essay about covid 19 education

How to Write About Coronavirus in a College Essay

Students can share how they navigated life during the coronavirus pandemic in a full-length essay or an optional supplement.

Writing About COVID-19 in College Essays

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Experts say students should be honest and not limit themselves to merely their experiences with the pandemic.

The global impact of COVID-19, the disease caused by the novel coronavirus, means colleges and prospective students alike are in for an admissions cycle like no other. Both face unprecedented challenges and questions as they grapple with their respective futures amid the ongoing fallout of the pandemic.

Colleges must examine applicants without the aid of standardized test scores for many – a factor that prompted many schools to go test-optional for now . Even grades, a significant component of a college application, may be hard to interpret with some high schools adopting pass-fail classes last spring due to the pandemic. Major college admissions factors are suddenly skewed.

"I can't help but think other (admissions) factors are going to matter more," says Ethan Sawyer, founder of the College Essay Guy, a website that offers free and paid essay-writing resources.

College essays and letters of recommendation , Sawyer says, are likely to carry more weight than ever in this admissions cycle. And many essays will likely focus on how the pandemic shaped students' lives throughout an often tumultuous 2020.

But before writing a college essay focused on the coronavirus, students should explore whether it's the best topic for them.

Writing About COVID-19 for a College Application

Much of daily life has been colored by the coronavirus. Virtual learning is the norm at many colleges and high schools, many extracurriculars have vanished and social lives have stalled for students complying with measures to stop the spread of COVID-19.

"For some young people, the pandemic took away what they envisioned as their senior year," says Robert Alexander, dean of admissions, financial aid and enrollment management at the University of Rochester in New York. "Maybe that's a spot on a varsity athletic team or the lead role in the fall play. And it's OK for them to mourn what should have been and what they feel like they lost, but more important is how are they making the most of the opportunities they do have?"

That question, Alexander says, is what colleges want answered if students choose to address COVID-19 in their college essay.

But the question of whether a student should write about the coronavirus is tricky. The answer depends largely on the student.

"In general, I don't think students should write about COVID-19 in their main personal statement for their application," Robin Miller, master college admissions counselor at IvyWise, a college counseling company, wrote in an email.

"Certainly, there may be exceptions to this based on a student's individual experience, but since the personal essay is the main place in the application where the student can really allow their voice to be heard and share insight into who they are as an individual, there are likely many other topics they can choose to write about that are more distinctive and unique than COVID-19," Miller says.

Opinions among admissions experts vary on whether to write about the likely popular topic of the pandemic.

"If your essay communicates something positive, unique, and compelling about you in an interesting and eloquent way, go for it," Carolyn Pippen, principal college admissions counselor at IvyWise, wrote in an email. She adds that students shouldn't be dissuaded from writing about a topic merely because it's common, noting that "topics are bound to repeat, no matter how hard we try to avoid it."

Above all, she urges honesty.

"If your experience within the context of the pandemic has been truly unique, then write about that experience, and the standing out will take care of itself," Pippen says. "If your experience has been generally the same as most other students in your context, then trying to find a unique angle can easily cross the line into exploiting a tragedy, or at least appearing as though you have."

But focusing entirely on the pandemic can limit a student to a single story and narrow who they are in an application, Sawyer says. "There are so many wonderful possibilities for what you can say about yourself outside of your experience within the pandemic."

He notes that passions, strengths, career interests and personal identity are among the multitude of essay topic options available to applicants and encourages them to probe their values to help determine the topic that matters most to them – and write about it.

That doesn't mean the pandemic experience has to be ignored if applicants feel the need to write about it.

Writing About Coronavirus in Main and Supplemental Essays

Students can choose to write a full-length college essay on the coronavirus or summarize their experience in a shorter form.

To help students explain how the pandemic affected them, The Common App has added an optional section to address this topic. Applicants have 250 words to describe their pandemic experience and the personal and academic impact of COVID-19.

"That's not a trick question, and there's no right or wrong answer," Alexander says. Colleges want to know, he adds, how students navigated the pandemic, how they prioritized their time, what responsibilities they took on and what they learned along the way.

If students can distill all of the above information into 250 words, there's likely no need to write about it in a full-length college essay, experts say. And applicants whose lives were not heavily altered by the pandemic may even choose to skip the optional COVID-19 question.

"This space is best used to discuss hardship and/or significant challenges that the student and/or the student's family experienced as a result of COVID-19 and how they have responded to those difficulties," Miller notes. Using the section to acknowledge a lack of impact, she adds, "could be perceived as trite and lacking insight, despite the good intentions of the applicant."

To guard against this lack of awareness, Sawyer encourages students to tap someone they trust to review their writing , whether it's the 250-word Common App response or the full-length essay.

Experts tend to agree that the short-form approach to this as an essay topic works better, but there are exceptions. And if a student does have a coronavirus story that he or she feels must be told, Alexander encourages the writer to be authentic in the essay.

"My advice for an essay about COVID-19 is the same as my advice about an essay for any topic – and that is, don't write what you think we want to read or hear," Alexander says. "Write what really changed you and that story that now is yours and yours alone to tell."

Sawyer urges students to ask themselves, "What's the sentence that only I can write?" He also encourages students to remember that the pandemic is only a chapter of their lives and not the whole book.

Miller, who cautions against writing a full-length essay on the coronavirus, says that if students choose to do so they should have a conversation with their high school counselor about whether that's the right move. And if students choose to proceed with COVID-19 as a topic, she says they need to be clear, detailed and insightful about what they learned and how they adapted along the way.

"Approaching the essay in this manner will provide important balance while demonstrating personal growth and vulnerability," Miller says.

Pippen encourages students to remember that they are in an unprecedented time for college admissions.

"It is important to keep in mind with all of these (admission) factors that no colleges have ever had to consider them this way in the selection process, if at all," Pippen says. "They have had very little time to calibrate their evaluations of different application components within their offices, let alone across institutions. This means that colleges will all be handling the admissions process a little bit differently, and their approaches may even evolve over the course of the admissions cycle."

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Paul Reville says COVID-19 school closures have turned a spotlight on inequities and other shortcomings

This is part of our Coronavirus Update series in which Harvard specialists in epidemiology, infectious disease, economics, politics, and other disciplines offer insights into what the latest developments in the COVID-19 outbreak may bring.

As former secretary of education for Massachusetts, Paul Reville is keenly aware of the financial and resource disparities between districts, schools, and individual students. The school closings due to coronavirus concerns have turned a spotlight on those problems and how they contribute to educational and income inequality in the nation. The Gazette talked to Reville, the Francis Keppel Professor of Practice of Educational Policy and Administration at Harvard Graduate School of Education , about the effects of the pandemic on schools and how the experience may inspire an overhaul of the American education system.

Paul Reville

GAZETTE: Schools around the country have closed due to the coronavirus pandemic. Do these massive school closures have any precedent in the history of the United States?

REVILLE: We’ve certainly had school closures in particular jurisdictions after a natural disaster, like in New Orleans after the hurricane. But on this scale? No, certainly not in my lifetime. There were substantial closings in many places during the 1918 Spanish Flu, some as long as four months, but not as widespread as those we’re seeing today. We’re in uncharted territory.

GAZETTE: What lessons did school districts around the country learn from school closures in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, and other similar school closings?

REVILLE:   I think the lessons we’ve learned are that it’s good [for school districts] to have a backup system, if they can afford it. I was talking recently with folks in a district in New Hampshire where, because of all the snow days they have in the wintertime, they had already developed a backup online learning system. That made the transition, in this period of school closure, a relatively easy one for them to undertake. They moved seamlessly to online instruction.

Most of our big systems don’t have this sort of backup. Now, however, we’re not only going to have to construct a backup to get through this crisis, but we’re going to have to develop new, permanent systems, redesigned to meet the needs which have been so glaringly exposed in this crisis. For example, we have always had large gaps in students’ learning opportunities after school, weekends, and in the summer. Disadvantaged students suffer the consequences of those gaps more than affluent children, who typically have lots of opportunities to fill in those gaps. I’m hoping that we can learn some things through this crisis about online delivery of not only instruction, but an array of opportunities for learning and support. In this way, we can make the most of the crisis to help redesign better systems of education and child development.

GAZETTE: Is that one of the silver linings of this public health crisis?

REVILLE: In politics we say, “Never lose the opportunity of a crisis.” And in this situation, we don’t simply want to frantically struggle to restore the status quo because the status quo wasn’t operating at an effective level and certainly wasn’t serving all of our children fairly. There are things we can learn in the messiness of adapting through this crisis, which has revealed profound disparities in children’s access to support and opportunities. We should be asking: How do we make our school, education, and child-development systems more individually responsive to the needs of our students? Why not construct a system that meets children where they are and gives them what they need inside and outside of school in order to be successful? Let’s take this opportunity to end the “one size fits all” factory model of education.

GAZETTE: How seriously are students going to be set back by not having formal instruction for at least two months, if not more?

“The best that can come of this is a new paradigm shift in terms of the way in which we look at education, because children’s well-being and success depend on more than just schooling,” Paul Reville said of the current situation. “We need to look holistically, at the entirety of children’s lives.”

Stephanie Mitchell/Harvard file photo

REVILLE: The first thing to consider is that it’s going to be a variable effect. We tend to regard our school systems uniformly, but actually schools are widely different in their operations and impact on children, just as our students themselves are very different from one another. Children come from very different backgrounds and have very different resources, opportunities, and support outside of school. Now that their entire learning lives, as well as their actual physical lives, are outside of school, those differences and disparities come into vivid view. Some students will be fine during this crisis because they’ll have high-quality learning opportunities, whether it’s formal schooling or informal homeschooling of some kind coupled with various enrichment opportunities. Conversely, other students won’t have access to anything of quality, and as a result will be at an enormous disadvantage. Generally speaking, the most economically challenged in our society will be the most vulnerable in this crisis, and the most advantaged are most likely to survive it without losing too much ground.

GAZETTE: Schools in Massachusetts are closed until May 4. Some people are saying they should remain closed through the end of the school year. What’s your take on this?

REVILLE: That should be a medically based judgment call that will be best made several weeks from now. If there’s evidence to suggest that students and teachers can safely return to school, then I’d say by all means. However, that seems unlikely.

GAZETTE: The digital divide between students has become apparent as schools have increasingly turned to online instruction. What can school systems do to address that gap?

REVILLE: Arguably, this is something that schools should have been doing a long time ago, opening up the whole frontier of out-of-school learning by virtue of making sure that all students have access to the technology and the internet they need in order to be connected in out-of-school hours. Students in certain school districts don’t have those affordances right now because often the school districts don’t have the budget to do this, but federal, state, and local taxpayers are starting to see the imperative for coming together to meet this need.

Twenty-first century learning absolutely requires technology and internet. We can’t leave this to chance or the accident of birth. All of our children should have the technology they need to learn outside of school. Some communities can take it for granted that their children will have such tools. Others who have been unable to afford to level the playing field are now finding ways to step up. Boston, for example, has bought 20,000 Chromebooks and is creating hotspots around the city where children and families can go to get internet access. That’s a great start but, in the long run, I think we can do better than that. At the same time, many communities still need help just to do what Boston has done for its students.

Communities and school districts are going to have to adapt to get students on a level playing field. Otherwise, many students will continue to be at a huge disadvantage. We can see this playing out now as our lower-income and more heterogeneous school districts struggle over whether to proceed with online instruction when not everyone can access it. Shutting down should not be an option. We have to find some middle ground, and that means the state and local school districts are going to have to act urgently and nimbly to fill in the gaps in technology and internet access.

GAZETTE : What can parents can do to help with the homeschooling of their children in the current crisis?

“In this situation, we don’t simply want to frantically struggle to restore the status quo because the status quo wasn’t operating at an effective level and certainly wasn’t serving all of our children fairly.”

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REVILLE: School districts can be helpful by giving parents guidance about how to constructively use this time. The default in our education system is now homeschooling. Virtually all parents are doing some form of homeschooling, whether they want to or not. And the question is: What resources, support, or capacity do they have to do homeschooling effectively? A lot of parents are struggling with that.

And again, we have widely variable capacity in our families and school systems. Some families have parents home all day, while other parents have to go to work. Some school systems are doing online classes all day long, and the students are fully engaged and have lots of homework, and the parents don’t need to do much. In other cases, there is virtually nothing going on at the school level, and everything falls to the parents. In the meantime, lots of organizations are springing up, offering different kinds of resources such as handbooks and curriculum outlines, while many school systems are coming up with guidance documents to help parents create a positive learning environment in their homes by engaging children in challenging activities so they keep learning.

There are lots of creative things that can be done at home. But the challenge, of course, for parents is that they are contending with working from home, and in other cases, having to leave home to do their jobs. We have to be aware that families are facing myriad challenges right now. If we’re not careful, we risk overloading families. We have to strike a balance between what children need and what families can do, and how you maintain some kind of work-life balance in the home environment. Finally, we must recognize the equity issues in the forced overreliance on homeschooling so that we avoid further disadvantaging the already disadvantaged.

GAZETTE: What has been the biggest surprise for you thus far?

REVILLE: One that’s most striking to me is that because schools are closed, parents and the general public have become more aware than at any time in my memory of the inequities in children’s lives outside of school. Suddenly we see front-page coverage about food deficits, inadequate access to health and mental health, problems with housing stability, and access to educational technology and internet. Those of us in education know these problems have existed forever. What has happened is like a giant tidal wave that came and sucked the water off the ocean floor, revealing all these uncomfortable realities that had been beneath the water from time immemorial. This newfound public awareness of pervasive inequities, I hope, will create a sense of urgency in the public domain. We need to correct for these inequities in order for education to realize its ambitious goals. We need to redesign our systems of child development and education. The most obvious place to start for schools is working on equitable access to educational technology as a way to close the digital-learning gap.

GAZETTE: You’ve talked about some concrete changes that should be considered to level the playing field. But should we be thinking broadly about education in some new way?

REVILLE: The best that can come of this is a new paradigm shift in terms of the way in which we look at education, because children’s well-being and success depend on more than just schooling. We need to look holistically, at the entirety of children’s lives. In order for children to come to school ready to learn, they need a wide array of essential supports and opportunities outside of school. And we haven’t done a very good job of providing these. These education prerequisites go far beyond the purview of school systems, but rather are the responsibility of communities and society at large. In order to learn, children need equal access to health care, food, clean water, stable housing, and out-of-school enrichment opportunities, to name just a few preconditions. We have to reconceptualize the whole job of child development and education, and construct systems that meet children where they are and give them what they need, both inside and outside of school, in order for all of them to have a genuine opportunity to be successful.

Within this coronavirus crisis there is an opportunity to reshape American education. The only precedent in our field was when the Sputnik went up in 1957, and suddenly, Americans became very worried that their educational system wasn’t competitive with that of the Soviet Union. We felt vulnerable, like our defenses were down, like a nation at risk. And we decided to dramatically boost the involvement of the federal government in schooling and to increase and improve our scientific curriculum. We decided to look at education as an important factor in human capital development in this country. Again, in 1983, the report “Nation at Risk” warned of a similar risk: Our education system wasn’t up to the demands of a high-skills/high-knowledge economy.

