The pandemic is over, but American schools are still not the same

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On a recent Friday at Gary Comer High School in Chicago, you had to squint to see signs of the pandemic that upended American education just a few years ago.

Only a handful of students wore masks, and even then, some used them to cover their pimples, staff said. Hand sanitizer stations outside each classroom were mostly unused and some were empty. Students stopped to hug each other in the hallway and ate lunch side by side in the cafeteria.

“I don’t think it’s as important as it was before,” said Evelyn Harris, 12, an eighth-grader at Comer, whose lasting memory of schooling during the pandemic is that online classes were easier, so it got better. Grades. “The pandemic didn’t really affect me much.”

But inside Nikhil Bhatia’s classroom, the evidence was on the blackboard, where the math teacher shaded slices of a pie to illustrate how to find a common denominator. That day, his seventh graders were working on adding and subtracting fractions, a skill students typically learn in fourth grade.

Maybe you learned this before, Bhatia began. “Or, during the pandemic, you may have status on zoom,” some students laughed as he slurred, “turn the screen to black and I went to play a couple of video games. Click if that sounds familiar?

The snapping of fingers filled the room. “Alright!” Bhatia replied. “That’s why we’re going to do the review.”

As the new school year begins in Comer and elsewhere, many students and educators say school feels more normal than it has in more than three years. COVID health precautions have all but disappeared. There is less social awkwardness. Students say they’ve gotten over the novelty of seeing their classmates in person.

But deep consequences of the pandemic era linger beneath the surface. More and more students are missing school and educators are struggling to keep kids interested in class. Many students fall behind academically, leaving teachers like Bhatia to fill in the gaps even as they try to move students forward. Rebuilding students’ weakened confidence in their abilities is especially important right now.

“It’s okay that you don’t know this,” Bhatia tells his students. “It’s normal right now.”

Nationally, many students stay very behind in math and reading where they would have been if it weren’t for the pandemic. Has been especially pronounced learning dips in schools that taught virtually for most of the 2020-21 school year, as did schools across Chicago and within Noble’s charter network, which includes Comer. It’s an even more pressing problem for older students, who have less time to fill those gaps.

In Comer, 28% of eighth graders met or exceeded Illinois math standards the year before the pandemic, not far from the state average of 33%. But by spring 2022, that figure had fallen to just 2%, compared to 23% for the state.

Meanwhile, in reading, 9% of Comer eighth graders met or exceeded state standards before the pandemic, and that number dropped to 4% in spring 2022, when the state average was 30%. .

The school made gains they are proud of last year: 10% of eighth graders met the state standard in math and 22% met it in reading, although school leaders say they know there is still work to do .

“If you don’t have some foundational, basic skills, it will be almost impossible to keep up with the curriculum as children get older,” said Mary Avalos, a research professor of teaching and learning at the University of Miami. who has studied How COVID affected high school teachers. “That’s a big problem that needs to be addressed.”

How teachers are addressing learning gaps during the pandemic

Most of Bhatia’s students lost key skills in fourth and fifth grade (the years school was remote and then interrupted by waves of COVID), but mastered more advanced concepts in sixth grade last year.

That left Bhatia, like many teachers across the country, with the difficult task of coming up with mini-lessons to fill those gaps in elementary school, without spending so much time on preconceptions that cause students to fall behind in high school.

On a day like Friday, that meant preparing students to add negative fractions, a seventh-grade skill. Bhatia first had to teach a brief lesson on adding fractions, a fourth-grade skill. At first, some students mistakenly thought they should use the technique for dividing fractions they learned last year.

“They’ll say, ‘Oh, this is conserve, change, flip’?” Bhatia said. “The gap is not exactly what you would expect it to be.”

This type of teaching happened “from time to time” before the pandemic, Bhatia said, but “now it’s like day to day I have to be really critical in thinking, ‘OK, what could be the gap that’s emerging today?’ ”

Aubria Myers, who teaches sixth-grade English in Comer, sees how the familiar rhythms of school are only now returning, four months after federal health officials declared an official end to the COVID-19 emergency.

