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Shumita Basu, Narrating: This is "In Conversation," from Apple News. I'm Shumita Basu. Today, how the U.S. politicized pandemic school closures and failed to put children first.
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Basu, Narrating: In the spring of 2020, when the pandemic first hit and schools around the country closed, four-year-old Serena had nowhere to go. Her kindergarten was now online, and her mom, a single parent, couldn't stay home to supervise her learning. So, she brought Serena with her to work, cleaning hotel rooms.
Anya Kamenetz: Serena was commuting with her mother an hour each way by bus to the hotel, and her experience of kindergarten was on her mother's smartphone while her mother was cleaning the rooms.
Basu, Narrating: That's Anya Kamenetz. She's a journalist who's been covering education for two decades.
Kamenetz: As her mother explained to me with a lot of self-recrimination, she couldn't get her onto the math lesson because the math lesson was when her mother had to strip the beds and get the laundry down to the laundry room. And so she wasn't there to make sure that she paid attention.
Basu, Narrating: Serena's teacher was also struggling to keep the kids engaged.
Kamenetz: She poured her heart and soul into trying to translate the kindergarten experience online, and what that ended up being like was like a small Mr. Rogers production out of her home, like, singing, she's got props… But it wasn't working. It just didn't work.
Basu, Narrating: This is the story of the unworkable, unthinkable 2020 school year that became the unworkable 2021 school year and, in some places, still a pretty rough start to 2022. Anya writes about the ripple effects of school closures in America in her new book, "The Stolen Year: How COVID Changed Children's Lives, and Where We Go Now." She says, here in the U.S., we didn't heed the warnings, we didn't follow the data, and we just did not prioritize kids.
Kamenetz: We allowed kids to become victims of the pandemic and our social responses to the pandemic. We allowed them to go hungry in April and May. We allowed them to lose this learning that they may or may not be able to get back.
Basu, Narrating: As school starts back up again around the country, I sat down with Anya to talk about how the U.S. got pandemic school policies so wrong. And she started by saying, at the most basic level, I'm talking about before the pandemic, a lot of people took schools for granted.
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Kamenetz: Here in this country, we don't have public healthcare per se, we don't have a lot of public housing, we don't have a lot of public transportation, but we have this incredible phenomenon where there is this warm, well-lighted building on almost every street corner in America, in cities, in towns, in villages. And in that building, for 180 days a year, it is the safest place that a child can be. It is a place with hot meals, it is a place with caring adults, it is a place where they can learn and be with their fellow citizens as well. And so that's what public schools are and were. And I guess what happened for me in the pandemic when they shut their doors, and I think for a lot of the parents that I spend time with, was just such a sense of betrayal. And also a sense of surprise. Like, I compare it to a sound like the refrigerator humming, and you can't hear it until it gets unplugged.
Basu: Mm.
Basu: Right, yeah. And how eerie the silence is once it's gone.
Kamenetz: Absolutely. And that was a silence that I think we all felt. It's a silence that I felt in my neighborhood when the schools were closed. And yeah, so understanding how they could be hubs of communities seems pretty obvious, but I think as the days wore on, realizing that this is far more than a lack of convenience, this is something that for a lot of families was a disaster.
Basu: So, tell us what you remember of reporting in the early months on the U.S. response, and where did reopening fall in that conversation?
Kamenetz: We started failing in April of 2020, because April of 2020 is…
Basu: [CHUCKLES] A month in basically.
Kamenetz: I remember having a conversation with Michael Mulgrew, the head of the New York City teachers' union, over the summer about what it would take, and he was like, We're already behind because in a normal year, April is when you start planning. You're staffing, you're scheduling your protocols. And at that moment, they were doing something completely different. They were standing up remote learning, they were trying to deal with their food service programs. So they didn't divide the labor and the planning in a way that was necessary. There was a lot of confusion about how the response was going to go, and it wasn't clear what was going to happen. Nobody seemed to be able to see a clear path forward.
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Basu, Narrating: We'll get back to why there was no clear path forward, and who might be responsible, a little bit later. But first, let's talk about the most obvious way that school closures affected kids: they missed out on learning.
During the pandemic, there were a lot of theories about just how bad learning loss would be. Would kids who were already far behind fall even further back? What about kids in low-income households with parents who didn't have the luxury of working from home?
We're now starting to get data answering these questions. A recent assessment of standardized test scores showed that reading performance for nine-year-olds fell by the largest margin in three decades. Math scores dropped, too. And the drops were steeper for students of color.