We tried with our education reforms to build a 21st-century education system, but the results of that movement have been modest. We are still a nation at risk. We need another paradigm shift, where we look at our goals and aspirations for education, which are summed up in phrases like “No Child Left Behind,” “Every Student Succeeds,” and “All Means All,” and figure out how to build a system that has the capacity to deliver on that promise of equity and excellence in education for all of our students, and all means all. We’ve got that opportunity now. I hope we don’t fail to take advantage of it in a misguided rush to restore the status quo.

This interview has been condensed and edited for length and clarity.

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COVID-19 and education: The lingering effects of unfinished learning

As this most disrupted of school years draws to a close, it is time to take stock of the impact of the pandemic on student learning and well-being. Although the 2020–21 academic year ended on a high note—with rising vaccination rates, outdoor in-person graduations, and access to at least some in-person learning for 98 percent of students—it was as a whole perhaps one of the most challenging for educators and students in our nation’s history. 1 “Burbio’s K-12 school opening tracker,” Burbio, accessed May 31, 2021, cai.burbio.com. By the end of the school year, only 2 percent of students were in virtual-only districts. Many students, however, chose to keep learning virtually in districts that were offering hybrid or fully in-person learning.

Our analysis shows that the impact of the pandemic on K–12 student learning was significant, leaving students on average five months behind in mathematics and four months behind in reading by the end of the school year. The pandemic widened preexisting opportunity and achievement gaps, hitting historically disadvantaged students hardest. In math, students in majority Black schools ended the year with six months of unfinished learning, students in low-income schools with seven. High schoolers have become more likely to drop out of school, and high school seniors, especially those from low-income families, are less likely to go on to postsecondary education. And the crisis had an impact on not just academics but also the broader health and well-being of students, with more than 35 percent of parents very or extremely concerned about their children’s mental health.

The fallout from the pandemic threatens to depress this generation’s prospects and constrict their opportunities far into adulthood. The ripple effects may undermine their chances of attending college and ultimately finding a fulfilling job that enables them to support a family. Our analysis suggests that, unless steps are taken to address unfinished learning, today’s students may earn $49,000 to $61,000 less over their lifetime owing to the impact of the pandemic on their schooling. The impact on the US economy could amount to $128 billion to $188 billion every year as this cohort enters the workforce.

Federal funds are in place to help states and districts respond, though funding is only part of the answer. The deep-rooted challenges in our school systems predate the pandemic and have resisted many reform efforts. States and districts have a critical role to play in marshaling that funding into sustainable programs that improve student outcomes. They can ensure rigorous implementation of evidence-based initiatives, while also piloting and tracking the impact of innovative new approaches. Although it is too early to fully assess the effectiveness of postpandemic solutions to unfinished learning, the scope of action is already clear. The immediate imperative is to not only reopen schools and recover unfinished learning but also reimagine education systems for the long term. Across all of these priorities it will be critical to take a holistic approach, listening to students and parents and designing programs that meet academic and nonacademic needs alike.

What have we learned about unfinished learning?

As the 2020–21 school year began, just 40 percent of K–12 students were in districts that offered any in-person instruction. By the end of the year, more than 98 percent of students had access to some form of in-person learning, from the traditional five days a week to hybrid models. In the interim, districts oscillated among virtual, hybrid, and in-person learning as they balanced the need to keep students and staff safe with the need to provide an effective learning environment. Students faced multiple schedule changes, were assigned new teachers midyear, and struggled with glitchy internet connections and Zoom fatigue. This was a uniquely challenging year for teachers and students, and it is no surprise that it has left its mark—on student learning, and on student well-being.

As we analyze the cost of the pandemic, we use the term “unfinished learning” to capture the reality that students were not given the opportunity this year to complete all the learning they would have completed in a typical year. Some students who have disengaged from school altogether may have slipped backward, losing knowledge or skills they once had. The majority simply learned less than they would have in a typical year, but this is nonetheless important. Students who move on to the next grade unprepared are missing key building blocks of knowledge that are necessary for success, while students who repeat a year are much less likely to complete high school and move on to college. And it’s not just academic knowledge these students may miss out on. They are at risk of finishing school without the skills, behaviors, and mindsets to succeed in college or in the workforce. An accurate assessment of the depth and extent of unfinished learning will best enable districts and states to support students in catching up on the learning they missed and moving past the pandemic and into a successful future.

Students testing in 2021 were about ten points behind in math and nine points behind in reading, compared with matched students in previous years.

Unfinished learning is real—and inequitable

To assess student learning through the pandemic, we analyzed Curriculum Associates’ i-Ready in-school assessment results of more than 1.6 million elementary school students across more than 40 states. 2 The Curriculum Associates in-school sample consisted of 1.6 million K–6 students in mathematics and 1.5 million in reading. The math sample came from all 50 states, but 23 states accounted for 90 percent of the sample. The reading sample came from 46 states, with 21 states accounting for 90 percent of the sample. Florida accounted for 29 percent of the math and 30 percent of the reading sample. In general, states that had reopened schools are overweighted given the in-school nature of the assessment. We compared students’ performance in the spring of 2021 with the performance of similar students prior to the pandemic. 3 Specifically, we compared spring 2021 results to those of historically matched students in the springs of 2019, 2018, and 2017. Students testing in 2021 were about ten points behind in math and nine points behind in reading, compared with matched students in previous years.

To get a sense of the magnitude of these gaps, we translated these differences in scores to a more intuitive measure—months of learning. Although there is no perfect way to make this translation, we can get a sense of how far students are behind by comparing the levels students attained this spring with the growth in learning that usually occurs from one grade level to the next. We found that this cohort of students is five months behind in math and four months behind in reading, compared with where we would expect them to be based on historical data. 4 The conversion into months of learning compares students’ achievement in the spring of one grade level with their performance in the spring of the next grade level, treating this spring-to-spring difference in historical scores as a “year” of learning. It assumes a ten-month school year with a two-month summer vacation. Actual school schedules vary significantly, and i-Ready’s typical growth numbers for a “year” of learning are based on 30 weeks of actual instruction between the fall and the spring rather than on a spring-to-spring calendar-year comparison.

Unfinished learning did not vary significantly across elementary grades. Despite reports that remote learning was more challenging for early elementary students, 5 Marva Hinton, “Why teaching kindergarten online is so very, very hard,” Edutopia, October 21, 2020, edutopia.org. our results suggest the impact was just as meaningful for older elementary students. 6 While our analysis only includes results from students who tested in-school in the spring, many of these students were learning remotely for meaningful portions of the fall and the winter. We can hypothesize that perhaps younger elementary students received more help from parents and older siblings, and that older elementary students were more likely to be struggling alone.

It is also worth remembering that our numbers capture the “average” progress by grade level. Especially in early reading, this average can conceal a wide range of outcomes. Another way of cutting the data looks instead at which students have dropped further behind grade levels. A recent report suggests that more first and second graders have ended this year two or more grade levels below expectations than in any previous year. 7 Academic achievement at the end of the 2020–2021 school year , Curriculum Associates, June 2021, curriculumassociates.com. Given the major strides children at this age typically make in mastering reading, and the critical importance of early reading for later academic success, this is of particular concern.

While all types of students experienced unfinished learning, some groups were disproportionately affected. Students of color and low-income students suffered most. Students in majority-Black schools ended the school year six months behind in both math and reading, while students in majority-white schools ended up just four months behind in math and three months behind in reading. 8 To respect students’ privacy, we cannot isolate the race or income of individual students in our sample, but we can look at school-level demographics. Students in predominantly low-income schools and in urban locations also lost more learning during the pandemic than their peers in high-income rural and suburban schools (Exhibit 1).

In fall 2020, we projected that students could lose as much as five to ten months of learning in mathematics, and about half of that in reading, by the end of the school year. Spring assessment results came in toward the lower end of these projections, suggesting that districts and states were able to improve the quality of remote and hybrid learning through the 2020–21 school year and bring more students back into classrooms.

Indeed, if we look at the data over time, some interesting patterns emerge. 9 The composition of the fall student sample was different from that of the spring sample, because more students returned to in-person assessments in the spring. Some of the increase in unfinished learning from fall to spring could be because the spring assessment included previously virtual students, who may have struggled more during the school year. Even so, the spring data are the best reflection of unfinished learning at the end of the school year. Taking math as an example, as schools closed their buildings in the spring of 2020, students fell behind rapidly, learning almost no new math content over the final few months of the 2019–20 school year. Over the summer, we assume that they experienced the typical “summer slide” in which students lose some of the academic knowledge and skills they had learned the year before. Then they resumed learning through the 2020–21 school year, but at a slower pace than usual, resulting in five months of unfinished learning by the end of the year (Exhibit 2). 10 These lines simplify the pattern of typical learning through the year. In a typical year, students learn more in the fall and less in the spring, and only learn during periods of instruction (the chart includes the well-documented learning loss that happens during the summer, but does not include shorter holidays when students are not in school receiving instruction).

In reading, however, the story is somewhat different. As schools closed their buildings in March 2020, students continued to progress in reading, albeit at a slower pace. During the summer, we assume that students’ reading level stayed roughly flat, as in previous years. The pace of learning increased slightly over the 2020–21 school year, but the difference was not as great as it was in math, resulting in four months of unfinished learning by the end of the school year (Exhibit 3). Put another way, the initial shock in reading was less severe, but the improvements to remote and hybrid learning seem to have had less impact in reading than they did in math.

Before we celebrate the improvements in student trajectories between the initial school shutdowns and the subsequent year of learning, we should remember that these are still sobering numbers. On average, students who took the spring assessments in school are half a year behind in math, and nearly that in reading. For Black and Hispanic students, the losses are not only greater but also piled on top of historical inequities in opportunity and achievement (Exhibit 4).

Furthermore, these results likely represent an optimistic scenario. They reflect outcomes for students who took interim assessments in the spring in a school building 11 Students who took the assessment out of school are not included in our sample because we could not guarantee fidelity and comparability of results, given the change in the testing environment. Out-of-school students represent about a third of the students taking i-Ready assessments in the spring, and we will not have an accurate understanding of the pandemic’s impact on their learning until they return to school buildings, likely in the fall. —and thus exclude students who remained remote throughout the entire school year, and who may have experienced the most disruption to their schooling. 12 Initial results from Texas suggest that districts with mostly virtual instruction experienced more unfinished learning than those with mostly in-person instruction. The percent of students meeting math expectations dropped 32 percent in mostly virtual districts but just 9 percent in mostly in-person ones. See Reese Oxner, “Texas students’ standardized test scores dropped dramatically during the pandemic, especially in math,” Texas Tribune , June 28, 2021, texastribune.org. The Curriculum Associates data cover a broad variety of schools and states across the country, but are not fully representative, being overweighted for rural and southeastern states that were more likely to get students back into the classrooms this year. Finally, these data cover only elementary schools. They are silent on the academic impact of the pandemic for middle and high schoolers. However, data from school districts suggest that, even for older students, the pandemic has had a significant effect on learning. 13 For example, in Salt Lake City, the percentage of middle and high school students failing a class jumped by 60 percent, from 2,500 to 4,000, during the pandemic. To learn about increased failure rates across multiple districts from the Bay Area to New Mexico, Austin, and Hawaii, see Richard Fulton, “Failing Grades,” Inside Higher Ed , March 8, 2021, insidehighered.com.

The harm inflicted by the pandemic goes beyond academics

Students didn’t just lose academic learning during the pandemic. Some lost family members; others had caregivers who lost their jobs and sources of income; and almost all experienced social isolation.

These pressures have taken a toll on students of all ages. In our recent survey of 16,370 parents across every state in America, 35 percent of parents said they were very or extremely concerned about their child’s mental health, with a similar proportion worried about their child’s social and emotional well-being. Roughly 80 percent of parents had some level of concern about their child’s mental health or social and emotional health and development since the pandemic began. Parental concerns about mental health span grade levels but are slightly lower for parents of early elementary school students. 14 While 30.7% percent of all K–2 parents were very or extremely concerned, a peak of 37.6% percent of eighth-grade parents were.

Parents also report increases in clinical mental health conditions among their children, with a five-percentage-point increase in anxiety and a six-percentage-point increase in depression. They also report increases in behaviors such as social withdrawal, self-isolation, lethargy, and irrational fears (Exhibit 5). Despite increased levels of concern among parents, the amount of mental health assessment and testing done for children is 6.1 percent lower than it was in 2019 —the steepest decline in assessment and testing rates of any age group.

Broader student well-being is not independent of academics. Parents whose children have fallen significantly behind academically are one-third more likely to say that they are very or extremely concerned about their children’s mental health. Black and Hispanic parents are seven to nine percentage points more likely than white parents to report higher levels of concern. Unaddressed mental-health challenges will likely have a knock-on effect on academics going forward as well. Research shows that trauma and other mental-health issues can influence children’s attendance, their ability to complete schoolwork in and out of class, and even the way they learn. 15 Satu Larson et al., “Chronic childhood trauma, mental health, academic achievement, and school-based health center mental health services,” Journal of School Health , 2017, 87(9), 675–86, escholarship.org.

In our recent survey of 16,370 parents across every state in America, 35 percent of parents said they were very or extremely concerned about their child’s mental health.

The impact of unfinished learning on diminished student well-being seems to be playing out in the choices that students are making. Some students have already effectively dropped out of formal education entirely. 16 To assess the impact of the pandemic on dropout rates, we have to look beyond official enrollment data, which are only published annually, and which only capture whether a child has enrolled at the beginning of the year, not whether they are engaged and attending school. Chronic absenteeism rates provide clues as to which students are likely to persist in school and which students are at risk of dropping out. Our parent survey suggests that chronic absenteeism for eighth through 12th graders has increased by 12 percentage points, and 42 percent of the students who are new to chronic absenteeism are attending no school at all, according to their parents. Scaled up to the national level, this suggests that 2.3 million to 4.6 million additional eighth- to 12th-grade students were chronically absent from school this year, in addition to the 3.1 million who are chronically absent in nonpandemic years. State and district data on chronic absenteeism are still emerging, but data released so far also suggest a sharp uptick in absenteeism rates nationwide, particularly in higher grades. 17 A review of available state and district data, including data released by 14 states and 11 districts, showed increases in chronic absenteeism of between three and 16 percentage points, with an average of seven percentage points. However, many states changed the definition of absenteeism during the pandemic, so a true like-for-like comparison is difficult to obtain. According to emerging state and district data, increases in chronic absenteeism are highest among populations with historically low rates. This is reflected also in our survey results. Black students, with the highest historical absenteeism rates, saw more modest increases during the pandemic than white or Hispanic students (Exhibit 6).

It remains unclear whether these pandemic-related chronic absentees will drop out at rates similar to those of students who were chronically absent prior to the pandemic. Some students could choose to return to school once in-person options are restored; but some portion of these newly absent students will likely drop out of school altogether. Based on historical links between chronic absenteeism and dropout rates, as well as differentials in absenteeism between fully virtual and fully in-person students, we estimate that an additional 617,000 to 1.2 million eighth–12th graders could drop out of school altogether because of the pandemic if efforts are not made to reengage them in learning next year. 18 The federal definition of chronic absenteeism is missing more than 15 days of school each year. According to the Utah Education Policy Center’s research brief on chronic absenteeism, the overall correlation between one year of chronic absence between eighth and 12th grade and dropping out of school is 0.134. For more, see Utah Education Policy Center, Research brief: Chronic absenteeism , July 2012, uepc.utah.edu. We then apply the differential in chronic absenteeism between fully virtual and fully in-person students to account for virtual students reengaging when in-person education is offered. For students who were not attending school at all, we assumed that 50 to 75 percent would not return to learning. This estimation is partly based on The on-track indicator as a predictor of high school graduation from the UChicago Consortium on School Research, which estimates that up to 75 percent of high school students who are “off track”—either failing or behind in credits—do not graduate in five years. For more, see Elaine Allensworth and John Q. Easton, The on-track indicator as a predictor of high school graduation , UChicago Consortium on School Research, 2005, consortium.uchicago.edu.

