Did the Education System Fail Our Kids in the Pandemic?

Did the Education System Fail Our Kids in the Pandemic?

As kids are graduating, as a parent, college teacher, and behavioral researcher, I can’t help but wonder how some families are dealing with the last year and a half of their kids’ schooling. Given my challenges over the last year and a half with my daughter and her school experiences, this hits home even more. Some students are experiencing a sense of permanent loss, as their GPAs tanked before graduating. Some parents are trying to encourage their kids through it all, despite the issues that aren’t going away. Others have lost friends or family to suicide. And still, other students are wondering how their low grades will impact the rest of their academic careers, college opportunities, and eventual jobs. Average grades have plummeted. But is it the kids’ fault?

Is it the kids' fault?

As a veteran and former drill instructor for juvenile offenders, I can relate to the resilience needed to learn in challenging environments and overcome obstacles as a child in difficult times. But was it enough to hand our kids this difficulty in school and just expect them to navigate it and figure it out on their own? Let’s consider some factors and think about whether our kids got a fair shake.

Prior to Covid, some students were spending around 5 hours per week per class with in-person instruction. Then when schools went to purely online learning in March of 2020, much of the rest of the trimester kids had little, if any, Zoom classes and they have had a hard time keeping up the grades they maintained before the pandemic. When the first trimester of the 2021 school year started, classes resumed with Zoom sessions. But these were less than 20 percent of the total instruction students had got on campus, with under an hour of online instruction per week. And grades plummeted across the nation. This begs the question: how is it that we give our kids one-fifth of the instruction and still expect the same level of academic performance?

Grades have plummeted across the nation

Never mind the limited teaching time; what about the other learning factors? Some studies have shown that online learning results in worse performance for K-12 students. Then there are all the other factors that inhibit learning. Teachers and students alike may be more susceptible to cognitive biases like attribution error, which causes people to not consider the situation of the person due to a lack of understanding of their circumstances (which is further exacerbated by no in-person contact). Kids can have lower psychological safety due to unfamiliar teachers and environments because of online learning, and the research shows that people need to feel psychologically safe to engage, learn, and develop. With in-person learning, kids were able to approach their teachers and felt safe to do so. This brings us to the next issue. Many students may not feel comfortable asking questions in front of the class and may have been able to get instruction from the teacher on campus. But with online learning, many times, students won’t even ask questions for fear they would have to do so in front of the whole class.

Adults have a hard enough time navigating all of these issues, and many times, we fail. But we left our children to cope without being prepared with the right tools.?

we left our children to cope without being prepared with the right tools...

And what about preparing teachers? Teachers had not previously been exposed to online learning, and their lessons were based on in-person delivery. How could we expect them to fill the gap when they had not been fully prepared? As a college professor that has spent 8 years teaching online, we have more established systems and processes for the online environment, and even that has its challenges. But with the pandemic, kids had in-person instruction that moved online overnight, with a sometimes little adjustment to the assignments, little training for teachers, and both kids and teachers were just thrown into this experiment with little change in expectations and little if any, research to back up the approach.

If you want to read a study based on the students’ perspective on learning in the pandemic, read this article. It will pull at your heartstrings as you hear about kids and their struggle to cope and navigate this new environment. Kids are overwhelmed by pop-up notifications for assignments, last-minute assignments that create a sense of constant anxiety, lack of motivation, and feelings no one cares about them. The pandemic left some students who had previously been great performers feeling as though they were just bad students.?

The pandemic left some students who had previously been great performers feeling as though they were just bad students.?

Now let’s talk about justice for kids and the grading systems. Covid seems to have exposed a lot of things in the system that perhaps were not as obvious before; surprise assignments at the last minute, grades that are too late to do anything about, and worst of all, tests that are heavily weighted at the end that even a 4 question exam can bring a student from an A down to a D in their final. Let’s take a moment to think about that…a student does well all trimester/semester, averaging an A, then takes a 4 question test and the 4 questions bring the score for the entire class down to a D if they missed those 4 questions. If this was college, and students had surprises like that at the end of the class, there would be some major uproar from students and things would change. Is it fair and just for the students to not be aware of how grades and performance will impact their academic careers? As faculty at a college, I could never get away with surprising students in that way and unfairly weighting scores in such a way that wipes out a student's entire class’s progress.

What could we have done better?

I’ll leave the decision to you. But the question is, given the research and resources already available at the start of the pandemic, could our local, state, and the federal government have done better for our kids? It’s sad; that sense of permanence in looking at your future and what could have been. Can you imagine how our kids feel faced with this prospect? There are millions of students who have been impacted forever. The question of who is at fault is not an easy one, as it is the future of our nation, our own flesh and blood, and the lives of these innocent little humans that are at stake. They looked to us for guidance, and they looked to us for fairness. They were thrust into a situation in which they had no control, and we left it to them to figure it out for themselves in many cases. What does that show us about ourselves and about our system? These little people deserve far better than excuses. What will we do to make it right? Adjust their grades, grade the entire system on the curve, or give them an opportunity to make it up? We failed them, our government failed them, and the school system failed them. What’s the next step in making our kids’ education whole? It’s not good enough to hand them their report card and say “oh well, better luck next time.” For most, there is no next time. Let the conversation begin…


Josh E. Ramirez, PhD (ABD)

Carole Osterweil MAPM

Bringing neuroscience to projects and business transformation ??Project Troubleshooter?? Coach?? Author ??Speaker??

3 年

An interesting and provocative piece Josh E. Your observations and questions will resonate for many in the UK too

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