised even health experts, the virus has forced at least 1,400 closures of long-awaited in-person school across some 278 districts in 35 states, according to the website Burbio, a data service that tracks school calendars.

As for the adults in schools, at least 13 Miami-Dade staffers have died of the virus since mid-August and a Central Texas district shut down all its schools earlier this month after two teachers perished in the same week.

The Delta drumbeat of distress is one of the main reasons that President Joe Biden came out Thursday with a new plan of attack, including mandatory vaccinations for some 300,000 school staff members working for federal programs, such as Head Start or schools operated by the Bureau of Indian Education, and grants for districts confronting loss of funding for implementing mask mandates.

It will take some time to tell if Biden’s new strategy will be successful in beating back this latest surge. Right now, many parents and school officials are in a state of anxiety about how to keep their K-12 communities safe and perhaps questioning whether they miscalculated the strength of the COVID-19 enemy.

Complicating the matter further, decisions to implement basic virus mitigation measures in school have in some cases exploded into ridicule or even all-out brawls.

Amid the uncertainty and high tensions, and with misinformation about the virus still rampant, The 74 spoke directly to health experts for clarity on how to understand the virus in this critical stage and tips on how to safely navigate the back-to-school season.

Here’s what they had to say:

1. We’ve seen a surge in pediatric coronavirus cases. Should we abandon the prior wisdom that kids rarely catch COVID, and when they do, it’s not too serious?

Not exactly.

“[The Delta variant] is more infectious, but it’s not a whole new game,” explained Benjamin Linas, professor of medicine at Boston University.

The variant’s high transmissibility has pushed up case counts, including among children, he told The 74. But serious illness among young people remains “vanishingly rare,” he said — citing a case fatality rate of .00003 for those under 20.

“This underlying reality that kids are at far less risk of severe COVID-19 than adults remains true, even with Delta.”

Young people do represent a larger share of infections nationwide now than they did at the outset of the pandemic. But that’s likely because far fewer minors than adults are vaccinated, and many remain ineligible for shots, said Kristina Deeter, professor of pediatric medicine at University of Nevada, Reno School of Medicine.

In most cases, “[kids] are not as sick as the adults,” she agreed.

Still, Rebecca Wurtz, professor of health policy at the University of Minnesota, cautions that the risk of infection remains high, particularly for the unvaccinated. The idea that young people couldn’t catch or spread COVID was always silly, she told The 74, and the Delta variant means that transmission is now easier than ever before.

“Delta will find you if you are not thoughtfully masking and social distancing,” she said.

2. Does the Delta variant make kids sicker than previous strains?

There is no conclusive evidence that it does, according to the experts.

“The jury’s still out,” said Deeter.

Studies from Canada and Scotland have found that patients infected with the Delta variant were more likely to be hospitalized than those infected with previous mutations of the virus.

And while those papers don’t examine virulence specifically among young people, Wurtz believes it could still be “reasonable to extrapolate that to kids.”

Evidence from the U.S., however, seems to contradict the idea that Delta causes more severe infections among youth. Even as pediatric COVID cases have surged, the proportion of children and adolescents hospitalized with severe disease has remained constant, points out Amruta Padhye, pediatric infectious disease specialist at the University of Missouri.

The hospitalization rate among unvaccinated adolescents was 10 times higher compared to those who were fully vaccinated, recent CDC data reveal.

3. After the Pfizer vaccine’s full approval from the FDA, parents may now theoretically seek “off-label” vaccines for children under 12. Should they do so?

In short, no.

Although the FDA’s full approval of the Pfizer vaccine for those 16 and up means that doctors now have the power to prescribe the shot “off label” to any individual regardless of age, it would be irresponsible to do so, said Deeter.

The biggest unknown, she explained, is dosage. She prescribes drugs off label every day as a pediatrician, but explained that the COVID vaccine is different because it’s still so new.

“I don’t feel safe even deciding on what dose I might want to prescribe for a child. I have no idea what’s going to work,” she said, explaining that too much vaccine could elevate risks such as myocarditis, already more prevalent in young vaccine recipients than adults, and too little vaccine might not provide adequate protection against the coronavirus.

“There’s a reason that we have the approval process, even in the middle of a crisis,” added Linas. “I don’t recommend going out to get your child vaccinated before the vaccine has actually been approved or emergency authorized for kids.”

Youngsters aged 5 to 11 are expected to become eligible for coronavirus shots as soon as the end of October, experts say. The process has stretched out over months in part due to federal health regulators efforts to bolster confidence in the shots by demanding increased enrollment in clinical trials.

Once shots are approved for that age group, they will be the most effective way to keep children healthy, said Linas.

“With the vaccine, you’re very well protected from the bad outcomes.”