Even among students who complete high school, many may not fulfill their dreams of going on to postsecondary education. Our survey suggests that 17 percent of high school seniors who had planned to attend postsecondary education abandoned their plans—most often because they had joined or were planning to join the workforce or because the costs of college were too high. The number is much higher among low-income high school seniors, with 26 percent abandoning their plans. Low-income seniors are more likely to state cost as a reason, with high-income seniors more likely to be planning to reapply the following year or enroll in a gap-year program. This is consistent with National Student Clearinghouse reports that show overall college enrollment declines, with low-income, high-poverty, and high-minority high schools disproportionately affected. 19 Todd Sedmak, “Fall 2020 college enrollment update for the high school graduating class of 2020,” National Student Clearinghouse, March 25, 2021, studentclearinghouse.org; Todd Sedmak, “Spring 2021 college enrollment declines 603,000 to 16.9 million students,” National Student Clearinghouse, June 10, 2021, studentclearinghouse.org.

Unfinished learning has long-term consequences

The cumulative effects of the pandemic could have a long-term impact on an entire generation of students. Education achievement and attainment are linked not only to higher earnings but also to better health, reduced incarceration rates, and greater political participation. 20 See, for example, Michael Grossman, “Education and nonmarket outcomes,” in Handbook of the Economics of Education, Volume 1 , ed. Eric Hanushek and Finis Welch (Amsterdam: Elsevier, 2006), 577–633; Lance Lochner and Enrico Moretti, “The effect of education on crime: Evidence from prison inmates, arrests, and self-reports,” American Economic Review , 2004, Volume 94, Number 1, pp. 155–89; Kevin Milligan, Enrico Moretti, and Philip Oreopoulos, “Does education improve citizenship? Evidence from the United States and the United Kingdom,” Journal of Public Economics , August 2004, Volume 88, Number 9–10, pp. 1667–95; and Education transforms lives , UNESCO, 2013, unesdoc.unesco.org. We estimate that, without immediate and sustained interventions, pandemic-related unfinished learning could reduce lifetime earnings for K–12 students by an average of $49,000 to $61,000. These costs are significant, especially for students who have lost more learning. While white students may see lifetime earnings reduced by 1.4 percent, the reduction could be as much as 2.4 percent for Black students and 2.1 percent for Hispanic students. 21 Projected earnings across children’s lifetimes using current annual incomes for those with at least a high school diploma, discounting the earnings by a premium established in Murnane et al., 2000, which tied cognitive skills and future earnings. See Richard J. Murnane et al., “How important are the cognitive skills of teenagers in predicting subsequent earnings?,” Journal of Policy Analysis and Management , September 2000, Volume 19, Number 4, pp. 547–68.

Lower earnings, lower levels of education attainment, less innovation—all of these lead to decreased economic productivity. By 2040 the majority of this cohort of K–12 students will be in the workforce. We anticipate a potential annual GDP loss of $128 billion to $188 billion from pandemic-related unfinished learning. 22 Using Hanushek and Woessmann 2008 methodology to map national per capita growth associated with decrease in academic achievement, then adding additional impact of pandemic dropouts on GDP. For more, see Eric A. Hanushek and Ludger Woessmann, “The role of cognitive skills in economic development,” Journal of Economic Literature , September 2008, Volume 46, Number 3, pp. 607–68.

This increases by about one-third the existing hits to GDP from achievement gaps that predated COVID-19. Our previous research indicated that the pre-COVID-19 racial achievement gap was equivalent to $426 billion to $705 billion in lost economic potential every year (Exhibit 7). 23 This is the increase in GDP that would result if Black and Hispanic students achieved the same levels of academic performance as white students. For more information on historical opportunity and achievement gaps, please see Emma Dorn, Bryan Hancock, Jimmy Sarakatsannis, and Ellen Viruleg, “ COVID-19 and student learning in the United States: The hurt could last a lifetime ,” June 1, 2020.

What is the path forward for our nation’s students?

There is now significant funding in place to address these critical issues. Through the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security Act (CARES Act); the Coronavirus Response and Relief Supplemental Appropriations Act (CRRSAA); and the American Rescue Plan (ARP), the federal government has already committed more than $200 billion to K–12 education over the next three years, 24 The CARES Act provided $13 billion to ESSER and $3 billion to the Governor’s Emergency Education Relief (GEER) Fund; CRRSAA provided $54 billion to ESSER II, $4 billion to Governors (GEER II and EANS); ARP provided $123 billion to ESSER III, $3 billion to Governors (EANS II), and $10 billion to other education programs. For more, see “CCSSO fact sheet: COVID-19 relief funding for K-12 education,” Council of Chief State School Officers, 2021, https://753a0706.flowpaper.com/CCSSOCovidReliefFactSheet/#page=2. a significant increase over the approximately $750 billion spent annually on public schooling. 25 “The condition of education 2021: At a glance,” National Center for Education Statistics, accessed June 30, 2021, nces.ed.gov. The majority of these funds are routed through the Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief Fund (ESSER), of which 90 percent flows to districts and 10 percent to state education agencies. These are vast sums of money, particularly in historical context. As part of the 2009 American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA), the Obama administration committed more than $80 billion toward K–12 schools—at the time the biggest federal infusion of funds to public schools in the nation’s history. 26 “The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009: Saving and Creating Jobs and Reforming Education,” US Department of Education, March 7, 2009, ed.gov. Today’s funding more than doubles that previous record and gives districts much more freedom in how they spend the money. 27 Andrew Ujifusa, “What Obama’s stimulus had for education that the coronavirus package doesn’t,” Education Week , March 31, 2020, www.edweek.org.

However, if this funding can mitigate the impact of unfinished learning, it could prevent much larger losses to the US economy. Given that this generation of students will likely spend 35 to 40 years in the workforce, the cumulative impact of COVID-19 unfinished learning over their lifetimes could far exceed the investments that are being made today.

Furthermore, much of today’s federal infusion will likely be spent not only on supporting students in catching up on the unfinished learning of the pandemic but also on tackling deeper historical opportunity and achievement gaps among students of different races and income levels.

As districts consider competing uses of funding, they are juggling multiple priorities over several time horizons. The ARP funding needs to be obligated by September 2023. This restricts how monies can be spent. Districts are balancing the desire to hire new personnel or start new programs with the risk of having to close programs because of lack of sustained funds in the future. Districts are also facing decisions about whether to run programs at the district level or to give more freedom to principals in allocating funds; about the balance between academics and broader student needs; about the extent to which funds should be targeted to students who have struggled most or spread evenly across all students; and about the balance between rolling out existing evidence-based programs and experimenting with innovative approaches.

It is too early to answer all of these questions decisively. However, as districts consider this complex set of decisions, leading practitioners and thinkers have come together to form the Coalition to Advance Future Student Success—and to outline priorities to ensure the effective and equitable use of federal funds. 28 “Framework: The Coalition to Advance Future Student Success,” Council of Chief State School Officers, accessed June 30, 2021, learning.ccsso.org.

These priorities encompass four potential actions for schools:

• Safely reopen schools for in-person learning.
• Reengage students and reenroll them into effective learning environments.
• Support students in recovering unfinished learning and broader needs.
• Recommit and reimagine our education systems for the long term.

Across all of these actions, it is important for districts to understand the changing needs of parents and students as we emerge from the pandemic, and to engage with them to support students to learn and to thrive. The remainder of this article shares insights from our parent survey of more than 16,000 parents on these changing needs and perspectives, and highlights some early actions by states and districts to adapt to meet them.

1. Safely reopen schools for in-person learning

The majority of school districts across the country are planning to offer traditional five-days-a-week in-person instruction in the fall, employing COVID-19-mitigation strategies such as staff and student vaccination drives, ongoing COVID-19 testing, mask mandates, and infrastructure updates. 29 “Map: Where Were Schools Required to Be Open for the 2020-21 School Year?,” Education Week , updated May 2021, edweek.org. The evidence suggests that schools can reopen buildings safely with the right protocols in place, 30 For a summary of the evidence on safely reopening schools, see John Bailey, Is it safe to reopen schools? , CRPE, March 2021, crpe.org. but health preparedness will likely remain critical as buildings reopen. Indeed, by the end of the school year, a significant subset of parents remain concerned about safety in schools, with nearly a third still very or extremely worried about the threat of COVID-19 to their child’s health. Parents also want districts to continue to invest in safety—39 percent say schools should invest in COVID-19 health and safety measures this fall.

2. Reengage and reenroll students in effective learning environments

Opening buildings safely is hard enough, but encouraging students to show up could be even more challenging. Some students will have dropped out of formal schooling entirely, and those who remain in school may be reluctant to return to physical classrooms. Our survey results suggest that 24 percent of parents are still not convinced they will choose in-person instruction for their children this fall. Within Black communities, that rises to 34 percent. But many of these parents are still open to persuasion. Only 4 percent of parents (and 6 percent of Black parents) say their children will definitely not return to fully in-person learning—which is not very different from the percentage of parents who choose to homeschool or pursue other alternative education options in a typical year. For students who choose to remain virtual, schools should make continual efforts to improve virtual learning models, based on lessons from the past year.

For parents who are still on the fence, school districts can work to understand their needs and provide effective learning options. Safety concerns remain the primary reason that parents remain hesitant about returning to the classroom; however, this is not the only driver. Some parents feel that remote learning has been a better learning environment for their child, while others have seen their child’s social-emotional and mental health improve at home.

Still, while remote learning may have worked well for some students, our data suggest that it failed many. In addition to understanding parent needs, districts should reach out to families and build confidence not just in their schools’ safety precautions but also in their learning environment and broader role in the community. Addressing root causes will likely be more effective than punitive measures, and a broad range of tactics may be needed, from outreach and attendance campaigns to student incentives to providing services families need, such as transportation and childcare. 31 Roshon R. Bradley, “A comprehensive approach to improving student attendance,” St. John Fisher College, August 2015, Education Doctoral, Paper 225, fisherpub.sjfc.edu; a 2011 literature review highlights how incentives can effectively be employed to increase attendance rates. Across all of these, a critical component will likely be identifying students who are at risk and ensuring targeted outreach and interventions. 32 Elaine M. Allensworth and John Q. Easton, “What matters for staying on-track and graduating in Chicago Public Schools: A close look at course grades, failures, and attendance in the freshman year,” Consortium on Chicago School Research at the University of Chicago, July 2007, files.eric.ed.gov.

Chicago Public Schools, in partnership with the University of Chicago, has developed a student prioritization index (SPI) that identifies students at highest risk of unfinished learning and dropping out of school. The index is based on a combination of academic, attendance, socio-emotional, and community vulnerability inputs. The district is reaching out to all students with a back-to-school marketing campaign while targeting more vulnerable students with additional support. Schools are partnering with community-based organizations to carry out home visits, and with parents to staff phone banks. They are offering various paid summer opportunities to reduce the trade-offs students may have to make between summer school and summer jobs, recognizing that many have found paid work during the pandemic. The district will track and monitor the results to learn which tactics work. 33 “Moving Forward Together,” Chicago Public Schools, June 2021, cps.edu.

In Florida’s Miami-Dade schools, each school employee was assigned 30 households to contact personally, starting with a phone call and then showing up for a home visit. Superintendent Alberto Carvalho personally contacted 30 families and persuaded 23 to return to in-person learning. The district is starting the transition to in-person learning by hosting engaging in-person summer learning programs. 34 Hannah Natanson, “Schools use home visits, calls to convince parents to choose in-person classes in fall,” Washington Post , July 7, 2021, washingtonpost.com.

3. Support students in recovering unfinished learning and in broader needs

Even if students reenroll in effective learning environments in the fall, many will be several months behind academically and may struggle to reintegrate into a traditional learning environment. School districts are therefore creating strategies to support students  as they work to make up unfinished learning, and as they work through broader mental health issues and social reintegration. Again, getting parents and students to show up for these programs may be harder than districts expect.

Our research suggests that parents underestimate the unfinished learning caused by the pandemic. In addition, their beliefs about their children’s learning do not reflect racial disparities in unfinished learning. In our survey, 40 percent of parents said their child is on track and 16 percent said their child is progressing faster than in a usual year. Black parents are slightly more likely than white parents to think their child is on track or better, Hispanic parents less so. However, across all races, more than half of parents think their child is doing just fine. Only 14 percent of parents said their child has fallen significantly behind.

Even if programs are offered for free, many parents may not take advantage of them, especially if they are too academically oriented. Only about a quarter of parents said they are very likely to enroll their child in tutoring, after-school, or summer-school programs, for example. Nearly 40 percent said they are very likely to enroll their students in enrichment programs such as art or music. Districts therefore should consider not only offering effective evidence-based programs, such as high-dosage tutoring and vacation academies, but also ensuring that these programs are attractive to students.

In Rhode Island, for example, the state is taking a “Broccoli and Ice Cream” approach to summer school to prepare students for the new school year, combining rigorous reading and math instruction with fun activities provided by community-based partners. Enrichment activities such as sailing, Italian cooking lessons, and Olympic sports are persuading students to participate. 35 From webinar with Angélica Infante-Green, Rhode Island Department of Education, https://www.ewa.org/agenda/ewa-74th-national-seminar-agenda. The state-run summer program is open to students across the state, but the Rhode Island Department of Education has also provided guidance to district-run programs, 36 Learning, Equity & Accelerated Pathways Task Force Report , Rhode Island Department of Education, April 2021, ride.ri.gov. encouraging partnerships with community-based organizations, a dual focus on academics and enrichment, small class sizes, and a strong focus on relationships and social-emotional support.

In Louisiana, the state has provided guidance and support 37 Staffing and scheduling best practices guidance , Louisiana Department of Education, June 3, 2021, louisianabelieves.com. to districts in implementing recovery programs to ensure evidence-based approaches are rolled out state-wide. The guidance includes practical tips on ramping up staffing, and on scheduling high-dosage tutoring and other dedicated acceleration blocks. The state didn’t stop at guidance, but also flooded districts with support and two-way dialogue through webinars, conferences, monthly calls, and regional technical coaching. By scheduling acceleration blocks during the school day, rather than an add-on after school, districts are not dependent on parents signing up for programs.

For students who have experienced trauma, schools will likely need to address the broader fallout from the pandemic. In southwest Virginia, the United Way is partnering with five school systems to establish a trauma-informed schools initiative, providing teachers and staff with training and resources on trauma recovery. 38 Mike Still, “SWVA school districts partner to help students in wake of pandemic,” Kingsport Times News, June 26, 2021, timesnews.net. San Antonio is planning to hire more licensed therapists and social workers to help students and their families, leveraging partnerships with community organizations to place a licensed social worker on every campus. 39 Brooke Crum, “SAISD superintendent: ‘There are no shortcuts’ to tackling COVID-related learning gaps,” San Antonio Report, April 12, 2021, sanantonioreport.org.