“This year, for me, is the most normal,” Myers said. Students say, “Wait, what’s the assignment? Can I get another copy?” she said. Last year, when she mentioned homework, “they said, ‘What is that?’”

That recent Friday, Myers led an activity in her multicultural literature class that would have been impossible two years ago, when students had to remain seated in clusters of color-coded desks.

Her sixth graders huddled close to each other as they attempted to jump across the classroom, an exercise designed to give her restless students a chance to move, while exemplifying the communication and teamwork skills that would be at the center of Seed peoplethe novel they were about to read in class.

Still, Myers had chosen the book, with its short chapters and lines full of metaphors and irony, to meet the needs of this group of sixth graders, who spent the entire third grade learning online. Myers knows many never logged on. They have shorter attention spans and doubts about their reading skills, but they love class discussions, she said.

“They remember that time in their life when they were stuck talking only to people in their house,” Myers said. “They’re in class and they want to interact with each other.”

Myers has tried to keep her students from becoming discouraged by their learning gaps. At the beginning of this school year, for example, she points out spelling and punctuation errors, but still doesn’t deduct points. She wants to make sure her students have time to learn some of the key skills they missed in previous grades.

“We have kids who don’t understand how to put a period somewhere in a sentence or how to put spaces between their words,” Myers said. “I see these really beautifully put together ideas, these really well thought out explanations, but they’re missing some of those key mechanics.”

Student Mental Health and Engagement Remains a Priority

Comer has also responded to students’ needs after the pandemic in other ways. The school expanded its team of social workers and other staff who work with students to resolve conflicts and address mental health needs, a trend that has been observed at the national level.

The school has long felt the effects of neighborhood gun violence and student trauma, but staff say having more adults focused on those issues has helped students open up and seek help. More students now request verbal mediations to avoid physical fights, staff say.

“If you follow us around the building, you’ll see it,” said Stephanie Williams, a former reading teacher who now leads Comer’s social and emotional learning team. “Kids will look for you or find you and say, ‘Hey, I need this.’”

And this is the second year the school has scheduled all core classes earlier in the week, so students can spend part of Friday practicing math and reading skills on the computer, and the rest of the day taking two special electives. It is a strategy intended to keep students interested and attending school.

The school offers classes that pique students’ interest, such as the history of hip hop, hair braiding, and creative writing. Brandon Hall, a seventh-grader at Comer, made his first smoothie in a “foodies” class and bonded with his basketball coach over chess. He came to see similarities between making plays on the court and moving pawns around the board.

“I learned a lot from him,” he said.

On “Freedom Fridays,” attendance is higher and student conflicts are less frequent, school officials say. That has been important as a school, Like many others, has seen higher chronic absenteeism rates over the past two years. In Comer, 1 in 3 sixth graders missed 18 or more days of school last year. Before the pandemic, that number was closer to 1 in 5.

The approach runs counter to calls some education experts have made for schools to double down on academic efforts and add more instructional time, rather than take away.

A recent report by the Center for Reinventing Public Education, for example, details the numerous ways students still struggle and calls for “greater urgency to address learning gaps before students graduate.” Harvard education researcher Thomas Kane noted that few districts They have lengthened the day or the school year and have warned that “the academic recovery effort after the pandemic has been underestimated from the beginning.”

But Comer Principal JuDonne Hemingway said it’s worth spending time on enrichment activities during the school day to ensure all students have access to them. These classes, she added, are helping students develop interests they can pursue in college or as part of a career.

“It’s not just random experiences for kids,” Hemingway said. “We believe they are as important as any traditional academic class.”

chalk beat is a nonprofit news organization that covers public education.

For more news about COVID in schools, visit eSN’s Educational Leadership page.