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Kamenetz: If a kid falls behind, they start to develop a self-concept of being not as successful in school, they become less engaged with school, it can be a vicious cycle. And so that's why we see that a child who hasn't learned to read by the age of ten has a much higher chance of not graduating from high school, and that sets them off on all kinds of hard things in their life course. It means that they might not get as good of a job, make as good of a wage, be as healthy in their life. They're more likely to smoke. They're less likely to have an enduring relationship. So there's super wide range of social impacts to this downturn. And so what we're concerned about is making knitting those kids back into the fabric of school and of learning, and helping them not just make progress on a test, but feel like they belong at school and they are successful at school. And this is gonna be a whole society effort.
Basu: I think that people generally think they understand what it means to have been outta school for a year and a half, two years for some kids, on and off, right? What does it mean practically? What does it literally mean for these students?
Kamenetz: It means that they don't have the material. They don't have the fluency. They might be picking something up, like the times tables, for the very first time at an older age, so there's developmental directories. Same thing with kids with special needs. Early intervention is what we harp on when we think about dyslexia or we think about specific learning disabilities. More time later, starting later, it's harder. So these are the kinds of things that we're really concerned about. And I also wanna mention the NAEP results, "the nation's report card," is for nine-year-olds. And we care a lot about nine-year-olds, but I'm super concerned about high school students, because high school students don't have five years to catch up.
Basu: Right.
Kamenetz: They drift. And we know that kids during remote learning in low-income communities were more likely to pick up paid jobs. Lot of kids were Zooming into math class from Chipotle, from Chick-fil-A. And once they started bringing in that money, and now it's a labor shortage and wages are higher, it's really hard for them to give that up. And in the short term, they make a different choice and that has long-term impacts.
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Basu, Narrating: Then, there's the mental and emotional impact of school closures. When classrooms closed, young people's mental health suffered. Particularly teenagers. In September of 2020, the American Psychological Association found that more than half of eleven- to 17-year-olds reported having frequent thoughts of suicide or self-harm. Anya spoke with one 15-year-old girl, who she calls E.
Kamenetz: So, E was in Alexandria, and before the pandemic, she said that she was very active. She was in all kinds of clubs, she was doing sports, she was engaged with her friend group as well as her studies. So these are all the things that school provides for kids, structure and challenge and focus and exercise and friendship. So, when that all shut down, it was a very common story. I mean, she stopped sleeping regular hours.
E: I never stayed up super late pre-pandemic, but now I stay up so late for no reason. At the very beginning, it was like I wouldn't sleep for days.
Kamenetz: She would stay up on her phone late into the night, sometimes texting with friends, but also just scrolling, and really having a hard time focusing or being motivated in her schoolwork. She started feeling terrible about her body because she wasn't working out, she wasn't leaving the house anymore, and she just described it as like you're watching your life go down the tubes.
'Cause it's like being in solitary confinement except different because, like, your brain is still developing. And this is, like, a time when you need to be out of the house and you need to be, like, seeing people and you need to be forming friendships.
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Kamenetz: For teenagers, the indefinite horizon of the pandemic, the way it stretched out and the way things kept getting canceled, brought them so low. It was so hard for them to have hope for the future because of the things that they kept having to miss out on.
Basu, Narrating: Another essential service that schools provide young people is food. School cafeterias are the second biggest anti-hunger program in the United States after SNAP food benefits. Now, before the pandemic, the U.S. was actually doing a relatively good job addressing childhood hunger through free and reduced school meal programs. But COVID set us back.
Kamenetz: There's 30 million children that rely on the school food, that need that school food, their free and reduced lunch. And it's billions of meals a year, including summer program and dinner. And it's a substantial portion of the calories that children living in poverty get during the school year. That's why their summer meal program is really important. And so, when that went away, families went hungry and children actually went hungry. And hunger researchers were flabbergasted. When they told me, they were like, We haven't seen these levels. And we usually don't even measure hunger itself, we measure food insecurity, which is more common, which is, I'm stretching out this can of beans or I'm eating what's in the house. I'm waiting to go to the grocery store. But this was hunger. I'm going to bed hungry. I'm skipping meals. My kid is skipping meals. And it was a brief period of time, but it was so upsetting. So damaging.
Basu, Narrating: In the United States, education is decentralized, which means the federal government can give guidance, but ultimately, decisions were left up to individual states and, in a lot of cases, individual districts. Local superintendents were trying to make important public health decisions, something they were never trained to do.