4. Recommit and reimagine our education systems for the long term

Opportunity gaps have existed in our school systems for a long time. As schools build back from the pandemic, districts are also recommitting to providing an excellent education to every child. A potential starting point could be redoubling efforts to provide engaging, high-quality grade-level curriculum and instruction delivered by diverse and effective educators in every classroom, supported by effective assessments to inform instruction and support.

Beyond these foundational elements, districts may consider reimagining other aspects of the system. Parents may also be open to nontraditional models. Thirty-three percent of parents said that even when the pandemic is over, the ideal fit for their child would be something other than five days a week in a traditional brick-and-mortar school. Parents are considering hybrid models, remote learning, homeschooling, or learning hubs over the long term. Even if learning resumes mostly in the building, parents are open to the use of new technology to support teaching.

Edgecombe County Public Schools in North Carolina is planning to continue its use of learning hubs this fall to better meet student needs. In the district’s hub-and-spoke model, students will spend half of their time learning core content (the “hub”). For the other half they will engage in enrichment activities aligned to learning standards (the “spokes”). For elementary and middle school students, enrichment activities will involve interest-based projects in science and social studies; for high schoolers, activities could include exploring their passions through targeted English language arts and social studies projects or getting work experience—either paid or volunteer. The district is redeploying staff and leveraging community-based partnerships to enable these smaller-group activities with trusted adults who mirror the demographics of the students. 40 “District- and community-driven learning pods,” Center on Reinventing Public Education, crpe.org.

In Tennessee, the new Advanced Placement (AP) Access for All program will provide students across the state with access to AP courses, virtually. The goal is to eliminate financial barriers and help students take AP courses that aren’t currently offered at their home high school. 41 Amy Cockerham, “TN Department of Education announces ‘AP Access for All program,’” April 28, 2021, WJHL-TV, wjhl.com.

The Dallas Independent School District is rethinking the traditional school year, gathering input from families, teachers, and school staff to ensure that school communities are ready for the plunge. More than 40 schools have opted to add five additional intercession weeks to the year to provide targeted academics and enrichment activities. A smaller group of schools will add 23 days to the school year to increase time for student learning and teacher planning and collaboration. 42 “Time to Learn,” Dallas Independent School District, dallasisd.org.

It is unclear whether all these experiments will succeed, and school districts should monitor them closely to ensure they can scale successful programs and sunset unsuccessful ones. However, we have learned in the pandemic that some of the innovations born of necessity met some families’ needs better. Continued experimentation and fine-tuning could bring the best of traditional and new approaches together.

Thanks to concerted efforts by states and districts, the worst projections for learning outcomes this past year have not materialized for most students. However, students are still far behind where they need to be, especially those from historically marginalized groups. Left unchecked, unfinished learning could have severe consequences for students’ opportunities and prospects. In the long term, it could exact a heavy toll on the economy. It is not too late to mitigate these threats, and funding is now in place. Districts and states now have the opportunity to spend that money effectively to support our nation’s students.

Emma Dorn is a senior expert in McKinsey’s Silicon Valley office; Bryan Hancock and Jimmy Sarakatsannis are partners in the Washington, DC, office; and Ellen Viruleg is a senior adviser based in Providence, Rhode Island.

The authors wish to thank Alice Boucher, Ezra Glenn, Ben Hayes, Cheryl Healey, Chauncey Holder, and Sidney Scott for their contributions to this article.

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The changes we need: Education post COVID-19

1 Melbourne Graduate School of Education, University of Melbourne, Parkville, Australia

2 School of Education, University of Kansas, 419 JRP, Lawrence, KS 66049 USA

Jim Watterston

The COVID-19 pandemic has caused both unprecendented disruptions and massive changes to education. However, as schools return, these changes may disappear. Moreover, not all of the changes are necessarily the changes we want in education. In this paper, we argue that the pandemic has created a unique opportunity for educational changes that have been proposed before COVID-19 but were never fully realized. We identify three big changes that education should make post COVID: curriculum that is developmental, personalized, and evolving; pedagogy that is student-centered, inquiry-based, authentic, and purposeful; and delivery of instruction that capitalizes on the strengths of both synchronous and asynchronous learning.

Introduction

The impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on education is both unprecedented and widespread in education history, impacting nearly every student in the world (UNICEF 2020 ; United Nations 2020 ). The unexpected arrival of the pandemic and subsequent school closures saw massive effort to adapt and innovate by educators and education systems around the world. These changes were made very quickly as the prevailing circumstances demanded. Almost overnight, many schools and education systems began to offer education remotely (Kamanetz 2020 ; Sun et al. 2020 ). Through television and radio, the Internet, or traditional postal offices, schools shifted to teach students in very different ways. Regardless of the outcomes, remote learning became the de facto method of education provision for varying periods. Educators proactively responded and showed great support for the shifts in lesson delivery. Thus, it is clear and generally accepted that “this crisis has stimulated innovation within the education sector” (United Nations 2020 , p. 2).

However, the changes or innovations that occurred in the immediate days and weeks when COVID-19 struck are not necessarily the changes education needs to make in the face of massive societal changes in a post-COVID-19 world. By and large, the changes were more about addressing the immediate and urgent need of continuing schooling, teaching online, and finding creative ways to reach students at home rather than using this opportunity to rethink education. While understandable in the short term, these changes will very likely be considered insubstantial for the long term.

The COVID-19 pandemic has the potential to be a once in a generation opportunity for real change a number of reasons. First, the pandemic was global and affected virtually all schools. As such, it provides the opportunity for educators and children to come together to rethink the education we actually need as opposed to the inflexible and outdated model that we are likely to feverishly cling to. Second, educators across the world demonstrated that they could collectively change en masse. The pandemic forced closure of schools, leaving teachers, children and adults to carry out education in entirely different situations. Governments, education systems, and schools offered remote learning and teaching without much preparation, planning, and in some cases, digital experience (Kamanetz 2020 ; Sun et al. 2020 ). Third, when schools were closed, most of the traditional regulations and exams that govern schools were also lifted or minimally implemented. Traditional accountability examinations and many other high stakes tests were cancelled. Education was given the room to rapidly adapt to the prevailing circumstances.

It is our hope that as we transition out of the COVID-19 pandemic and into an uncertain future that we can truly reimagine education. In light of this rare opportunity, we wish to urge scholars, policy makers, and educators to have the courage to make bold changes beyond simply changing instructional delivery. The changes that we advocate in this paper are not new but they never managed to gain traction in the pre-COVID-19 educational landscape. Our most recent experience, however, has exacerbated the need for us to rethink what is necessary, desirable, and even possible for future generations.

Changes we need

It is incumbant upon all educators to use this crisis-driven opportunity to push for significant shifts in almost every aspect of education: what, how, where, who, and when. In other words, education, from curriculum to pedagogy, from teacher to learner, from learning to assessment, and from location to time, can and should radically transform. We draw on our own research and that of our colleagues to suggest what this transformation could look like.

Curriculum: What to teach

It has been widely acknowledged that to thrive in a future globalized world, traditionally valued skills and knowledge will become less important and a new set of capabilities will become more dominant and essential (Barber et al. 2012 ; Florida 2012 ; Pink 2006 ; Wagner 2008 ; Wagner and Dintersmith 2016 ). While the specifics vary, the general agreement is that repetition, pattern-prediction and recognition, memorization, or any skills connected to collecting, storing, and retrieving information are in decline because of AI and related technologies (Muro et al. 2019 ). On the rise is a set of contemporary skills which includes creativity, curiosity, critical thinking, entrepreneurship, collaboration, communication, growth mindset, global competence, and a host of skills with different names (Duckworth and Yeager, 2015 ; Zhao et al. 2019 ).

For humans to thrive in the age of smart machines, it is essential that they do not compete with machines. Instead, they need to be more human. Being unique and equipped with social-emotional intelligence are distinct human qualities (Zhao 2018b , 2018c ) that machines do not have (yet). In an AI world individual creativity, artistry and humanity will be important commodities that distinguish us from each other.

Moreover, given the rapidity of changes we are already experiencing, it is clear that lifelong careers and traditional employment pathways will not exist in the way that they have for past generations. Jobs and the way we do business will change and the change will be fast. Thus there are almost no knowledge or skills that can be guaranteed to meet the needs of the unknown, uncertain, and constantly changing future. For this reason, schools can no longer preimpose all that is needed for the future before students graduate and enter the world.

While helping students develop basic practical skills is still needed, education should also be about development of humanity in citizens of local, national, and global societies. Education must be seen as a pathway to attaining lifelong learning, satisfaction, happiness, wellbeing, opportunity and contribution to humanity. Schools therefore need to provide comprehensive access and deep exposure to all learning areas across all years in order to enable all students to make informed choices and develop their passions and unique talents.

A new curriculum that responds to these needs must do a number of things. First, it needs to help students develop the new competencies for the new age (Barber et al. 2012 ; Wagner 2008 , 2012 ; Wagner and Dintersmith 2016 ). To help students thrive in the age of smart machines and a globalized world, education must teach students to be creative, entrepreneurial, and globally competent (Zhao 2012a , 2012b ). The curriculum needs to focus more on developing students’ capabilities instead of focusing only on ‘template’ content and knowledge. It needs to be concerned with students’ social and emotional wellbeing as well. Moreover, it needs to make sure that students have an education experience that is globally connected and environmentally connected. As important is the gradual disappearance of school subjects such as history and physics for all students. The content is still important, but it should be incorporated into competency-based curriculum.

Second, the new curriculum should allow personalization by students (Basham et al. 2016 ; Zhao 2012b , 2018c ; Zhao and Tavangar 2016 ). Although personalized learning has been used quite elusively in the literature, the predominant model of personalized learning has been computer-based programs that aim to adapt to students’ needs (Pane et al. 2015 ). This model has shown promising results but true personalization comes from students’ ability to develop their unique learning pathways (Zhao 2018c ; Zhao and Tavangar 2016 ). That is, students can follow their passions and strengths. This not only requires the curriculum to be flexible so that students can choose what they wish to learn, but also requires students to come up with their own learning pathway without being overly constrained by the pre-determined curriculum. Thus national curriculum or curriculum for all students should be a minimal suite of essential knowledge and skills, sufficient for all students to develop the most basic competences and learn the most common norms, expectations, and the societal organizations of a jurisdiction.

Enabling students to co-develop part of the curriculum is not only necessary for them to become unique but also gives them the opportunity to exercise their right to self-determination, which is inalienable to all humans (Wehmeyer and Zhao 2020 ). It provides the opportunities for students to make choices, propose new learning content, and learn about consequences of their actions. Furthermore, it helps students to become owners of their learning and also develop life-long learning habits and skills. It is to help them go meta about their learning—above what they learn and understand why they learn.

Third, it is important to consider the curriculum as evolving. Although system-level curriculum frameworks have to be developed, they must accommodate changes with time and contexts. Any system-level curriculum should enable the capacity for schools to contextualize and make changes to it as deemed necessary. Such changes must be justifiable of course but a system-level curriculum framework should not use national or state level accountability assessments to constrain the changes.

Pedagogy: How to teach

There is increasing call for learners to be more actively engaged in their own learning. The reasons for students to take a more significant role in their own learning are multiple. First, students are diverse and have different levels of abilities and interests that may not align well with the content they are collectively supposed to learn in the classroom. Teachers have been encouraged to pursue classroom differentiation (Tomlinson 2014 ) and students have been encouraged to play a more active role in defining their learning and learning environments in collaboration with teachers (Zhao 2018c ). Second, the recent movement toward personalized learning (Kallick and Zmuda 2017 ; Kallio and Halverson 2020 ) needs students to become more active in understanding and charting their learning pathways.

To promote student self-determination as both a self-evident, naturally born right and an effective strategy for enhanced learning (Wehmeyer and Zhao 2020 ), we need to consider enabling students to make informed decisions regarding their own learning pathway. This generation of learners are much more active and tech-savvy. They access information instantly and have been doing so throughout their daily life. They have different strengths and weaknesses. They also have different passions. Thus, schools should use discretion to start relaxing the intense requirements of curriculum. Schools could start by allowing students to negotiate part of their curriculum instead of requiring all students learn the same content, as discussed earlier. Students should be enabled to have certain levels of autonomy over what they want to learn, how they learn, where they learn and how they want to be assessed (Zhao 2018c ). When students have such autonomy, they are more likely to be less constrained by the local contexts they are born into. The impact of their home background and local schools may be less powerful.

Students should exercise self-determination as members of the school community (Zhao 2018c ). The entire school is composed of adults and students, but students are the reason of existence for schools. Thus, schools and everything in the school environment should incorporate and serve the students, yet most schools do not have policies and processes that enable students to participate in making decisions about the school—the environment, the rules and regulations, the curriculum, the assessment, and the adults in the school. Schools need to create these conditions through empowering students to have a genuine voice in part of how they operate, if not in its entirety. Students’ right to self-determination implies that they have the right to determine under what conditions they wish to learn. Thus, it is not unreasonable for schools to treat students as partners of learning and of change (Zhao 2011 , 2018c ).

It should not be unique to see school practices co-developed with students (Zhao 2018c ). Students not only will be co-owners (with parents and teachers) of their own learning enterprise, but also co-owners of the school community. It is likely to see students having their own personal learning programs and also acting as fully functioning members of the entire school community, contributing to fundamental decisions regarding the curriculum for all, the staff, the students, and the entire environment.

Moreover, with ubiquitous access to online resources and experts, students do not necessarily need teachers to continually and directly teach them. When students are enabled to own their learning and have access to resources and experts, the role of the teacher changes (Zhao 2018a ). Teachers no longer need to serve as the instructor, the sole commander of information to teach the students content and skills. Instead, the teacher serves other more important roles such as organizer of learning, curator of learning resources, counselor to students, community organizer, motivator and project managers of students’ learning. The teacher’s primary responsibility is no longer simply just instruction, which requires teacher education to change as well. Teacher education needs to focus more on preparing teachers to be human educators who care more about the individual students and serve as consultants and resource curators instead of teaching machines (Zhao 2018a ).

Pedagogy should change as well. Direct instruction should be cast away for its “unproductive successes” or short-term successes but long term damages (Bonawitza et al. 2011 ; Buchsbauma et al. 2011 ; Kapur 2014 , 2016 ; Zhao 2018d ). In its place should be new models of teaching and learning. The new models can have different formats and names but they should be student-centered, inquiry-based, authentic, and purposeful. New forms of pedagogy should focus on student-initiated explorations of solutions to authentic and significant problems. They should help students develop abilities to handle the unknown and uncertain instead of requiring memorization of known solutions to known problems.

Organization: Where and when to teach

Technology has made it possible for schools to offer online education for quite some time and the number of students taking online courses has been on the rise, but not until the arrival of COVID-19 has the majority of education been offered through this mode. While there are many good reasons for schools to return to what was refrred to as “normal,” the normalcy may not be easily achieved because of the uncertainty of the virus, and as discussed above, may not even be desirable.

Moving teaching online is significant. It ultimately changed one of the most important unwritten school rules: all students must be in one location for education to take place. The typical place of learning has been the classroom in a school and the learning time has been typically confined to classes. This massive online movement changed the typical. It has forced teachers to experience remote teaching without proximity to the students. It has also given many teachers the opportunity to rethink the purpose of teaching and connecting with students.

