16

Introduction

2020 was a rough year for America. The COVID-19 virus took over the lives of nearly every American, whether by actually infecting them, or causing other things that affected their lives. The pandemic changed the way of life and how people went about their normal days. One of the main things that the pandemic affected was the US education system, as it changed the safety guidelines, instructional methods, and overall student experience in school.

Safety Guidelines

Prior to the pandemic, you could walk into any public school and see students bumping into and touching each other in the hallways, drinking from water fountains, and other normal kid things. However, with how easily the coronavirus can spread, schools have had to enact policy changes that have affected the ways students, teachers and faculty interact with one another. Probably one of the most obvious changes comes with the mandation of students and teachers wearing masks in most public schools. As the Center for Disease Control and Prevention states, “The use of masks is one of many important mitigation strategies to help prevent the spread of COVID-19” (“Operating School”, 2020), though not all schools mandate wearing of masks (such as Hillsborough County Schools in Florida). As a student teacher during the pandemic, I have witnessed many things schools are doing in addition to the mask mandations. For example, at Wren High School in South Carolina, students are required to have desk shields (pictured left) in addition to wearing masks in the classroom. These shields are cleaned every night by staff and then returned to students the next morning. Furthermore, just as the CDC recommends people maintain social distancing in public settings, they also have strongly recommended that students remain socially distant within the schools. As will be discussed later, social distancing strongly affects students’ learning abilities in classroom settings. For faculty, the pandemic has tremendously added to their workload. In addition to following the aforementioned guidelines and ensuring students are following these guidelines, faculty must also ensure that the school is a clean, safe environment for students. To do this there are many new cleaning and disinfecting protocols that teachers must follow. As an example, in the classroom that I student-teach for, we must clean every desk, calculator, chair, and anything else a student has come in contact with before another student is allowed to use it.  Of course, schools have also had to decide on how they are going to prepare for what to do if students or faculty get sick. As we saw in August, many schools did not reopen for face-to-face learning right away. Many schools implemented a virtual learning environment or some form of hybrid learning environment. As the CDC recommended, most schools based their reopening plans on the medical data that was available to them for their local communities. For those that have at least some in-person instruction days, many schools require students to complete daily self-evaluations. And, of course, students or faculty that have either been exposed to or tested positive for the virus must quarantine, though the length of quarantine differs across various districts.

Learning Environment

The way students learn best has always been a debatable topic and it has changed many times throughout history as more research has been completed. As schools change the way they operate, the way students are learning has had to change, too.

Virtual Instruction

As mentioned in the previous section, many schools have had to implement at least a portion of virtual learning within their instruction. This sudden change in instruction is accompanied by a multitude of problems. For example, as the Economic Policy Institute analyzed in a 2017 analysis, “about 16% of eighth graders and 25% of poor eighth graders have no desktop or laptop at home” (Garcia & Weiss, 2020). Due to this fact, virtual learning environments will lead to opportunity gaps for students of families that are financially struggling. Even if all schools were able to become one-to-one institutions (meaning every students is equipped with a laptop, chromebook, or iPad), many students still will not be able to access the resources necessary for a successful virtual learning environment, i.e. stable internet connection, calm/quiet space to learn, etc. Plus, many current teachers are not well-versed in the technological components required to teach virtually, which leads to many problems. Thus, there will be a clear gap between students who have more accessibility to necessary resources and those who do not, and there will be a clear gap between students in virtual classrooms who have technologically savvy teachers and those who do not.

Furthermore, many of the issues with virtual instruction deal with how they will be learning. One of the most widely accepted theories within the American education system is Lev Vygotsky’s theory that social interactions have a fundamental role in the development of cognition (Mcleod). Virtual learning takes away much of the ability for students to interact with other students as well as the teacher. This prohibits students from properly developing the cognitive skills that teachers use to help them learn content. Much of successful instruction requires student engagement and student-led learning activities, and a virtual setting decreases these things drastically. Both in college and in my classroom observations, I have witnessed virtual classes in which students are muted and showing “black screens”, meaning there is no engagement with content material, so the information provided that day is more likely to go in one ear and out the other. Students are less likely to collaborate in virtual settings so they are having to complete more individualized work, which can add to mental stress and anxiety (which will be discussed more later). All in all, though it can be done properly, virtual instruction hurts the development of students’ cognitive abilities within the classroom.