Kamenetz: Even on the federal level, there were three different voices, right? The White House was yelling about opening the schools, beating the drum to open the schools, and this is part of a thrust of, like, trying to get everything back to normal as quickly as possible. And it felt to a lot of people at that time that that guidance was divorced from scientific reality. That was President Trump. The education department, led by Betsy DeVos, she just has no interest in public education. She said on the record that she doesn't think that Department of Education should exist. And so her main concern was diverting federal aid to private schools and abdicating any role on the Department of Education level for organizing and directing the response. So, that was what was going on there. And then you have to look at the public health infrastructure, our CDC. They seemed to be a lot more interested in talking about the risks and the harms of COVID and controlling it than they were in balancing that with the risks of school closures. It took a very long time for the CDC to have a full-throated and clear message about the importance of in-person learning. And when other groups tried to do that-- So, the American Academy of Pediatrics, the AAP, they came out with a statement on the importance of in-person learning and the necessity of having kids in school in person. They were embraced strongly by the White House. Teachers' unions had objected to that statement because it didn't talk about the risk to adults in the classroom, it talked about children. And within two weeks, they had walked that statement back.
Basu: Would you say that the strong message coming from Trump's White House at the time to reopen schools, to push to reopen schools, would you say that that politicization of the message sort of poisoned it, at least for a certain group of people, even when the data started to support the fact that transmission is not particularly high when schools are open-- as a result of schools being open?
Kamenetz: Yes, I think that's a very fair way of putting it. I think that the politicization made it very hard to have an open conversation. And in the "stopped clock is right twice a day" kind of situation, right, where it's like-- he's out there saying insane things in press conferences, and he's promoting quack remedies, and he's talking about bleach injections. In the midst of that, he says that school should be opened. It's very hard not to-- I mean, I can understand why people didn't believe that.
Basu: You mentioned teacher unions just a moment ago. Is there something particular to teachers; unions here in the U.S. that has changed the conversation here about reopening?
Kamenetz: The way that I try to unpack it in the book is: historically the status of teachers has felt precarious, that they've had something to prove about their professionalism, that they're professionals. Because on the one hand, they're educated and they are professional in that sense and they have a guild and then they have qualifications. On the other hand, they are underpaid for their education level, they are disrespected, they are mostly women, they are public employees, city employees, and so they have this dual status. And to me, the privilege to work from home during the pandemic was a privilege of professionals. There's a laptop class of people that I was in that was able to stay home and insulate themselves from the risks of the virus. And what I believe it comes down to for a lot of teachers was, in the spring of 2020, they had laptop status, and some of them didn't wanna give that up. They were like, Why should I have to come in? I see that my lawyer friends are not going into work, my city administrator friends are not going into work, why should I have to go into work? In a work environment-- And we can also be realistic about what does a school look like in a city like New York. It is an old building, it is not typically cleaned, the bathrooms don't have soap, they don't have paper towels. We are not doing well by our children or our teachers in the buildings that we have. And that's not unique to America, but it was definitely a factor in the teachers that I spoke with.
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Basu, Narrating: Ultimately, the U.S. closed most classrooms for 58 weeks during the pandemic. By comparison, the U.K. and China closed schools for 27 weeks. And in New Zealand, schools were closed for just nine weeks. I asked Anya what other wealthy nations did differently to keep schools open.
Kamenetz: There's two major answers, right. If you look at our peer countries, there's a group of countries that controlled the pandemic, they spared lives. We wanted to be in that group. Japan, South Korea, New Zealand. They reopened their schools with no controversy because they didn't have rampant virus in their communities. Then you had a group of European countries and also Israel that had waves of the virus. They were battling the virus, just like we were, for a variety of reasons. But starting in the spring of 2020, and absolutely by the fall, they had very clear messaging that they were going to close schools as their last resort. They had national campaigns of reopening schools. And it wasn't that there weren't objections, and it wasn't that there weren't families that were afraid or disagreed. It wasn't that they didn't have teacher unions. But there was a unified message that, We're going to spare the children. These children are not being harmed by this illness in the same way as older people, the risk profile is very different, and we understand that school is an essential service and childcare. And so they started to build that base. And the European equivalent of the CDC grew ever more confident in its messaging that school closure should be a last resort.
Basu, Narrating: But as we know, here in the United States, closing schools was not a last resort. It was the norm. We now have millions of students showing up in schools across the country who are behind on academics, who have suffered emotional trauma, and who are looking to adults to help bridge the gap. So, I asked Anya what needs to happen to repair the damage that's been done, and how do we move forward without leaving a generation of young people behind?
Kamenetz: In general, in education, we lack a lot of evidence about super effective interventions to improve learning.