When students are not learning in classes inside a school, they are distributed in the community. They can interact with others through technologies. This can have significant impact on learning activities. If allowed or enabled by a teacher, students could be learning from online resources and experts anywhere in the world. Thus, the where of learning changes from the classroom to the world.

Furthermore, the time of learning also changes. When learning goes online and students are not or do not need to be in schools, their learning time vastly expands beyond the traditional school time. They can learn asynchronously at anytime. Equally important is that their learning time does not need to be synchronous with each other or with that of the teacher.

There are many possible ways for schools to deliver remote learning (Zhao 2020 ). The simplest is to simulate that schools are open with traditional timetables with the default model being that all students attend lessons on screen at the same time as they do in schools. In this case, nothing changes except for the fact that students are not in the same location as their classmates and the teacher. While it has been perhaps the most common approach that has been taken by many schools, this approach has not been very effective and successful, resulting in distress, disengagement, and much less personal interaction and learning than traditional face-to-face situations (Darby 2020 ; Dorn et al. 2020 ).

As schools continue to explore online learning, new and more effective models are being explored, innovatively developed, and practiced. The more effective models of online learning have a well-balanced combination of both synchronous and asynchronous sessions that enable more desirable ways of learning. Instead of teaching online all the time, it is possible, for example, to conduct inquiry-based learning. Students receive instructions from online resources or synchronous meetings, conduct inquiry, create products individually or within small groups, and make presentations in large class synchronous meetings. Instead of lecturing to all students, teachers could create videos of lectures or find videos made by others and share them with students. They would also be meeting with small groups of individuals for specific advice and support. The fundamental pursuit is that there is minimal benefit or student engagement for teachers to lecture all the time when more interesting and challenging instructional models can be developed.

Today, being disconnected physically can result in being more broadly connected virtually. Students have been traditionally associated with their schools and schools have typically served local communities. Thus, students typically are connected and socialize with their peers from restricted catchment areas. Despite the possibility to connect globally with people from other lands, most schools’ activities are local. Today, when local connections become less reliable and students are encouraged to have social distancing, it is possible to encourage more global connections virtually. Students could join different learning communities that involve members from different locations, not necessarily from their own schools. Students could also participate in learning opportunities provided by other providers in remote locations. Furthermore, students could create their own learning opportunities by inviting peers and teachers from other locations.

The ideal model of organizing students, based on the COVID-19 experiences, is perhaps a combination of both online and face-to-face learning opportunities. Many schools have already reopened, but when schools reopen it is unnecessary to undo the online aspect of learning developed during COVID-19. Online learning can be effective (Means et al. 2013 ; Rudestam and Schoenholtz-Read 2010 ; Zhao et al. 2005 ), but a well-designed mixed mode delivery of online and face-to-face education should be more effective for learning in general but especially so should there be future instances of virtual learning (Tucker 2020 ). The idea of blended learning or flipped classrooms (Bishop and Verleger 2013 ) has been promoted and researched in recent years as very effective models of teaching. COVID-19 should have made the convincing much easier since many teachers have been forced to move online.

When learning is both online and face-to-face, students are liberated from having to attend classes at specific times. They are also no longer required to be in the same place to receive instruction from teachers. They could work on their own projects and reach out to their teachers or peers when necessary. When students are no longer required to attend class at the same time in the same place, they can have much more autonomy over their own learning. Their learning time expands beyond school time and their learning places can be global.

Education will undoubtedly go through major changes in the next decade as the combined result of multiple major forces. These changes include curricular changes that determine what is to be learned by learners. It is likely that more students will be moving toward competency-based learning that has an emphasis on developing unique skills and abilities. Learning has to become more based on strengths and passions and become personalized. In response, education providers will need to make student autonomy and student agency key to transforming pedagogy and school organizations. Students will prosper by having more say in their own learning and their learning communities. Moreover, schools will have a unique opportunity to positively and proactively change as a result of COVID-19 and the need for global connections. It is possible to see schools rearrange their schedules and places of teaching so that students can at the same time take part in different and more challenging learning opportunities regardless of their physical locations. Relevant online learning will be on the rise and perhaps becomes a regular part of the daily routine for many students.

Of course, we cannot forget that not all students have equal access to technology, both in terms of hardware and digital competency. The issue of digital divide remains a significant issue around the globe. It is important for us to reimagine a better education with technology and find creative ways to make education more equitable, including wiping out the digital divide.

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Contributor Information

Yong Zhao, Email: ude.uk@oahzgnoy .

Jim Watterston, Email: [email protected] .

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COVID-19 has fuelled a global ‘learning poverty’ crisis

The pandemic saw empty classrooms all across the world. Image:  REUTERS/Marzio Toniolo

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Stay up to date:, education, gender and work.

• Before the pandemic, the world was already facing an education crisis.
• Last year, 53% of 10-year-old children in low- and middle-income countries either had failed to learn to read with comprehension or were out of school.
• COVID-19 has exacerbated learning gaps further, taking 1.6 billion students out of school at its peak.
• To mitigate the situation, parents, teachers, students, governments, and development partners must work together to remedy the crisis.

Even before COVID-19 forced a massive closure of schools around the globe, the world was in the middle of a learning crisis that threatened efforts to build human capital—the skills and know-how needed for the jobs of the future. More than half (53 percent) of 10-year-old children in low- and middle-income countries either had failed to learn to read with comprehension or were out of school entirely. This is what we at the World Bank call learning poverty . Recent improvements in Learning Poverty have been extremely slow. If trends of the last 15 years were to be extrapolated, it will take 50 years to halve learning poverty. Last year we proposed a target to cut Learning Poverty by at least half by 2030. This would require doubling or trebling the recent rate of improvement in learning, something difficult but achievable. But now COVID-19 is likely to deepen learning gaps and make this dramatically more difficult.

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3 things we can do reverse the ‘covid slide’ in education, this indian state is a model of how to manage education during a pandemic, covid-19 is an opportunity to reset education. here are 4 ways how.

Temporary school closures in more than 180 countries have, at the peak of the pandemic, kept nearly 1.6 billion students out of school ; for about half of those students, school closures are exceeding 7 months. Although most countries have made heroic efforts to put remote and remedial learning strategies in place, learning losses are likely to happen. A recent survey of education officials on government responses to COVID-19 by UNICEF, UNESCO, and the World Bank shows that while countries and regions have responded in various ways, only half of the initiatives are monitoring usage of remote learning (Figure 1, top panel). Moreover, where usage is being monitored, the remote learning is being used by less than half of the student population (Figure 1, bottom panel), and most of those cases are online platforms in high- and middle-income countries.

COVID-19-related school closures are forcing countries even further off track from achieving their learning goals. Students currently in school stand to lose $10 trillion in labor earnings over their working lives. That is almost one-tenth of current global GDP, or half the United States’ annual economic output, or twice the global annual public expenditure on primary and secondary education.

In a recent brief I summarize the findings of three simulation scenarios to gauge potential impacts of the crisis on learning poverty. In the most pessimistic scenario, COVID-related school closures could increase the learning poverty rate in the low- and middle-income countries by 10 percentage points, from 53% to 63%. This 10-percentage-point increase in learning poverty implies that an additional 72 million primary-school-age children could fall into learning poverty , out of a population of 720 million children of primary-school age.

This result is driven by three main channels: school closures, effectiveness of mitigation and remediation, and the economic impact. School closures, and the effectiveness of mitigation and remediation, will affect the magnitude of the learning loss, while the economic impact will affect dropout rates. In these simulations, school closures are assumed to last for 70% of the school year, there will be no remediation, mitigation effectiveness will vary from 5%, 7% and 15% for low-, middle- or high-income countries, respectively. The economic channel builds on macro-economic growth projections , and estimates the possible impacts of economic contractions on household income, and the likelihood that these will affect primary school age-school-enrollment.

Most of the potential increase in learning poverty would take place in regions with a high but still average level of learning poverty in the global context pre-COVID, such as South Asia (which had a 63% pre-pandemic rate of learning poverty), Latin America (48%) , and East Asia and the Pacific (21%). In Sub-Saharan Africa and Low-income countries, where learning poverty was already at 87% and 90% before COVID, increases would be relatively small, at 4 percentage points and 2 percentage points, respectively. This reflects that most of the learning losses in those regions would impact students who were already failing to achieve the minimum reading proficiency level by the end of primary—that is, those who were already learning-poor.

To gauge at the impacts of the current crisis in Sub-Saharan Africa and the Middle East and Northern Africa we need to examine other indicators of learning deprivation. In these two regions children are on average the furthest below the minimum proficiency level, with a Learning Deprivation Gap (the average distance of a learning deprived child to the minimum reading proficiency level) of approximately 20%. This rate is double the global average (10.5%), four times larger than the East Asia and Pacific Gap (5%), and more than tenfold larger the Europe and Central Asia average gap (1.3%). The magnitude of learning deprivation gap suggests that on average, students on those regions are one full academic year behind in terms of learning, or two times behind the global average.

In the most pessimistic scenario, COVID-19 school closures might increase the learning deprivation gap by approximately 2.5 percentage points in Sub-Saharan Africa, Middle East and North Africa, and Latin America. However, the same increase in the learning deprivation gap does not imply the same impact in qualitative terms. An indicator of the severity of learning deprivation, which captures the inequality among the learning deprived children, reveals that the severity of learning deprivation in the Middle East and Sub-Saharan Africa could increase by approximately 1.5 percentage points, versus an increase of 0.5 percentage points in Latin America. This suggests that the new learning-deprived in Latin America would remain closer to the minimum proficiency level than children in Middle East and Sub-Saharan Africa. As a consequence, the range of options required to identify students’ needs and provide learning opportunities, will be qualitatively different in these two groups of countries— more intense in Sub-Saharan Africa and the Middle East than in Latin America.

In absolute terms, Sub-Sharan Africa and the Middle East and Northern Africa would remain the two regions with the largest number of learning-deprived children. The depth of learning deprivation in Sub-Saharan Africa will increase by three times more than the number of children who are learning-deprived. This is almost three times the global average, and four times more than in Europe and Central Asia. This suggests an increase in the complexity and the cost of tackling the learning crisis in the continent.

Going forward, as schools reopen , educational systems will need to be more flexible and adapt to the student’s needs. Countries will need to reimagine their educational systems and to use the opportunity presented by the pandemic and its triple shock—to health, the economy, and the educational system—to build back better . Several policy options deployed during the crisis, such as remote learning solutions, structured lesson plans, curriculum prioritization, and accelerated teaching programs (to name a few), can contribute to building an educational system that is more resilient to crisis, flexible in meeting student needs, and equitable in protecting the most vulnerable.

The results from these simulations are not destiny. Parents, teachers, students, governments, and development partners can work together to deploy effective mitigation and remediation strategies to protect the COVID-19 generation’s future. School reopening, when safe, is critical, but it is not enough. The simulation results show major differences in the potential impacts of the crisis on the learning poor across regions . The big challenge will be to rapidly identify and respond to each individual student’s learning needs flexibly and to build back educational systems more resilient to shocks, using technology effectively to enable learning both at school and at home.

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12 COVID-19’s Effect on Higher Education and What is Being Done

Jack Klinge

Introduction

Since the beginning of the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic, the global population has been going through a whirlpool of side effects. This chapter will discuss major challenges facing the college education system of the United States and the start of global school closures. COVID-19 has greatly impacted the industry of college education. More specifically, engagement, interaction, and communication between college students and their peers have been changed, improved, and altered in response to the pandemic. It’s pertinent throughout this discussion to include not only the impacts of COVID-19 on the college education system, but also to mention many of the adaptations and solutions that are being provided in response to the abnormal hindrances to education during the pandemic. How these alterations relate to the studies of science, technology, and society (STS), how they create major differentiations in the outcomes of college students’ futures and the connection between these alterations to the STS paradigm of path dependency will also be discussed. The importance of this topic has led to reform and deeper consideration of the system of higher education. The topic has also been the main focus of hea dlines around the world because education is the foundation for many countries, governments, and economies.

COVID-19’s Impacts on Education

To begin, the impacts of COVID-19 on higher education are many, but the most important ones fall between two categories: physical (or structural) and psychological (people). These two categories are relevant because higher education can be described in two separate entities. The physical or structural is the location that teaching takes place and how teaching is organized and provided. The psychological or people are the individual who are involved in running that system and learning from it (ie. teachers and students). Now that some background information has been laid out, the impacts of the pandemic on the structure of higher education and the psychological impacts that COVID-19 is having on people involved in it are more organized and understandable.

– Physical Impacts  –

First to be discussed are the physical impacts and how they have affected the structure of learning within the education system. To say that the pandemic has disrupted this structure of learning is an understatement. As of mid-April, according to UNESCO, 1.5 billion students and youth (roughly 87% of the world’s student population) were affected by school closures in 195 countries, from pre-primary to higher education ( Wolkoff ). The previously mentioned information is horrifying considering that almost 90% of students were affected by school closure.

On top of schools closing a cause and effect paradigm is also impacting higher education. The pandemic has caused schools to physically close. Those school closures, in turn, are causing the structure of teaching, which have been centered around the physical location of college campuses to collapse. When schools are physically closed the accessibility and reliability of their learning structure is reduced. A crumbling learning structure also affects students and teachers, the people entity of the college education system. Members of this system can’t attend school, give or receive lessons in their academic areas. This physical absence of a learning structure and a formal school setting is a perfect segway into the psychological impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic on students and teachers.

– Psychological –

Everyone who has either heard of, attended, or sent their children off to be educated at college knows about the stress, anxiety, and responsibility that students at higher educational institutions have to deal with and learn to cope in order to excel in their learning. However, there is a limit to the amount of these three variables that an average student can handle. Once those levels are higher than they are supposed to be, they can cause students to do poorly in their school work, not get enough sleep, not eat, have a bad attitude, and not being the best person they can be, etc. A study by doctors and scientists from the Houston Methodist Hospital and the Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering at Texas A&M University discovered that of the 195 students they tested,

“138 (71%) indicated increased stress and anxiety due to the COVID-19 outbreak. Multiple stressors were identified that contributed to the increased levels of stress, anxiety, and depressive thoughts among students. These included fear and worry about their own health and of their loved ones (177/195, 91% reported negative impacts of the pandemic), difficulty in concentrating (173/195, 89%), disruptions to sleeping patterns (168/195, 86%), decreased social interactions due to physical distancing (167/195, 86%), and increased concerns on academic performance (159/195, 82%). To cope with stress and anxiety, participants have sought support from others and helped themselves by adopting either negative or positive coping mechanisms” ( Son 21279).

From this study COVID-19 is having a massive psychological impact on students, the people entity of the college education system.  Another study on the psychological effects that Coronavirus is having on student also noted, “Due to the long-lasting pandemic situation and onerous measures such as lockdown and stay-at-home orders, the COVID-19 pandemic brings negative impacts on higher education. The findings of our study highlight the urgent need to develop interventions and preventive strategies to address the mental health of college students” ( Bilecen ).