4. Should schools implement vaccine mandates for staff?

Immunization requirements for school staff have multiplied since the FDA issued full approval for the Pfizer vaccine. ​Washington, Connecticut, Oregon and multiple other states have enacted rules requiring educators to receive the COVID shot or be regularly tested for the virus.

In his Thursday address, which unveiled new vaccination rules covering two-thirds of all U.S. workers, President Biden called on state leaders to help move the needle on teacher immunization from its reported 90 percent level up to 100 percent.

“Vaccination requirements in schools are nothing new,” said the president.

Expecting teachers to be immunized against COVID represents a sound public health policy, says Linas.

“It’s reasonable for school districts … to say to their educators and staff… ‘We have an expectation that if you’re going to come into our buildings where we have our unvaccinated children, we expect you to be vaccinated. And if you won’t do that, then I’m sorry, you can’t teach.’”

That strategy also minimizes learning disruptions, pointed out Janet Englund, professor of pediatrics at the University of Washington School of Medicine.

“When a teacher gets sick, he or she is unable to perform his or her job,” she told The 74.

5. What about vaccine mandates for students?

Very few school districts have extended vaccine mandates to students, as 12- to 15-year-olds remain eligible for shots only on an emergency authorization basis, and those under 12 are still ineligible.

On Thursday, however, Los Angeles Unified School District, which serves 600,000 students, became the first major U.S. school district to require that eligible students attending school in person be fully vaccinated against the coronavirus. Students 12 and older in the nation’s second-largest school system will have to receive their second dose of the shot by Dec. 19, officials announced.

Culver City, California and Hoboken, New Jersey also instituted similar requirements for students in late August. Experts told The 74 that they expect the vaccination rules to face legal challenges.

Although Englund said she is a believer in many student vaccine mandates — they helped control diseases such as measles and polio, she pointed out — requiring a vaccine that is approved only on an emergency use authorization may be premature.

“It’s not quite time,” she said.

Dr. Anthony Fauci, however, expressed his support for student vaccine mandates while speaking on CNN in late August, and the University of Minnesota’s Wurtz told The 74 that she is “absolutely in favor of mandatory vaccinations for students,” due to the high safety and efficacy of COVID shots.

6. How effective are masks and other safety mitigation measures at slowing the spread of COVID in school?

Experts agree that safety measures to slow the spread of COVID are more effective when implemented in tandem with multiple others than on their own.

“[Masking] has to be a part of a layered protection strategy,” UCLA professor of pediatrics Ishminder Kaur told The 74.

That means that classrooms should employ all strategies available to them, she said: universal masking, ventilation, distancing, outdoor activities and rigorous testing to keep infected students out of the classroom.

Doing so can result in schools effectively containing the virus and keeping case rates below those of surrounding communities, academic studies show.

Although quarantining students exposed to the virus can disrupt academics, experts said it is a necessary step to contain transmission. They pointed out that with widespread access to testing, a negative result after five days may allow students to return to the classroom more quickly. On Thursday, Biden announced that the White House will move to make 280 million rapid and at-home tests available using the Defense Production Act and lower the cost of over-the-counter tests from Walmart, Kroger and Amazon.

Some districts’ quarantine protocols are more stringent than those recommended by the CDC, according to a recent survey of 100 districts from the University of Washington’s Center for Reinventing Public Education.

Some observers have recently made the case that the benefits of mask-wearing in the classroom remain uncertain, but Kaur points out that a recent study from Bangladesh with a randomized design — considered the “gold standard” in causal research — finds that simple surgical masks slow spread of COVID significantly, though it cautions that cloth masks may be less effective.

And while masking controversy has turned many school board meetings ugly, including in Broward County, Florida where the board chair said “all hell broke loose” when they required face coverings in defiance of Gov. Ron DeSantis’s order, kids don’t actually seem to mind wearing masks, said Kaur.

“They’re not fidgeting, they’re not touching it,” she said of the youngsters who come into her clinic. “It’s the new normal for them.”

Deeter, who works in a sedation clinic and has to ask kids to remove their masks, has observed the same.

“They get so upset when I try to take it off of them. It’s their buddy,” she said.

7. Outside of school, what’s the best way to navigate playdates and other social activities?

The number one tip, experts say, is to stay outside as much as possible.

“Outdoor activities were not the ones that were spreading these infections, which remains true even for Delta,” said Kaur, although she recommended avoiding overcrowded locations even outside. For example, coaches calling players into a huddle might ask everyone to momentarily mask up.

Even when the weather gets cold, Wurtz recommends limiting indoor hangouts. She suggests some compromises: building a snowman outside then coming indoors for hot chocolate at the end, perhaps.

8. What’s the COVID end-game for schools?

Once all students have had the opportunity to receive COVID vaccinations, it could be time to consider rolling back virus mitigation protocols, Linas said, and beginning the conversation about how to live with a virus that experts expect to remain endemic within the global population. But that’s still a long way out.

“We’re not there yet,” he said.

