Learning During COVID: A Cut-Off Experience
Written by Amy Park, Lonestar Writer
While the 20-month experience most students lived through was mostly filled with sleeping (or not sleeping), procrastinating, and watching TikToks, the increasing rate of high school dropouts presented the flip side of the nearly 2-year long quarantine and the difficulties students had while struggling to make ends meet.
Although many schools were able to start off the 2020–21 academic year with in-person attendance, high vaccination rates, and mask policies in place, the pandemic’s lasting fallout has taken a devastating toll on education and will be remembered as one of the most challenging years for educators and students.
While for some, remote learning meant sleeping in or turning in homework a minute before midnight, for others, the closure of classrooms meant a drop in priority, which was only worsened by the lack of digital devices or resources required to attend classes.
With more than 600,000 Texas public school students leaving assignments incomplete or remaining unresponsive to teacher outreach during lockdown, administrators had no way of contacting students after the abrupt dismissal of schools left districts to go off of outdated contacts and old addresses.
Nearly 15,000 students were missing by the new school year in the Houston Independent School District alone, and some schools would have dozens of staff members visiting houses door-to-door in search of students.
For some, the economic impact of the pandemic involved stepping up to raise money on behalf of the family, meaning schoolwork and class attendance would have to come second to an income.
The overwhelming amount of research on teen labor supports that more work hours means lower grades and a higher chance of dropout, and while jobs can provide an invaluable learning experience, working for more than 20 hours a week would drastically change students’ school lives and not for the better.
Oftentimes, the time commitments of a job entailed a disengagement from classes and led to dropping out in many cases, seemingly inevitable as unemployment rates began to rise and students searched for work to make up for the job losses. Before the pandemic, an estimated 114,055 Texas students were considered homeless in 2019, with 7% of those students living in hotels or motels.
With this number only rising during the lockdown, the loss of income for many families forced them into extended-stay hotels and other types of temporary housing, leaving several students without internet access or devices. Schools were forced to address the disparity between students and their apparent differences in resources by communicating the requirements of classrooms, which only became increasingly harder as attempts to contact families and students repeatedly failed.
In an assessment of over 1.6 million students across 40 states, results showed that the “time equivalent” of points behind in math and reading — 10 points behind in math and 9 in reading — was 5 months of learning behind in math and 4 months for reading compared with previous years. Students’ reading progression performed relatively better than math, which could be attributed to the more independent education reading requires, along with parents being better equipped to support learning in reading compared to other subjects like math.
With such a significant loss in learning, the Texas Senate recently passed a bill that allowed a parental option for student retention in which high schoolers can repeat any course they were enrolled in during the 2020–2021 school year. While parents’ written requests for course retakes may allow students to strengthen their academic foundations and relearn topics for a better understanding, studies have shown that students are 50% more likely to drop out if they’ve been asked to repeat a grade. This number jumps to 90% if they’re asked twice due to the internal questioning of their own abilities that ensues.
With 33,742 students in 55 Houston school districts still unenrolled by the start of the 2021–2022 school year, many high schoolers are simply “lost from the system.” While the reasons for these disappearing students may vary, the fact remains that COVID left a detrimental impact on education everywhere.