Adaptive Solutions (Short-Term & Long-Term)

What is being altered, changed, and inn ovated to combat the negative impacts that the pandemic is having on higher education must also be discussed. It is important to understand that the world, let alone the United States, has never experienced a natural crisis on such a  widespread scale. This is mentioned throughout an interview conducted by the Harvard gazette on the former secretary of education for Massachusetts, Paul Reville. Reville, in response to a question about the similarities between today’s pandemic and other historical events, told the journalists, “There were substantial closings in many places during the 1918 Spanish Flu, some as long as four months, but not as widespread as those we’re seeing today. We’re in uncharted territory” ( Mineo ). However, Reville notes that there are solutions to the problems caused by COVID-19. When asked what can be learned and enacted in response to the pandemic crisis, Reveille points out that he had recently been talking to people in New Hampshire discovered that “because of all the snow days they have in the wintertime, they had already developed a backup online learning system. That made the transition, in this period of school closure, a relatively easy one for them to undertake. They moved seamlessly to online instruction” ( Mineo ).

New Hampshire’s example is something that the entire world, not just the U.S is trying to implement and take advantage of. This explains the massive amounts of video chat software (Zoom, Google hangouts, Microsoft meetings) that everybody is always hearing about in the news. Many schools have transferred to an online system of learning through these outlets to continue to educate students, offering them the ability to still go to class and learn while staying safe. One personal experience I have is the way Clemson has integrated online instruction into its learning structure. Clemson students can watch and listen to their professors’ lectures for each class through Zoom and other software and continue taking notes and asking questions like they did in their pre-pandemic college academics. Canvas, Clemson’s class work interface has also been a massive help during times where in-person questions and handouts cannot be applied. All the work for each of my classes appears in organized online spaces, where I can find recordings of teachers’ lectures, their lecture notes, and practice problems.

Other types of solutions to the impacts of the pandemic on the education system include correspondence schools, where the vast majority of interaction happening by email. Another solution is directing students to online tutoring and practice programs, and posting videos for them ( Harris ). The way that Clemson has responded to the pandemic, in my opinion, is superior to the other solutions mentioned. How higher education can better prepare for pandemics is a topic that is now widely being discussed.  One example of this discussion is a realization that higher education institutions need to invest in high-quality educator preparation, with the inclusion of  teacher and leader residencies in high-need communities. A research article by Darling-Hammond presents major suggestions on how contemporary pandemic societies can build stronger higher education. It notes that:

“High-quality programs begin with strong, research-aligned standards for teaching and school leadership, long-recognized as a foundation of high-achieving education systems and as a key feature for influencing preparation programs quality and supporting student learning. Policymakers can update and strengthen these standards to reflect the needs of today’s students – including new knowledge about social, emotional, and cognitive development; culturally responsive pedagogies; and trauma-informed practices and then ensure that these standards are reflected in licensure requirements, performance assessments for teacher and administrator candidates, and performance-based accreditation for programs ( Darling-Hammond & Hyler ).”

Relevance to STS Theory

Existing solutions are not perfect. A representative from the Brown Center on Education Policy explains that,

“Families will get more accustomed to online learning. However, this approach has the significant disadvantage that families have to play the role of hall monitor and teacher. Few families want or can afford that, given their work schedules and other responsibilities. Moreover, research consistently suggests that students learn less in fully virtual environments ( Harris ).

This is where STS, particularly its emphasis on understanding how new technology affects society comes into play. This emphasis can help create guidelines on which approach we should take to deal with the COVID-19 crisis. STS calls for us to question many of the innovations and solutions being provided during this troubling time, especially in education. This perspective is important in fixing the education system during the pandemic because the only way to escape the problems COVID-19 has caused is through technological and scientific learning. Integrating perspectives from STS with the development new technologies and strategies for dealing with the COVID-19 pandemic is important and helps us to come up with efficient, productive, and accessible solutions for the problems of today.

In terms of theory, changes to the physical education system brought about by COVID-19 and the psychological impact that it has had on those involved in the system reflect the STS paradigm of Path-Dependency. Put simply, Path-Dependency argues that future outcomes will shaped by what has happened in the past. For higher education the effects of the past are the psychological and physical changes it has experienced. By disrupting the higher education system that existed prior it, the pandemic will change our society in the future in unpredictable ways, possibly having economic or political impacts.

The structure of higher education between schools is different, and the psychological impact that COVID-19 is having may vary from one student to the next. However, it’s important to note that a majority of students and educational systems will experience a variety of everlasting effects that are similar, even if the impact of these effects might vary between schools. The COVID-19 pandemic and the public response to it will go down in history as a unique event because nothing like it has happened on such a global scale in the past. Neither has any previous event had such as an impact on higher education, if not all education as the Coronavirus. The pandemic in the short term has created chaos among many educational institutions. While solutions and patchwork fixes have been created to slow the massive implications caused by the pandemic, the permanent physical and psychological effects of COVID-19 on the educational systems is still unknown. Only with the passage of time will society fully understand the total disarray that the pandemic has left on education.

Bilecen, Basak. “Commentary: COVID‐19 Pandemic and Higher Education: International Mobility and Students’ Social Protection.” International Migration , vol. 58, no. 4, 2020, pp. 263–66, https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/imig.12749 .

Darling-Hammond, Linda, and Maria E. Hyler. “Preparing Educators for the Time of COVID . and Beyond.”  European Journal of Teacher Education , vol. 43, no. 4, 2020, pp. 457-465, https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/02619768.2020.1816961

Harris, D. N. “How will COVID-19 change our schools in the long run?” Brookings , 24 Apr. 2020, https://www.brookings.edu/brown-center-chalkboard/2020/04/24/how-will-covid-19-change-our-schools-in-the-long-run/ .

Mineo, Liz. “Time to fix American education with race-for-space resolve.” The Harvard Gazette , 10 Apr. 2020, https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2020/04/the-pandemics-impact-on-education/ .

Wolkoff, Melanie. “Education reinvented: How COVID-19 has changed how students learn.” ZDNet , 24 Jul. 2020, https://www.zdnet.com/article/education-reinvented-how-covid-19-has-changed-how-students-learn/ .

Son, Changwon et al. “Effects of COVID-19 on College Students’ Mental Health in the United States: Interview Survey Study.”  Journal of Medical Internet Research, vol. 22, no. 9, 2020, pp. 21279, https://www.jmir.org/2020/9/e21279/ .

“ COVID-19 school closures ” by betseg is in the Public Domain

“School Closures – Covid” by Wikimedia Commons is licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0

“COVID Domino Effect” by Santima.Studio is in the Public Domain

“ Online, Education, E-learning ” by Needpix is in the Public Domain

COVID-19: Success Within Devastation Copyright © 2020 by Jack Klinge is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License , except where otherwise noted.

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Mission: Recovering Education in 2021

THE CONTEXT

The COVID-19 pandemic has caused abrupt and profound changes around the world.  This is the worst shock to education systems in decades, with the longest school closures combined with looming recession.  It will set back progress made on global development goals, particularly those focused on education. The economic crises within countries and globally will likely lead to fiscal austerity, increases in poverty, and fewer resources available for investments in public services from both domestic expenditure and development aid. All of this will lead to a crisis in human development that continues long after disease transmission has ended.

Disruptions to education systems over the past year have already driven substantial losses and inequalities in learning. All the efforts to provide remote instruction are laudable, but this has been a very poor substitute for in-person learning.  Even more concerning, many children, particularly girls, may not return to school even when schools reopen. School closures and the resulting disruptions to school participation and learning are projected to amount to losses valued at $10 trillion in terms of affected children’s future earnings.  Schools also play a critical role around the world in ensuring the delivery of essential health services and nutritious meals, protection, and psycho-social support. Thus, school closures have also imperilled children’s overall wellbeing and development, not just their learning.   

It’s not enough for schools to simply reopen their doors after COVID-19. Students will need tailored and sustained support to help them readjust and catch-up after the pandemic. We must help schools prepare to provide that support and meet the enormous challenges of the months ahead. The time to act is now; the future of an entire generation is at stake.

THE MISSION

Mission objective:  To enable all children to return to school and to a supportive learning environment, which also addresses their health and psychosocial well-being and other needs.

Timeframe : By end 2021.

Scope : All countries should reopen schools for complete or partial in-person instruction and keep them open. The Partners - UNESCO , UNICEF , and the World Bank - will join forces to support countries to take all actions possible to plan, prioritize, and ensure that all learners are back in school; that schools take all measures to reopen safely; that students receive effective remedial learning and comprehensive services to help recover learning losses and improve overall welfare; and their teachers are prepared and supported to meet their learning needs. 

Three priorities:

1.    All children and youth are back in school and receive the tailored services needed to meet their learning, health, psychosocial wellbeing, and other needs. 

Challenges : School closures have put children’s learning, nutrition, mental health, and overall development at risk. Closed schools also make screening and delivery for child protection services more difficult. Some students, particularly girls, are at risk of never returning to school. 

Areas of action : The Partners will support the design and implementation of school reopening strategies that include comprehensive services to support children’s education, health, psycho-social wellbeing, and other needs. 

Targets and indicators

2.    All children receive support to catch up on lost learning.

Challenges : Most children have lost substantial instructional time and may not be ready for curricula that were age- and grade- appropriate prior to the pandemic. They will require remedial instruction to get back on track. The pandemic also revealed a stark digital divide that schools can play a role in addressing by ensuring children have digital skills and access.

Areas of action : The Partners will (i) support the design and implementation of large-scale remedial learning at different levels of education, (ii) launch an open-access, adaptable learning assessment tool that measures learning losses and identifies learners’ needs, and (iii) support the design and implementation of digital transformation plans that include components on both infrastructure and ways to use digital technology to accelerate the development of foundational literacy and numeracy skills. Incorporating digital technologies to teach foundational skills could complement teachers’ efforts in the classroom and better prepare children for future digital instruction.   

While incorporating remedial education, social-emotional learning, and digital technology into curricula by the end of 2021 will be a challenge for most countries, the Partners agree that these are aspirational targets that they should be supporting countries to achieve this year and beyond as education systems start to recover from the current crisis.

3.   All teachers are prepared and supported to address learning losses among their students and to incorporate  digital technology into their teaching.

Challenges : Teachers are in an unprecedented situation in which they must make up for substantial loss of instructional time from the previous school year and teach the current year’s curriculum. They must also protect their own health in school. Teachers will need training, coaching, and other means of support to get this done. They will also need to be prioritized for the COVID-19 vaccination, after frontline personnel and high-risk populations.  School closures also demonstrated that in addition to digital skills, teachers may also need support to adapt their pedagogy to deliver instruction remotely. 

Areas of action : The Partners will advocate for teachers to be prioritized in COVID-19 vaccination campaigns, after frontline personnel and high-risk populations, and provide capacity-development on pedagogies for remedial learning and digital and blended teaching approaches. 

Country level actions and global support

UNESCO, UNICEF, and World Bank are joining forces to support countries to achieve the Mission, leveraging their expertise and actions on the ground to support national efforts and domestic funding.

Country Level Action

1.  Mobilize team to support countries in achieving the three priorities

The Partners will collaborate and act at the country level to support governments in accelerating actions to advance the three priorities.

2.  Advocacy to mobilize domestic resources for the three priorities

The Partners will engage with governments and decision-makers to prioritize education financing and mobilize additional domestic resources.

Global level action

1.  Leverage data to inform decision-making

The Partners will join forces to   conduct surveys; collect data; and set-up a global, regional, and national real-time data-warehouse.  The Partners will collect timely data and analytics that provide access to information on school re-openings, learning losses, drop-outs, and transition from school to work, and will make data available to support decision-making and peer-learning.

2.  Promote knowledge sharing and peer-learning in strengthening education recovery

The Partners will join forces in sharing the breadth of international experience and scaling innovations through structured policy dialogue, knowledge sharing, and peer learning actions.

The time to act on these priorities is now. UNESCO, UNICEF, and the World Bank are partnering to help drive that action.

Last Updated: Mar 30, 2021

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Writing about COVID-19 in a college admission essay

by: Venkates Swaminathan | Updated: September 14, 2020

Print article

For students applying to college using the CommonApp, there are several different places where students and counselors can address the pandemic’s impact. The different sections have differing goals. You must understand how to use each section for its appropriate use.

The CommonApp COVID-19 question

First, the CommonApp this year has an additional question specifically about COVID-19 :

Community disruptions such as COVID-19 and natural disasters can have deep and long-lasting impacts. If you need it, this space is yours to describe those impacts. Colleges care about the effects on your health and well-being, safety, family circumstances, future plans, and education, including access to reliable technology and quiet study spaces. Please use this space to describe how these events have impacted you.

This question seeks to understand the adversity that students may have had to face due to the pandemic, the move to online education, or the shelter-in-place rules. You don’t have to answer this question if the impact on you wasn’t particularly severe. Some examples of things students should discuss include:

• The student or a family member had COVID-19 or suffered other illnesses due to confinement during the pandemic.
• The candidate had to deal with personal or family issues, such as abusive living situations or other safety concerns
• The student suffered from a lack of internet access and other online learning challenges.
• Students who dealt with problems registering for or taking standardized tests and AP exams.

Jeff Schiffman of the Tulane University admissions office has a blog about this section. He recommends students ask themselves several questions as they go about answering this section:

• Are my experiences different from others’?
• Are there noticeable changes on my transcript?
• Am I aware of my privilege?
• Am I specific? Am I explaining rather than complaining?
• Is this information being included elsewhere on my application?

If you do answer this section, be brief and to-the-point.

Counselor recommendations and school profiles

Second, counselors will, in their counselor forms and school profiles on the CommonApp, address how the school handled the pandemic and how it might have affected students, specifically as it relates to:

• Grading scales and policies
• Graduation requirements
• Instructional methods
• Schedules and course offerings
• Testing requirements
• Your academic calendar
• Other extenuating circumstances

Students don’t have to mention these matters in their application unless something unusual happened.

Writing about COVID-19 in your main essay

Write about your experiences during the pandemic in your main college essay if your experience is personal, relevant, and the most important thing to discuss in your college admission essay. That you had to stay home and study online isn’t sufficient, as millions of other students faced the same situation. But sometimes, it can be appropriate and helpful to write about something related to the pandemic in your essay. For example:

• One student developed a website for a local comic book store. The store might not have survived without the ability for people to order comic books online. The student had a long-standing relationship with the store, and it was an institution that created a community for students who otherwise felt left out.
• One student started a YouTube channel to help other students with academic subjects he was very familiar with and began tutoring others.
• Some students used their extra time that was the result of the stay-at-home orders to take online courses pursuing topics they are genuinely interested in or developing new interests, like a foreign language or music.

Experiences like this can be good topics for the CommonApp essay as long as they reflect something genuinely important about the student. For many students whose lives have been shaped by this pandemic, it can be a critical part of their college application.

Want more? Read 6 ways to improve a college essay , What the &%$! should I write about in my college essay , and Just how important is a college admissions essay? .

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A year later: Reflections on learning, adapting, and scaling education interventions during COVID-19

Subscribe to the center for universal education bulletin, tendekai mukoyi , tendekai mukoyi education program coordinator - youth impact molly curtiss wyss , and molly curtiss wyss senior project manager and senior research analyst - global economy and development , center for universal education jenny perlman robinson jenny perlman robinson nonresident senior fellow - global economy and development , center for universal education @jennyperlman.