Face-to Face Instruction

Most US schools have strived for at least some sort of in-person instruction to occur throughout the fall semester of 2020. According to CNN, at least every US state has at least some days of face-to-face instruction as of October 5th, 2020. The only exceptions are the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico, which have ordered that all learning be done virtually until further notice. Though face-to-face instruction is seen as much more beneficial to student learning, in the COVID-19 pandemic era, this method of instruction does not come without its own faults. As mentioned in the previous section, the safety guidelines have greatly impacted the way in-person instruction is done. The majority of the issue comes with the amount of time teachers have in the classroom. Though schools have different policies on how to handle the safety of students and faculty, most of the newly implemented protocols cause there to be less time for students to spend within the classroom. For example, in the school I am doing my student-teaching in, students were given an extra 5 minutes in between class changes to promote being socially distant during this time. In addition to this, students are given 5 minutes at the beginning of class and 5 minutes at the end of class to clean their desks and pack their belongings. It also takes much longer for students to pass the necessary materials out for a class as students are not allowed to pass things to each other. Thus, educators have had over 15 minutes of learning time taken away from them for each one of their classes.

Another issue that occurs with face-to-face instruction is actually very similar to the problems that take place in a virtual learning environment. Though the teacher-student interaction is stronger and more prevalent with in-person education, student engagement is still pretty low in these classes. As pointed out by the CDC, there is a much higher risk for the spread of the virus to occur when students and teachers are mixing freely in the classroom (“Operating School”, 2020). This basically means that s students and teachers are encouraged not to get too close to each other, meaning collaboration and individual help are less prevalent in the classroom. Just as with virtual learning, this can hinder the cognitive development of students.

Assessment and Grading

Assessment is one of the most debated topics within education as schools, districts, and even federal departments work to figure out the best ways to measure students’ performances in academia. The COVID-19 pandemic has “added fuel to the fire” to this debate. The federal government is rethinking all of its current stances on end-of-course (EOC) exams as more students, teachers, and parents express the difficulties students have had learning in the current state. South Carolina’s Department of Education decided that for the fall semester of 2020, teachers would not be mandated to have the EOC’s count as twenty percent of the students’ final grades (“Home”, 2020). Some states and even the federal government are considering getting rid of the EOC’s all together. Additionally, many colleges and universities are not considering ACT and SAT scores in their decisions in terms of accepting students (Sarikas, 2020). All of these decisions are mainly based on the mental health of students, something that will be discussed more in the next section.

Within the classroom, assessment has changed as well. Educators have two options when assessing students: formative assessment or summative assessment. Formative assessments are where the students are engaging in discourse and the teacher is observing and guiding students. The teacher grades the student based on their ability to engage in discourse rather than perform a task. Summative assessments are where students are performing a task and the teacher grades how well the students are able to perform that task. Now, with the pandemic causing student engagement to decrease in the classroom, teachers have had to rely on summative assessments more. This puts more pressure on students as they have more things to do outside the classroom, and their grades are more based on how they perform than how they are thinking. Between the changes in learning environments and the changes with assessments, students are not expected to do as well in their learning. Some research suggests that “students [were] likely to return in fall 2020 with approximately 63-68% of the learning gains in reading relative to a typical school year and with 37-50% of the learning gains in math” (Kuhfeld et al., 2020). That means that students were already starting behind to begin the fall semester. I witnessed this happening in classes that I observed as students in an Algebra II class had not mastered the concept of square roots that they were supposed to have learned the previous year. Thus, the teacher had to pause the unit on quadratic equations to reteach square roots. In addition to falling behind, one article predicts that the achievement gap will likely grow, meaning the higher scoring students will be even further separated from the lower scoring students (Terada, 2020). We will have to wait to see the results from the fall 2020 semester, from what I have seen, there is no doubt going to be changes in the achievements of students.