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Kamenetz: One of the ones that we've heard the most about is called "high dosage tutoring," which basically just means, like, a few times a week with someone who's trained in a small group of at least no more than like two or three people. That's happening in some places and some places it's not. A big problem is that, from what we understand from polling, parents are not that concerned about their kids learning right now. That may be because of grade inflation, it may be because they're comparing them to their peers who had similar experiences, rather than to some national standard, but if you make things like summer school voluntary, which is what they've been, parents might say no. And so the number of kids who are actually getting the interventions, even when the federal money's there and even when schools are offering them, might not be appropriate to the need. Huge amount of innovation is needed, not a huge amount of innovation is happening.
Basu: Yeah, it's understandable that there's a lot of work to be done, and yet at the same time, there is a lot of money that's been earmarked for schools, right, pandemic-related funding in the billions given to schools with the purpose of being spent for pandemic-related needs. Where's the money been going? How is it being spent? Have you seen really successful examples of this and maybe less successful examples of this?
Kamenetz: So, the pandemic relief money, about $122 billion, that money's going to a variety of places. One of the really painful unattended consequences is that because of the pandemic, enrollment has plunged. Enrollment is tied to funding, and so some of that money is going to patch the holes that were opened up by the enrollment loss. Rather than to necessarily improve instruction, it's to prevent loss.
Basu: And when you say enrollment has plunged, where are these kids?
Kamenetz: Yes.
Kamenetz: This is a huge problem. So, we don't know where they all are. Homeschooling is up, private schools are up a little bit, in some places there's been a flow to charter schools, out of district schools, but I am not satisfied that we know where all these kids are. And I worry that there are some that are just not in school anymore. Los Angeles says that they're missing, before the school year started, they said they had unaccounted for between 10,000 and 20,000 students.
Basu: Wow. Wow.
Kamenetz: So, there hasn't been a lot of oversight or guidance on how this rescue plan money is supposed to be spent. And so, I know that surveys have shown they've spent it on social, emotional programming, they've spent it on training for teachers, they've spent it on extra learning time, which we would like to see them do, after-school, summer programs.
Basu: Right, and I remember reading in your book that in some districts people are upgrading their athletic fields [CHUCKLES] or athletic departments. Not necessarily things that would immediately bridge gaps that are important, although sports are an important part of kids social and emotional learning at school.
Kamenetz: Yeah. I mean, this is a problem when you have funding and no oversight or direction or accountability, really. So, the report recently by "The74Million" showed that the largest districts that were closed the longest, specifically, have spent an average of just 15% of the money so far.
Basu: Right. If you could give your own guidance as to how schools should be spending the remaining amount of their funding, what would you say they should be prioritizing?
Kamenetz: I think that social, emotional wellbeing of students and faculty teachers has to take an equal stand with learning. I think of this as making sure kids feel a sense of belonging and success at school. And part of that has to do with setting goals and meeting them and part of it has to do with how they feel at school. Is there things that make school fun and enjoyable for them? I would also make sure that part of the money that you spend is spent on evaluation of whatever it is that you do do, because a lot of districts, and even states, are left in the situation of saying "We think this is working, but we don't really have any way to prove it." Polls also show that parents retain confidence in their kids' schools. The ones who are there. I mean, there are some that have voted with their feet. But the ones that are there think highly of their kids' schools. We did a survey at NPR in April that most parents think that their kids' school did a good job, all things considered, and their teachers did the best they could. And so that goodwill is very strong. It's generation strong. And I think it's worth building on and trying to keep that communication going, even if it feels like it can go sideways sometimes.
Basu: Since so much of your book keeps coming back to this point, what if we had put children first? These are all the ways that we didn't, but what if we did? So, tell me more about how you imagined that world, the "what if children were truly put first"? What would that look like in schools, but also in other areas of our life?
Kamenetz: We would have a social safety net. We wouldn't make schools the linchpin and the only part of our social safety net. We would have basic income, child tax credit, paid leave, and subsidized childcare. We would reduce inequality overall because children are always going to be at risk of being in poverty because they are financial drains on their households. And so, we would try to make it less of a burden to be raising kids on your own. And while I still see schools as beacons, I don't want them to be stuck doing all these jobs by themselves and I don't want teachers to have to spend more time dealing with traumatized kids than they do exposing them to the wonders of learning. I want us all to protect our kids so that schools can focus on what they do best.
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Basu, Narrating: You can read Anya Kamenetz's book, out now, called "The Stolen Year," on Apple Books.
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