April 2, 2021

Already more than a full year into the COVID-19 pandemic, it is sobering to reflect on the ongoing responses to the global pandemic, as well as future disruptions to children’s learning. The past year has really put to the test scaling principles and elucidated important lessons about catalyzing and sustaining transformative change in rapidly evolving contexts. Many of these principles—such as adaptive learning and systems thinking—are being unpacked and explored in Real-time Scaling Labs (RTSL), a collaboration with the Center for Universal Education at Brookings and local institutions and governments around the world to learn from, document, and support education initiatives in the process of scaling.

In Botswana, Young 1ove and CUE have been partnering on an RTSL convened by the Ministry of Basic Education (MoBE) focused on scaling Teaching at the Right Level (TaRL). The experience of the Botswana scaling lab over the past year offers several important insights and reflections that may be useful more broadly for those working to affect large-scale improvements in children’s learning, particularly in low-resource environments.

Insight 1 : National scale can be pursued from the top down and bottom up

Expanding and deepening the impact of an education intervention requires nurturing partnerships from grassroots to national levels, with the understanding that buy-in and ownership for scale needs to involve players at all levels. Young 1ove has been collaborating closely with the MoBE at the central offices to support progress toward the ultimate goal of infusing TaRL into daily teaching practices in all primary school classrooms in Botswana. However, the past year has revealed significant potential for scaling via regional pathways, as many stakeholders at the highest levels of government have been consumed by national responses to COVID-19-related school closures and health crises.

For example, MoBE partners in the North East region took the lead in reinstating TaRL as schools reopened by mobilizing teachers and school-based youth volunteers to restart the program even amid shorter shift-system school days (where students attend classes in shift for half the day rather than for the full day). North East regional leaders also adapted TaRL delivery in response to COVID-19, including creating safety protocols that adhere to COVID-19 health protocols and taking full ownership of TaRL data collection and submission by utilizing existing school-based tablets. Student learning results from the region show a 79 percent decline in innumeracy, a near doubling of students who could perform all mathematical operations, and 57 percent of students learning a new operation, further evidencing how strong regional leadership can catalyze change that directly impacts children’s learning.

The success in North East illustrates how scale-up efforts can be made more powerful and sustainable when led by regional directors in the MoBE. The partnership between Young 1ove and the MoBE jointly supporting TaRL implementation prior to COVID-19 likely facilitated this approach, as regional stakeholders already had the tools and knowledge in place to take TaRL implementation and run with it.

Insight 2: Local champions leading the charge on the ground can be particularly important, even in a virtual world

Key to a regional scaling approach has been the role of a supportive and enthusiastic MOBE regional director. Young 1ove already knew that changemakers in bureaucracy are central to the scaling process, but this has proven especially true at the regional level, where an engaged director who champions TaRL can make significant progress in advancing and prioritizing TaRL within the region.

Further, Young 1ove has found that embedding a staff member in the regional government has been a particularly powerful scaling asset. Even as the world has shifted to virtual meetings and phone calls, having someone from Young 1ove physically present has helped the organization remain actively involved in and aware of conversations and schooling decisions. Moreover, the integration of this staff member in the regional government supports the shift to seeing TaRL as a sustainable government program led by strong regional champions. In regions where they do not have a staff member embedded, Young 1ove has found lapsed communication over the past year and faced more challenges “restarting” TaRL after COVID-19 school closures.

Insight 3 : Short-term shocks can lead to long-term learnings

The COVID-19 pandemic has demonstrated the absolute need to be flexible, adaptive, and responsive to changes in the education landscape in real-time. This experience has also underscored the importance of evidence and learning alongside adaptation and rapid response.

The TaRL implementation cycle in Botswana is typically designed to last 30 days. However, as a result of COVID-19, the implementation period was cut by over half during the first term of the 2020 school year with an average implementation period of eight days across schools. To understand the impact of this significant shift, Young 1ove collected data on student learning outcomes and discovered that despite the reduced intervention time, students demonstrated strong learning gains—almost equal to previous 30-day cycles as shown in Figure 1.

This finding not only suggests that even relatively short periods of high-quality implementation can improve student learning, but also underscores the importance of tracking results—even during unexpected adaptations. In this case, tight feedback loops provided evidence of possibilities for refining the TaRL model beyond this pandemic in ways that maximize effectiveness and scalability.

Learnings for beyond the pandemic

The RTSL experience adapting and scaling TaRL in Botswana in the midst of a global pandemic offers key insights that are applicable well beyond this immediate pandemic:

• An orientation toward rapid learning and evidence generation is key to maintain alongside innovation and adaptation, especially in a crisis like COVID-19. Balancing the need for adjustments and iteration with the collection and use of timely data and learning can help respond to disruptions of scaling efforts.
• Focusing on regional/grassroots partnerships for scaling can be particularly effective as those closest to the problems are most often best placed—and have the most incentive—to respond. Even where the ultimate goal is national scaling or ownership of the initiative by the central government, a more decentralized approach to scaling can be an effective way to make progress toward this goal, especially when national-level actors are consumed by crisis-response.
• And, finally, even in a more virtual world, regional and local champions present on the ground are important for maintaining scaling momentum and expanding impact.

Photo credit: Thimonyo Karunga, Northeast Sub-Regional Coordinator at Young 1ove

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The COVID-19 emergency is unprecedented, and the potential impact is still uncertain.

Author: Arnaldo Cruz

Given this uncertainty, the Puerto Rico Department of Education (PRDE) must carefully evaluate medium- and long-term implications for teaching and student achievement. Based on current epidemiology models, there are three possible scenarios: an optimistic, a somewhat optimistic and a pessimistic one. The optimistic scenario assumes schools will be closed until the end of the school year and will be ready to open in the fall semester. The somewhat optimistic scenario assumes schools will remain closed during the fall 2020 quarter and resume classroom instruction in January 2021. While a pessimistic scenario assumes schools will be closed the entire 2020-2021 school year. Given all these possibilities, a meticulous scenario planning exercise would be necessary to map out all potential actions to minimize learning interruption in Puerto Rico. Although PRDE has announced a set of initiatives, we have concerns that they are not part of a larger coordinated effort to address student needs during the crisis, in any of these scenarios.

PRDE recently announced that it was terminating the semester early and that all students would pass grades or graduate regardless if they participated in any distance learning activities. PRDE offered two main academic alternatives to students during this time. One was a set of remedial modules on their website in PDF format, which contained lessons and practice exercises per grade and subject. These PDFs were able to be printed or downloaded for use or shared via email, text, WhatsApp, etc. The other alternative was an application for iOS, Windows 10 and Android, among others, called EduPR, which had content, reading exercises, interactive material and videos per grade and subject. Even though these are the main alternatives, PRDE also offered students other alternatives, including forums, resources bank, digitalized content via PRDE’s webpage, and links to Khan Academy. Although these platforms and tools provided students opportunities to remain engaged, it was far from a comprehensive and coherent distance learning plan. A distance learning plan requires guidelines on content, curriculum and assessment, teacher professional development and support and a plan to actively engage parents.  Several districts in the US of similar size to Puerto Rico have produced detailed distance learning guides and are currently implementing them, with information on content delivery, student assessments, technology, and support. There are about 85 detailed distance plans from districts across the US that PRDE could have emulated. Here are some of the best examples we have seen so far.

• Miami Dade – Florida
• Minneapolis Public Schools
• Orange County Public Schools

Given extreme circumstances, it is tempting for PRDE to say that these worksheets and websites were the only realistic options for students. But the Department should have been required to provide a robust distance learning plan; one that gave manageable and achievable goals to students to work on each week and provided immediate (or at least frequent) feedback from teachers through online knowledge checks, comments or chats to keep students motivated and moving forward.

While distance learning can replace in-person instruction, we do recognize the limitations of this practice. Many students lack access to the technology needed to learn remotely. A study from the Associated Press found that 17% of U.S. students do not have computers in the home and 18% of students lack access to high-speed internet. We suspect that access to internet and electronic devices is much lower in Puerto Rico, but unfortunately, we have no data to validate, and neither does PRDE.

Families do have different circumstances that will impact their ability to use these educational alternatives (family health, work obligations, childcare concerns, internet connectivity, access to devices, etc.). In terms of equity, lower-income students suffer disproportionately under these conditions. They are less likely to have resources, such as PCs and high-speed internet access, to enable them to succeed or even participate in an online learning environment. However, equitable access does not require that all students receive instruction in the same format (e.g., online instruction). Either way, PRDE should have moved to address equitable access to instruction for all students right away. One important step PRDE could have taken as it planned to use distance learning was simply to ask families. Web-based surveys or phone conversations could provide the necessary insight the Department needs to learn what sort of capacity parents or other caregivers have to help, and how the home’s technology and environment might enable or impede learning.

PRDE estimated that approximately 70% of students are currently using one of the academic alternatives offered. However, there is no way to currently validate or track exactly which student accessed an alternative, as web traffic and engagement was reported at a macro level, meaning site visits included everyone (teachers, parents, guardians and students). For instance, a student and his/her parent may each visit the site once per day, double counting the population reported. In order to properly assess student engagement and response to PRDE’s academic alternatives, the information has to be reported at a student level, which will then allow PRDE to monitor progress by school and educational region. By way of comparison, a lot of districts that we looked at (e.g., Columbus City and Indianapolis Public Schools) have been surveying parents to assess the needs of vulnerable students and analyze activities at the school and student level.

Technology Needs

The Federal Government awarded $589 million to PRDE under the Restart Program as a result of Hurricanes Irma and Maria, of which PRDE had approximately $130 million to purchase devices (computer/tablets) for students and teachers who lacked access to these devices at home. Due to a variety of reasons, PRDE was unable to purchase these devices until recently.

Then, as part of the Emergency Measures Support Package certified by the Oversight Board on March 28, 2020, an incremental $124 million was provided from General Fund spending.  Based on a preliminary analysis done by PRDE, the number of devices to be purchased with both state and federal funds is approximately 285,000. Contracts have already been finalized for the Federal funding portion of the purchase, but the state funds purchase requires urgent planning and implementation. Under one of the Restart contracts, which was already signed, devices are expected to be received between July to October of 2020. As far as to state fund purchases, it is estimated that devices could be received by January 2021, way past the time where they are most needed. PRDE states that the delay is due to internal procurement processes and interruptions in worldwide manufacturing as a result of the COVID-19 emergency. However, many districts in the US have already distributed hundreds of thousands of devices to their students. For example, Broward County Florida has already distributed 84,000 free laptops to students between March 20th and April 1. Most students at Broward picked up the laptops at the school they attended or at other participating schools. Some schools even offered drive-thru service. In Fort Worth Texas, the district asked parents to fill out a survey about their technology needs and has been handing out iPads, laptops and hot spots to families that indicated they need them. Some districts, like Baltimore City, Palm Beach and Tulsa Public are lending devices to students. In Richmond Virginia, the district is offering a variety of tools for families to take home, such as pencils, books, a Chromebook, and Wi-Fi/internet hotspots. Families can fill out an online form or reach out directly to their school principal to schedule a pickup. In New York City, to supplement the 175,000 devices schools have already given out, the state Department of Education is working with Apple and T-Mobile to lend LTE-enabled iPads to 300,000 public school students without access to devices. The state’s DOE is receiving about 50,000 iPads a week from Apple and through a partnership with IBM, gets them connected to the internet.

The same goes for mobile hotspots and internet access. PRDE was evaluating different alternatives to make sure all students have access to online alternatives and resources, but these internet options will be most beneficial only after students receive their devices, which unfortunately would be after the start of the fall semester. Most of the large districts have moved quickly by distributing hotspots or by partnering with local telecom providers. Some districts like Broward County have negotiated rates with internet providers and have given that information to parents. Some internet providers like Comcast, are providing high-speed internet service to students, families, and staff through their Internet Essentials Program. This program offers 2 months of free internet service to eligible participants and is now available. In Kansas City, the district has partnered with T-Mobile and Sprint to provide Wi-Fi hotspots to families without the internet. Some districts have been more creative. The Charleston County district is placing school buses equipped with Wi-Fi in select community centers and schools throughout the area for families without home internet access.

As mentioned before, most districts moved aggressively to enhance technology access, but in Puerto Rico, only some computers will be available after this semester is over, and there is no plan to provide internet access to families in case there is another lockdown in the future.

PRDE initially indicated that students that didn’t have access to the internet were able to obtain a physical copy of the remedial modules once the Governor authorized PRDE to distribute them. While PRDE was waiting on the Governor to authorize the distribution of materials, some districts in the US have been using school buses to drop off and pick up hard copy work. Cleveland Metropolitan School District has been mailing instructional packets to students’ home addresses. While Charleston County School District teachers prepare 10-day worth lessons in written form, which all students receive in a printed packet. After the printed packet, students can access digital resources from teachers and outside organizations through their schools’ online portals. In Cincinnati Public the district is providing weekly work packets with clear learning outcomes each week. Packets are provided online, distributed at meal service sites, and parents can print them for free at Staples locations. A lot of districts are also broadcasting learning lessons on public access television. For example, Nashville Public Television is broadcasting at-home learning programming during weekdays and in San Antonio education programming is available on local public television as well.

There are many other examples we can point to. Hence, by seeing what other districts have done and are planning on doing to save the semester and provide students, teachers, and parents with the necessary tools to assist learning, the lag of Puerto Rico Education System is upsetting.

Particularly when the Department has over 800 employees in central office and another 2,500 in the regional offices who continue to get paid. Thus, PRDE has plenty of resources available to devise and implement a robust plan. 

Robust Learning Experience

Although PRDE put out some learning alternatives on its website, it was not tracking individual use of these tools. PRDE initially indicated that students had the option of completing assignments from the remedial modules.  In the event that teachers were unable to contact a student or if a student were unable to complete assignment, they would not be penalized. PRDE cited equity concerns for wanting to pause traditional monitoring schemes or not grade students, pointing to ways in which grades could penalize students who are low-income, lack access to a device or the internet, or cannot rely on parents to help with home-based learning. But telling students that assignments are optional led to a big portion of them to simply “check out”. And that’s not good for them in the short run, and it’s not healthy for the long term either, as students will be less prepared for the next school year. With the recent decision by PRDE to end the semester early, many students in Puerto Rico will find that work they do while at home did not count.

PRDE should have had something in place to differentiate a student who was doing a lot of work and was gaining some kind of knowledge, and a student that for whatever reason just wasn’t. Even under the current circumstances, we are seeing some districts making significant  efforts to evaluate distance learning strategies, provide feedback to students and inform parents of the next steps. We looked at various larger school district’s COVID-19 distance learning plans and have identified at least 15 that still have intentions to asses student work, although with many variations on approaches. Some districts, like DC Public and Chicago Public Schools are adopting a similar approach of assigning final grades based on students’ third-quarter grades or students’ grades when the school shutdown occurred, with opportunities to increase the final grade. And unlike Puerto Rico, these districts have already distributed thousands of electronic devices and have begun distributing printed materials to families to minimize the digital divide. Others, like Austin ISD are instituting a pass/incomplete approach. Atlanta Public will continue to grade students, although it has adjusted credit requirements. New York City is tracking attendance and grading work for all students for credit.

Of all the larger districts plans reviewed, it seems like Puerto Rico had the most relaxed student monitoring policy. But even if PRDE reaffirms its policy to end the semester, it should at least prioritize the assessment of essential skills and continue to communicate feedback on a regular and consistent basis to ALL students and families to minimize the "incomplete learning" from this time. And to do that, PRDE will need to track teacher and student activities at a detailed level, even if they are not grading all of them.

