COVID Kids

For as long as I live, I will never understand why students were promoted during COVID. No, that’s not true. I want it to be true, but it isn’t. I know why they were promoted and it makes me angry. Do you remember those dark days? I wish I didn’t, but I do, all too vividly. I sat at home mourning the death of my father and homeschooling my son. With a background in education, I saw no reason to put my son through the facade of attending school via zoom. He hated the concept of learning from a screen–-didn’t most kids?—but he had the advantage of having an unemployed teacher as a mother. However, my spouse taught all through the pandemic. Every day, I heard tales of misery. The new technology she needed to learn along with new ways to teach material to make it accessible to students who she no longer saw in person. For nearly two years, as she worked from home, she put in more hours than she ever did when she physically commuted to school. In contrast, her students—most of them, certainly not all—barely invested themselves in the learning process. Student participation was low, while attention spans were practically nonexistent. 

At home, I saw first hand what one teacher was doing in an effort to keep the educational process alive and well. On social media, I read about other teachers scrambling to meet the needs of their students by adapting work to this new mode of delivering lessons. But I also read about teacher frustrations. Students who joined online classrooms, but refused to turn on their cameras. Students who were physically present, their faces on screen, but their minds elsewhere. Students who never bothered to “show-up,” their absences tallying up as quickly as points in a basketball game. And students who put forth such little effort their work was either done poorly or not all. Grades slipped, but no one wanted to fail students. Doing so would only have triggered their parents, angered them, riled them up to the point of demanding that teachers do more or that schools open up before it was safe to do so. There were more parents than teachers and their voices echoed loudly in Board of Education meetings as well as in the media.

Parents were not happy because students at home meant they needed to do more. They needed to care for their children during the eight hours they were accustomed to having free day care. Not only that, they were now fully responsible for ensuring that their children kept up with their school work. A greater burden fell on the parents and they resented it. Over time, that resentment festered. Parents turned against the schools and teachers became the enemy. Teachers were already doing more than they used to do, but parents still held schools responsible when student performance tanked. It was easier, after all, to blame the schools rather than themselves. Over time rigor suffered. The pressure to pass students was intense, and so teachers—who valued their jobs and didn’t want to piss off the administrators—lowered the academic bar and passed students who didn’t deserve it. Unearned promotions became an epidemic. Students who did little to no work, who made no effort to be attentive or learn new material, still miraculously passed. The loss of learning was cumulative. How can you really acquire the skills necessary for seventh grade when you never fully mastered the skills taught in fifth. You can’t. It’s not possible, but somehow school districts expected everything to fall perfectly into place once we returned to normalcy. They did not.

When the pandemic ended, students across the nation should have been tested to determine which grade they belonged in—not according to age, but according to ability. Seriously, we test our youth so exhaustively, why not give them one more exam, one that would have actually mattered and made a difference? Even though it seems logical, no one ever even entertained the idea. Why? My best guess is because it would have mobilized the parents, who—in my very humble opinion—have been granted too much power in regard to how schools operate.

This year, I am teaching sophomores. When the world went into lockdown and students were initially sent home with the chromebooks that would completely change the face of education, my students were in fourth grade. They are the same age as my son. Most of them are not reading or writing on a tenth grade level and yet, some administrators expect me and my colleagues to teach them with a high level of rigor, including questions and activities that are suitable for sophomores. The reality is, it’s just not possible. If I teach my students where they are, instead of where they are expected to be, I might have some success, but even that—considering the degree of learning loss they experienced, coupled with high levels of apathy—is questionable.

Undoubtedly, many of the issues regarding student performance and capability can be traced to COVID. This, however, is not the same as faulting COVID, which is what society tends to do. COVID did not cause the learning loss. Parents making unreasonable demands on teachers, and school districts in turn kowtowing to them created the situation in which we now find ourselves. Before COVID, the educational system in this country was broken. COVID simply exposed the problems, the deficiencies that were already rotting away at the foundation of the public school system. Even before the pandemic shuttered schools, they were promoting students who were unable to read on grade level. 

Twenty years ago, I was sitting in a faculty meeting at a different high school when the principal announced that teachers needed to start keeping logs for each student who was in danger of failing. In these logs, we were told to itemize every intervention we did for the students. This included staying after dismissal to provide tutoring, calling parents, contacting guidance counselors, differentiating work, and any conversations we had in an attempt to boost morale. It was a great deal of extra work the administration was expecting of us, but of course the extra work did not include a raise. What else is new? Barbara was enraged. She was our union representative, and she never shied away from speaking her mind. When the principal finished speaking, she stood up and asked, “What about the parents of the students who are failing? Are they expected to keep a log as well? Are we asking them to account for everything they do to ensure that their own children can be successful in school?” The principal was not pleased with her question, or the implication behind it. I can’t remember his exact response, but he essentially told her to sit down and that if she cared about her students, she’d do as she was told.

Barbara’s comment has stuck with me all these years. It’s amazing how much pressure parents put on schools, and to avoid conflict with parents, schools end up making decisions that are not in the best interest of the students who are struggling. In what world is it actually beneficial to a student to promote them to a grade where it will be impossible for them to keep up? What if, instead of faulting the school and teachers for not doing enough, parents actually sat with their children at home and read with them or helped them with their homework? What if parents held their children to higher standards and faulted them—not their teachers—when they neglected to do well in their classes? This game of blaming teachers and not failing students who do not deserve to pass only compounds the difficulties teachers—and students—experience in the classroom. If a student can’t read on a seventh grade reading level, what is the benefit of letting them go on to eighth grade? When students are operating below their grade level, they become more frustrated in class which only encourages them to act out. If they were struggling the previous year, they will only struggle more as the material gets harder. 

COVID did not create the problem of pushing failing students through school, but when the pandemic hit, the system of doing so was already in place, so schools were able to appease parents by promoting students who did little to nothing in the Zoom classrooms. If we are ever going to fix the educational system in America, we need to start retaining children who have not mastered the required skills for each grade level. By the time students reach high school, it’s impossible to close the gap between where struggling students should be and where in reality they are, and yet, teachers are still tasked with providing rigorous grade level instruction. It’s as if the powers that be want us to fail. It would be beneficial, all around, if students were held to higher standards starting in elementary school. Let’s bring back consequences for failing. If a student is not reading on grade level, hold them back until they can do so. If students can’t read, if they—and their parents—have no desire to put forth the effort required to learn, what is the point of going to school?