Kids have suffered during the coronavirus pandemic in ways whose long-term effects are only starting to become evident. And the reliance on screen time, whether for distance learning or for babysitting, has only worsened things.
I am no fan of standardized testing. But as a gross measure, tests can tell you how well children are learning. According to results of national exams released last week, between 2019 and 2022, students in fourth and eighth grade experienced unprecedented declines in math and reduced reading achievement.
Schools and teachers have been whipsawed between concerns for the health of students and teachers and the need to devise some reasonable form of pedagogy. Teachers also suffered. That’s why they are leaving the profession in droves.
A more subtle cost has been on the socialization of young children. Kids born just before the pandemic are now three and four years old, and starting to attend preschool. The results are not pretty.
During the pandemic, young children stayed home with parents or grandparents or paid babysitters. They arrive at preschool with no experience of social interaction with other kids, either for play or for learning.
A member of my extended family, who is a gifted Montessori teacher, told me, "Some children have never been in a classroom or even group play. Often the child will push, shove, or tug another child to initiate play. This behavior does not entice another child to play."
Masks, still worn in lots of preschools, have set back both children’s acquisition of speech and the reading of social cues from other children and teachers. Some kids exposed to peers for the first time cry inconsolably when they don’t get their way.
This teacher came up with the device of a "crying chair," both to reduce disruption and to break the pattern. "OK, if you want to keep crying, we have a crying chair," the teacher would say kindly. "You can sit in it as long as you like." Eventually, the child does get tired of crying, but still lacks emotional knowledge of how to re-engage with the group, for either play or learning.
A factor that has exacerbated all of these problems is the ubiquity of commercially motivated screen time directed at very small children. Harassed parents relied on this during the pandemic even more than before.
As Susan Linn, psychologist and founder of the Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood, writes in her superb recent book, Who’s Raising the Kids?: Big Tech, Big Business, and the Lives of Children, commercially designed and motivated screen time increases social isolation and undermines a child’s innate capacity for play based on the child’s own imagination. Kids who cultivate this capacity are better able to relate to other children and adults, and to learn.
As we dig out from the effects of the pandemic, we will need to invest more in preschools, restore the capacity of schools to make classrooms welcoming places for teachers as well as students, and regulate Big Tech to cease treating kids as profit centers and invading their imaginations. That’s no small set of challenges. |
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~ ROBERT KUTTNER
Robert Kuttner's observations of the effects of COVID on the education of our children only touches on one aspect of the crisis we are facing. The loss of learning time over the past 2 and a half years, the lack of socialization of younger children and the effects of commercial screen time would, by themselves, have presented us with possibly the worst crisis in public education in our history. But this comes at a time when that system faces two other crises; the long-term defunding of the public education and the attacks from the right on our educators and their supporters.
One indicator of the defunding of education can be seen in what has been dubbed the "teacher pay penalty".
Simply put, teachers are paid less (in weekly wages and total compensation) than their nonteacher college-educated counterparts, and the situation has worsened considerably over time. Prior to the pandemic, the long-trending erosion in the relative wages and total compensation of teachers was already a serious concern. The financial penalty that teachers face discourages college students from entering the teaching profession and makes it difficult for school districts to keep current teachers in the classroom.
The relative teacher wage penalty grew to a record high in 2021. It was 23.5% in 2021, up from 6.1% in 1996. In 28 states (including North Carolina), teachers are paid less than 80 cents on the dollar earned by similar college-educated workers in those states.
Providing teachers with compensation commensurate with that of other similarly educated professionals is not simply a matter of fairness but is necessary to improve educational outcomes and foster future economic stability of workers, their families, and communities across the U.S. Economic Policy Institute, 8/16/22
In January I had posted a blog article that outlined the nature of the crisis in public education in detail - even prior to COVID. The one thing, the ONLY thing, that has stood in the way of the total collapse of the system is our dedicated educators. Again and again they have been asked to do MORE with LESS. But there is a limit to what these heroes can do and a limit to what pressures they can endure, and for many that limit has already been exceeded. Putting public education back together will be a huge job, and must begin today with support for our educators and for providing them the resources they need.
We could start by diverting money from our bloated military budget to education. Would a 5% reduction in spending for war, roughly $40 billion, provide the resources needed? Is it time to renew our commitment to the next generation by providing a constitutional right of each and every child to receive a sound basic education (as provided for in the North Carolina Constitution and just reaffirmed on 11/4/22 by the North Carolina Supreme Court).
While we are at it, we need to define some other basic rights for all. But more on that later. |
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