While all school districts and state officials grapple with distance learning, many are wondering what comes next for students who will have missed several months of face to face education. School districts could institute large-scale summer school, but that could be prohibitively costly in many places. Douglas Harris, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, a Washington, D.C.-based think tank, estimated that six weeks of summer school nationwide would cost $8.1 billion. Although one can argue that funds spent on summer school could also serve as a form of economic stimulus, as teachers could earn higher incomes at a time where you have high unemployment in the Island. Another option is starting the 2020-21 school year early, giving teachers more time to help students catch up as well. Although the USDOE has granted waivers of federal testing requirements for all states, including Puerto Rico, PRDE could also require the META standardize test during the summer or at the beginning of the school year to assess how much progress students made during the lockdown. This information would then inform district officials, and most importantly teachers on what to expect during the fall semester.

Given PRDE’s planning shortcomings during the emergency, it might be practical to take this time to plan on how to enhance the systems’ distance learning capacity, which can be useful beyond emergencies such as this (and in preparing for a possible reemergence of COVID-19 this fall/winter), as well as to think about how to recuperate lost learning. Maybe this emergency can force PRDE to get up to speed on technology offerings. This increased level of tech fluency could be sustained post-crisis to assist student learning in normal times. One-way technology can aid learning is by making schools more productive. In California, schools have been using software, way before the virus, to overhaul the conventional learning model. Instead of textbooks, pupils have “playlists”, which they use to access online lessons and take tests. The software then assesses children’s progress, lightening teachers’ marking load and giving them individual insight into their pupils. Saved teachers’ time is allocated to other tasks, such as fostering pupils’ social skills or one-on-one tutoring. A study in 2015 suggested that children in the early adopters of this model score better in tests than their peers at other schools.

Perhaps this is a perfect opportunity to allow adaptive, interactive, evidence-based learning platforms to take hold in Puerto Rico. But the potential for technology will be realized only if PRDE can embrace it. It may be too late to save this semester, but it is not too late for the next school year.

Sadly, the COVID-19 outbreak has provided a revealing and slightly disturbing look into how unprepared the education system in Puerto Rico is for an emergency like this, let alone a technology revolution. However, this also presents an opportunity.  Given the funding available to date, and incremental funding already made available via the CARES Act either directly to PRDE, or via the eligibility guidelines of the $2.2 billion provided to the Government just the other day, we can use this difficult moment to implement best practices, learn from those successful in this area, and provide our children with a better education every day. 

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A scientometric analysis of technostress in education from 1991 to 2022

• Published: 22 May 2024

Cite this article

• Lu Li 1   na1 ,
• Linlin Li   ORCID: orcid.org/0009-0002-3757-0931 2   na1 ,
• Baichang Zhong 3 &
• Yuqin Yang 4  

The increasingly ubiquitous use of information and communication technologies (ICTs) in education have brought vast boons to educators and learners but also caused technostress for some of them due to their maladaptation to ICT-supported work and learning. Scientific research on technostress in educational settings has been growing ever since this concept was first proposed in 1984 in the business sector. However, there is currently no systematic understanding of prior research on this issue. The present study aimed to bridge this gap by reviewing previous publications related to technostress in education through the bibliometric analysis approach, involving the joint use of Bibliometrix, CiteSpace, and VOSviewer. Based on the analysis of 125 publications retrieved from Scopus and Web of Science, this study found that the annual scientific production increased slowly from 1991 to 2018 but skyrocketed from 2019 to 2022, coinciding with widespread online learning caused by COVID-19. Most papers were published by the following countries: China, the USA, Spain, Malaysia, and India. The salient research themes included the effect of COVID-19 on technostress, technostress in higher education, technostress among teachers, and countermeasures against technostress. Thematic evolution analysis revealed the development of this topic over time. This study also identified the most productive authors, institutions, and landmark publications in this research field. This study facilitates a better understanding of technostress research in educational settings spanning about three decades and can inspire countermeasures against this issue so as to maximize the bright side associated with the use of ICT.

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Acknowledgements

We extend our sincere gratitude to Professor Xinghua Wang for his substantial contributions to this research. His expertise significantly enhanced the quality of the manuscript, and his guidance during the original manuscript preparation and revision process was invaluable. This study was supported by the Natural Science Foundation of Shandong Province (grant no. ZR2023MF059).

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Lu Li and Linlin Li contribute equally to this work and share first authorship.

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School of Journalism and Communication, Qingdao University, 308 Ningxia Road, Qingdao, China

Normal College, Qingdao University, Qingda 1st Road 16, Qingdao, China

School of Information Technology in Education, South China Normal University, No. 55, West of Zhongshan Avenue, Guangzhou, 510631, China

Baichang Zhong

Faculty of Artificial Intelligence in Education, Central China Normal University, 152 Luoyu Road, Wuhan, China

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Correspondence to Linlin Li or Baichang Zhong .

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Li, L., Li, L., Zhong, B. et al. A scientometric analysis of technostress in education from 1991 to 2022. Educ Inf Technol (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10639-024-12781-1

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There’s a New Covid Variant. What Will That Mean for Spring and Summer?

Experts are closely watching KP.2, now the leading variant.

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By Dani Blum

For most of this year, the JN.1 variant of the coronavirus accounted for an overwhelming majority of Covid cases . But now, an offshoot variant called KP.2 is taking off. The variant, which made up just one percent of cases in the United States in mid-March, now makes up over a quarter.

KP.2 belongs to a subset of Covid variants that scientists have cheekily nicknamed “FLiRT,” drawn from the letters in the names of their mutations. They are descendants of JN.1, and KP.2 is “very, very close” to JN.1, said Dr. David Ho, a virologist at Columbia University. But Dr. Ho has conducted early lab tests in cells that suggest that slight differences in KP.2’s spike protein might make it better at evading our immune defenses and slightly more infectious than JN.1.

While cases currently don’t appear to be on the rise, researchers and physicians are closely watching whether the variant will drive a summer surge.

“I don’t think anybody’s expecting things to change abruptly, necessarily,” said Dr. Marc Sala, co-director of the Northwestern Medicine Comprehensive Covid-19 Center in Chicago. But KP.2 will most likely “be our new norm,’” he said. Here’s what to know.

The current spread of Covid

Experts said it would take several weeks to see whether KP.2 might lead to a rise in Covid cases, and noted that we have only a limited understanding of how the virus is spreading. Since the public health emergency ended , there is less robust data available on cases, and doctors said fewer people were using Covid tests.

But what we do know is reassuring: Despite the shift in variants, data from the C.D.C. suggests there are only “minimal ” levels of the virus circulating in wastewater nationally, and emergency department visits and hospitalizations fell between early March and late April.

“I don’t want to say that we already know everything about KP.2,” said Dr. Ziyad Al-Aly, the chief of research and development at the Veterans Affairs St. Louis Healthcare System. “But at this time, I’m not seeing any major indications of anything ominous.”

Protection from vaccines and past infections

Experts said that even if you had JN.1, you may still get reinfected with KP.2 — particularly if it’s been several months or longer since your last bout of Covid.

KP.2 could infect even people who got the most updated vaccine, Dr. Ho said, since that shot targets XBB.1.5, a variant that is notably different from JN.1 and its descendants. An early version of a paper released in April by researchers in Japan suggested that KP.2 might be more adept than JN.1 at infecting people who received the most recent Covid vaccine. (The research has not yet been peer-reviewed or published.) A spokesperson for the C.D.C. said the agency was continuing to monitor how vaccines perform against KP.2.

Still, the shot does provide some protection, especially against severe disease, doctors said, as do previous infections. At this point, there isn’t reason to believe that KP.2 would cause more severe illness than other strains, the C.D.C. spokesperson said. But people who are 65 and older, pregnant or immunocompromised remain at higher risk of serious complications from Covid.

Those groups, in particular, may want to get the updated vaccine if they haven’t yet, said Dr. Peter Chin-Hong, an infectious disease specialist at the University of California, San Francisco. The C.D.C. has recommended t hat people 65 and older who already received one dose of the updated vaccine get an additional shot at least four months later.

“Even though it’s the lowest level of deaths and hospitalizations we’ve seen, I’m still taking care of sick people with Covid,” he said. “And they all have one unifying theme, which is that they’re older and they didn’t get the latest shot.”

The latest on symptoms and long Covid

Doctors said that the symptoms of both KP.2 and JN.1 — which now makes up around 16 percent of cases — are most likely similar to those seen with other variants . These include sore throat, runny nose, coughing, head and body aches, fever, congestion, fatigue and in severe cases, shortness of breath. Fewer people lose their sense of taste and smell now than did at the start of the pandemic, but some people will still experience those symptoms.

Dr. Chin-Hong said that patients were often surprised that diarrhea, nausea and vomiting could be Covid symptoms as well, and that they sometimes confused those issues as signs that they had norovirus .

For many people who’ve already had Covid, a reinfection is often as mild or milder than their first case. While new cases of long Covid are less common now than they were at the start of the pandemic, repeat infections do raise the risk of developing long Covid, said Fikadu Tafesse, a virologist at Oregon Health & Science University. But researchers are still trying to determine by how much — one of many issues scientists are trying to untangle as the pandemic continues to evolve.

“That’s the nature of the virus,” Dr. Tafesse said. “It keeps mutating.”

Dani Blum is a health reporter for The Times. More about Dani Blum

President Joe Biden holds a joint press conference with President William Ruto of Kenya.

Portage Central special education students' starry art now displayed at Air Zoo

by News Channel 3

After putting in three years of work, Portage Central Middle School students can now see their art pieces hanging from above in the Kalamazoo Air Zoo. (Phil Gawel/WWMT)

PORTAGE, Mich. — After putting in three years of work, Portage Central Middle School students can now see their art pieces hanging from above in the Kalamazoo Air Zoo.

Special education students started the work right before the COVID-19 pandemic, according to former Portage teacher Doug Wilson.

They were painting the constellations on a large canvas and were worried that it would be destroyed while the middle school building was being torn down in the spring of 2020.

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However, Wilson promised the artwork would not be destroyed and continued to work on it with the next group of students.

"They had to plot the constellations on the canvas, they had to do research in order to determine what the magnitude and the stellar classification was of each star," Wilson said. "We also had to learn some Greek because the stars were labeled in Greek letters."

The piece has now found a home in the Air Zoo as the original group of students are set to graduate.

Dover middle school students nominate their heroes, tell them why in their own words

Dover Area Middle School students invited their heroes to school on May 22 to hear, in their own words, why they were chosen. Parents, teachers, coaches and soldiers were among those chosen by students.

Students wrote the essays ahead of time and then invited their heroes to the assembly where students sat at long tables with their heroes to hear why they were chosen.

"My hero is Miguel Rosado, his friends and family call him Mikey. He is my dad," Mikalyn Rosado read to her father, "He changed his life for me and that is why he is my hero..."

Rosado, wearing an XPO logistics company work shirt and cap, said he was a little bit choked up by the nomination, unaware that his daughter had named him her hero before he had arrived to meet her at school.

Several essays were chosen to read in front of the whole room.

Brody Wise took to the podium to read his nomination of his father Andrew Wise, "Have you ever heard of a hero without a cape? Well I have one… He might have some mental scars from serving, but there isn’t anything in the world that I would be grateful for more than him," citing his service to the Marine Corps. “He put his life on the line to give us the freedom of walking the earth.” 

Andrew Wise served with the Marines between 2000-2004 during Operation Iraqi Freedom.

Brody goes on to tell the audience how his father has “influenced my life to make me a clean and trustworthy person and make me stronger so when it comes time for me to face.”

Andrew Wise gave his son a strong hug after his reading.

Justin Rowand, a Dover middle school football coach, wore two name tags that said “Justin” because he was nominated by two different students. He sat at the end of the table with his head slightly tilted to the ceiling as he listened to what the two boys were saying on either side of him

More photos: Dover log house through the years in photos.

“He was a good impact on me and he helped me so much and made me into the young man I was today…,” Josh Alexander said, sitting to the right.

“He is a mentor to me and helps me every single day whether it comes to being better in life or being better in football,” Broden Greener said to his left.

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World Economic Situation and Prospects 2024

Global economic growth is projected to slow from an estimated 2.7 per cent in 2023 to 2.4 per cent in 2024, trending below the pre-pandemic growth rate of 3.0 per cent, according to the United Nations World Economic Situation and Prospects (WESP) 2024. This latest forecast comes on the heels of global economic performance exceeding expectations in 2023. However, last year’s stronger-than-expected GDP growth masked short-term risks and structural vulnerabilities. 

The UN’s flagship economic report presents a sombre economic outlook for the near term. Persistently high interest rates, further escalation of conflicts, sluggish international trade, and increasing climate disasters, pose significant challenges to global growth.

The prospects of a prolonged period of tighter credit conditions and higher borrowing costs present strong headwinds for a world economy saddled with debt, while in need of more investments to resuscitate growth, fight climate change and accelerate progress towards the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).

“2024 must be the year when we break out of this quagmire. By unlocking big, bold investments we can drive sustainable development and climate action, and put the global economy on a stronger growth path for all,” said António Guterres, United Nations Secretary-General. “We must build on the progress made in the past year towards an SDG Stimulus of at least $500 billion per year in affordable long-term financing for investments in sustainable development and climate action.”

Subdued growth in developed and developing economies Growth in several large, developed economies, especially the United States, is projected to decelerate in 2024 given high interest rates, slowing consumer spending and weaker labour markets. The short-term growth prospects for many developing countries – particularly in East Asia, Western Asia and Latin America and the Caribbean – are also deteriorating because of tighter financial conditions, shrinking fiscal space and sluggish external demand. Low-income and vulnerable economies are facing increasing balance-of-payments pressures and debt sustainability risks. Economic prospects for small island developing States, in particular, will be constrained by heavy debt burdens, high interest rates and increasing climate-related vulnerabilities, which threaten to undermine, and in some cases, even reverse gains made on the SDGs.

Inflation trending down but recovery in labour markets still uneven Global inflation is projected to decline further, from an estimated 5.7 per cent in 2023 to 3.9 per cent in 2024. Price pressures are, however, still elevated in many countries and any further escalation of geopolitical conflicts risks renewed increases in inflation. 

In about a quarter of all developing countries, annual inflation is projected to exceed 10 per cent in 2024, the report highlights. Since January 2021, consumer prices in developing economies have increased by a cumulative 21.1 per cent, significantly eroding the economic gains made following the COVID-19 recovery. Amid supply-side disruptions, conflicts and extreme weather events, local food price inflation remained high in many developing economies, disproportionately affecting the poorest households. 

“Persistently high inflation has further set back progress in poverty eradication, with especially severe impacts in the least developed countries,” said Li Junhua, United Nations Under-Secretary-General for Economic and Social Affairs. “It is absolutely imperative that we strengthen global cooperation and the multilateral trading system, reform development finance, address debt challenges and scale up climate financing to help vulnerable countries accelerate towards a path of sustainable and inclusive growth.”

According to the report, the global labour markets have seen an uneven recovery from the pandemic crisis. In developed economies, labour markets have remained resilient despite a slowdown in growth. However, in many developing countries, particularly in Western Asia and Africa, key employment indicators, including unemployment rates, are yet to return to pre-pandemic levels. The global gender employment gap remains high, and gender pay gaps not only persist but have even widened in some occupations.   

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