Mental Health

Throughout this chapter, students’ mental health has been mentioned often. As one article finds, about fifty-seven percent of adolescents use the education system as their “de facto mental health system” (Terada, 2020). The changes within the education system have greatly impacted the status of students’ mental health. For one, students are not as motivated to do work for their classes because they are surrounded by many distractions when they are learning from home. Usually, teacher’s can form some sort of relationship with their students and use that relationship to help students who are struggling with motivation or mental health in general. However, due the pandemic changes, it is much more difficult for these student-teacher relationships to form. Finally, the aforementioned assessment changes combined with the uncertainty of life has caused an increase in anxiety within students. Academic achievement and mental health are closely related, so as the pandemic continues, it will be important for educators to focus on the mental health of their students.

The Future of Education

Most of this chapter has been spent discussing the negative effects that the coronavirus pandemic has had on America’s education system. However, the United States should use this tragic event as a learning opportunity to find ways to make the public schools better. One of the most positive things the COVID-19 pandemic has done for the US public education system is show how important public schools are in America. The federal projections in 2019 projected that there were nearly 50.8 million students in US public schools (Riser-Kositsky, 2020). When March 2020 came around, and schools started shutting down, many American parents felt the effects greatly. This caused a major swing in the economy as parents had to work around taking care of their children all day. As Brookings Institution states, this pandemic has caused many stakeholders to take interest in our education system (Vegas, 2020). So hopefully, the education system will get a huge bump post-pandemic era. Another positive thing that can come out of this pandemic is a new approach to instruction for educators. As mentioned earlier, teachers are working hard to differentiate instruction for students during this time. If educators approach this the right way, they could come out of this pandemic with new and creative ways to teach. Plus, teachers are going to become much more technologically savvy through this pandemic, meaning they will have better experience in using technology as a tool for teaching their content. Finally, the COVID-19 pandemic has affected everyone in the US, so teachers can take this opportunity to bond more with students and build those relationships (even though it can be much harder with the restrictions mentioned earlier).

References

Garcia, Emma and Weiss, Elaine. “COVID-19 and Student Performance, Equity, and U.S. Education Policy: Lessons from Pre-Pandemic Research to Inform Relief, Recovery, and Rebuilding.” Economic Policy Institute, www.epi.org/publication/the-consequences-of-the-covid-19-pandemic-for-education-performance-and-equity-in-the-united-states-what-can-we-learn-from-pre-pandemic-research-to-inform-relief-recovery-and-rebuilding/.

“Home.” End-of-Course Examination Program (EOCEP) – South Carolina Department of Education – 11/21/20 8:00 PM, ed.sc.gov/tests/high/eocep.

Kuhfeld, Megan, et al. “Projecting the Potential Impacts of COVID-19 School Closures on Academic Achievement.” EdWorkingPapers.com, www.edworkingpapers.com/ai20-226.

Mcleod, Saul. “Lev Vygotsky’s Sociocultural Theory.” Lev Vygotsky’s Sociocultural Theory | Simply Psychology, www.simplypsychology.org/vygotsky.html.

“Operating Schools during COVID-19: CDC’s Considerations.” Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/community/schools-childcare/schools.html.

Riser-Kositsky, Maya. “Education Statistics: Facts About American Schools.” Education Week, 16 June 2020, www.edweek.org/ew/issues/education-statistics/index.html.

Sarikas, Christine. Which Colleges Aren’t Requiring SAT/ACT Scores for 2020 Admissions?, blog.prepscholar.com/colleges-dont-require-sat-act-scores-2020-admissions-covid.

Terada, Youki. “Covid-19’s Impact on Students’ Academic and Mental Well-Being.” Edutopia, George Lucas Educational Foundation, 24 June 2020, www.edutopia.org/article/covid-19s-impact-students-academic-and-mental-well-being.

Vegas, Emiliana, and Rebecca Winthrop. “Beyond Reopening Schools: How Education Can Emerge Stronger than before COVID-19.” Brookings, Brookings, 23 Oct. 2020, www.brookings.edu/research/beyond-reopening-schools-how-education-can-emerge-stronger-than-before-covid-19/.