This article was published in partnership with The 74. Sign up for The 74’s newsletter here.

Getty Images

In the spring of 2020, facing massive disruptions to in-person instruction, state education chiefs urged then-U.S. Education Secretary Betsy DeVos to waive federal test requirements that had been in place for nearly 20 years.

She granted a blanket, one-year “accountability waiver.” But in February, with a new administration in place, then-Education Secretary nominee Miguel Cardona said he’d require states to administer the federally mandated tests in the spring, with an asterisk: They had the option of giving shorter, remote, or delayed versions.

Now, as students begin a third year of school under the cloud of COVID-19, a pair of researchers suggest that those two moves, by two administrations, may have made the results of annual testing less valuable — and could harm the delicate political support such testing still enjoys.

Using different versions of tests makes the results less comparable across different years and school districts. And shorter tests produce less “actionable” information about individual student achievement in the short term, said Dan Goldhaber of the National Center for Analysis of Longitudinal Data in Education Research at the University of Washington.

“The waivers looked to us like they made state tests less useful for diagnostic purposes, both for parents and for teachers,” Goldhaber said in an interview.

Dan Goldhaber

In a new policy brief, Goldhaber, along with Paul Bruno of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, say that as states begin planning for next spring’s tests, they should consider exactly how useful the results are for families, who spent much of the past school year getting an up-close look at just how much their children know.

When these tests return full-force in schools post-pandemic, as they likely will in 2022, they run the risk of being out-of-step with parents’ new, pandemic-fueled understanding of their children’s needs, the authors warn.

If the test results can’t help guide decisions about student placement and skills levels, they could lose what tenuous political support they still have, according to the analysis.

The researchers looked at testing policies nationwide and found that in most states, educators use tests either for diagnostics, for research and evaluation, or as the basis for accountability systems.

But they might also be better used to provide “actionable and timely information” about how to help individual students do better in the subjects tested. If results could be disaggregated more often and in a timely fashion, they say, that would help parents and teachers look more closely at students’ skill levels and academic needs.

As it is, they say, state test results “often take several months to make it into the hands of educators or families, impeding the use of testing to help individual students.”

“We need to make sure, I think, that they are useful for more than just accountability purposes,” said Goldhaber, who is also affiliated with the American Institutes for Research.

He noted, for instance, that in Washington State, many high-achieving students in underrepresented minority groups, who wouldn’t typically be assigned to advanced classes, get that option based on end-of-year assessment results. “They’re used for those kinds of things, but I don’t think it’s well-known,” he said.

Twenty years after No Child Left Behind first mandated widespread spring testing in K-12 schools, the authors say refocusing the tests could also keep them from losing popular support among parents and teachers.

Federal testing requirements are “popular in the abstract,” Bruno and Goldhaber write, but that support appears fragile: 41 percent of respondents in a 2020 Phi Delta Kappa poll said there’s “too much emphasis on achievement testing” in public schools, up from 37 percent in 2008 and just 20 percent in 1997.

They also note that support for testing drops 20 percentage points when respondents are told that test administration takes, on average, eight hours of class time annually.

“I think there’s probably less public support than there was, certainly, when No Child Left Behind passed” in 2001, Goldhaber said.

Because of remote schooling, Goldhaber said, “Many parents have a window into what’s actually going on inside the classroom, in a way that they did not have before the pandemic, because they could sit in with their kids during classes.”

But in many cases, he said, the test results don’t necessarily offer “concrete information that suggests maybe your kids need help with complex fractions — the kind of information that you could at least imagine would inform parent-teacher meeting discussions.”

Jonathan Schweig, a researcher at the RAND Corp. and a professor at Pardee RAND Graduate School who studies education policy and teacher evaluations, among other topics, said he generally agreed with Bruno’s and Goldhaber’s notion that using tests for diagnostic purposes might be a way to increase public support.

Echoing Goldhaber’s point about concrete data, he said state summative tests generally “were not designed to provide diagnostic or instructionally useful information. Even under routine conditions, the tests are administered towards the end of the school year, and score reports are returned to schools and families during the summer, after the school year has ended.”

Schweig also said the scores generated by these assessment systems “are not at a grain size that would be useful to support remediation or other diagnostic uses.”

Jonathan Schweig

Summative tests, he said, “are best thought of as providing one piece of information about student learning, but they do not provide the only piece and perhaps not even the most important piece. As such, it is important for school leaders to think comprehensively about assessment and design coherent systems that include a mix of formative, interim and state-wide summative assessments.”

Any broad new federal testing policies will have to wait until Congress approves a reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, which helps fund public schools. That could take years, since lawmakers typically push back the timeline for reauthorization by years. But in today’s political climate, Goldhaber said, “I think that if we were to have a negotiation right now, I don’t know that the tests would survive.”

This article was published in partnership with The 74. Sign up for The 74’s newsletter here.