The Painful Aftermath of School Closures

How did we get it so wrong? What are we gonna do now?

Alec MacGillis, one of the few journalists I trust more since the pandemic has a good new article out in the New Yorker about the national chronic absenteeism crisis affecting public schools across the country.

Nationally, chronic absenteeism — 18 or more days missed in a single year — has doubled since the pandemic. In many major districts — including Cleveland — it now hovers around 50 percent. It’s 30 percent in California and 40 percent across the whole state of New Mexico (one of the states that imposed the longest school closures).

The article interviews a lot of people caught up in the problem and they point the finger pretty clearly at extended pandemic-era school closures.

“They did school online. I hated it,” a Detroit-area mother of 8 tells MacGillis. “They took it as a joke most of the time, playing in class, because they felt like they were at home and they could do that.”

After that: “They got too comfortable at home,” she said.

The extent of the damage done here is absolutely astronomical. In Detroit, and some other places, they’re now paying private contractors to visit parents of chronically absent students at their home and try to coax them back to school.

MacGillis also notes that schools send mixed signals about the importance of attendance. Often seem to be searching for an excuse to cancel school at the last moment. That was something I related to as a parent. The school district my mom lives in, for example, closed school this week because of heavy rain (groan). We get, on one hand messages from school districts saying “school attendance is important!” and on the other hand they say “don’t bother coming to school today because there’s rain in the forecast.” What kind of message does that send?

It is a giant mess. I’m really angry and concerned about all this. Not just angry that we’re in this position, but that we seem to care so little (and by “we” I guess I mean more privileged people who dominate “the discourse” or anyone who’s in a position to do something about it, respond appropriately).

These school closures did tremendous damage to our education system. And now it seems like we’d rather just ignore it than face what we’ve done.

Cleveland’s public school district is in huge trouble. Chronic absenteeism is 45 percent, according to the Plain Press. Violence has surged. Half of current fourth graders failed to meet “basic” literacy levels, according to Crain’s Cleveland. If the state legislature hadn’t eliminated reading requirements, they would have all had to repeat third grade (in a typical pre-pandemic year, 85 percent of students tested above basic). Also CMSD is facing a half-billion-dollar budget gap in the next few years.

Similar stories, with respect to test scores and absenteeism, are playing out in Baltimore and Detroit and almost every major district in the country.

I — happily! — voted to pass four levies since I’ve lived in the city and I have to say, my confidence in the district and that it would make good use of the money is not high right now. I feel burned and like the district can’t be trusted to uphold its mission. It’s a feeling I came by honestly and painfully.

It’s frustrating because I watched this happen in slow motion, knowing it was going to be bad and I could not stop it. And now I’m sorta fascinated with how we fucked things up so badly. It’s mind bending to me.

I remember when CMSD first closed schools, my son was only in preschool. There really wasn’t any attempt at “distance learning” at that time. They sent home this hand out with a “daily activity” for parents every day. It would say things like “take a walk with your child and count the number of houses you pass.”

At that time nobody knew what was going on so we just stayed home and played video games and tried to hold it together. It was only pre-school anyway.

I was pretty cautious about covid initially. I self quarantined. I scolded people about masks. We washed oranges after we got home from the grocery store.

That summer, I watched the data very carefully. First daycares reopened. Our daycare was one of the early ones. I watched the data coming out of day cares, state of Ohio official data, that had reopened that summer. The data wasn’t real conclusive, either way in my reading. You couldn’t say it didn’t have an effect, but it was clear pretty early that childcare settings were not becoming scenes of mass death, the way the most alarmist voices predicted. (It was kind of interesting, most people were willing to acknowledge the “essential”-ness of daycare, but not elementary school, a contradiction that was always hard for me to square. None of the arguments seemed to have any logical consistency once you scrutinized them.)

Doing months locked down with a 3 and 5 year old was really hard. I struggled a lot with it. I watched very closely about what was going to happen at school in the fall. I had a journalism background and a natural curiosity plus a lot at stake. So I was looking at the data pretty closely and I was a pretty sophisticated reader, had experience analyzing data, but that’s the extent of it, nothing more.

At that time, even though I was pretty cautious, I would have been comfortable returning my kids to school, with a few precautions. Many of my mom friends felt the same. We knew from the get-go that children were low risk. I had work to think about. I didn’t have the kind of money where I could just quit my job and not have to worry about it. I have to say that people who didn’t have economic concerns hanging over their heads during all this — that was an enormous privilege. And I think too many people like that dominated the discourse too much. Acknowledging any tradeoffs was treated as heresy.

Some of my mom friends, they moved their kids schools so they could return to work that fall. And I weighed doing that very, very throughly. But when my school said they weren’t going to open the first nine weeks, I thought I could make it nine weeks. There was no guarantee the Catholic schools I could attend for free with a voucher would remain open. And there was no guarantee my school would remained closed past nine weeks. This was an enormous sacrifice for me, money wise, and in other respects.

At that time, though, I was ideologically committed to public schools. I honestly regret that decision quite a bit. One thing I’ve always thought was bullshit, is when parents choose them dumb ideological convictions over their kids. But now I can see that I did that.

What would have been best for my self interest was to quietly pull them out of public schools and I would have in a heartbeat, had I known my kids school would remain closed for a year and even then return only part time.

I was very liberal. In fact I had published a book about a public health issue that summer. But I watched with despair as the debate about school opening became politically polarized late that season. In my opinion, a sober reading of the science was reassuring. People hadn’t yet made covid their whole personality, and basis for their moral reasoning yet, but that was what happened.

This was a pretty mainstream position. All of Europe, essentially, went back to school that fall. And school opening was supported by the American Academy of Pediatrics at the time — that fall. (Although shamefully, the organization retracted its recommendation following blowback.)

But there was a digging in that happened around this time. There were pretty strident accusations. A lot of people on Twitter seemed to enjoy it. Seemed to benefit personally from styling themselves as more caring than the bad people who favored in person school. A lot of young white men, in particular, had a lot of fun at the expense of women who protested about this policy, myself included.

That was a little later though. That fall I was voluntarily doing Zoom school and I noticed two things right away. It was HARD. The stress of trying to make all the different applications work — this was before Zooming to meetings was a normal thing — was extremely difficult for my husband and I, even though we’re both pretty computer savvy professionals who work on computers all day.

Getting my son to cooperate was also very, very hard. (You should try getting a kindergartener to sit at a table attentive to a screen that’s malfunctioning half the time for hours and hours.) The way this was idealized and forgotten about was really something. Nobody checked in. Everyone sorta moved on.

The other thing I noticed right away was no one was coming to Zoom school. My son had attended pre school at the same school the previous year. During that time, parents would all drop them off in person every morning and wait together. There were 14 kids in his class, almost all lower income. I knew the parents and the kids. Pre school was optional so I knew these families were serious about getting their kids a good education. It was a very good experience for me overall, quite honestly.

But Zoom kindergarten was a different story. For the first few weeks, nobody else logged on, except the one other middle-income, white family I had roped into enrolling at this school. Over the course of the year, a few other kids made random appearances now and then. There was one kid who didn’t have any parents at home and was being supervised by a brother who was just a few years older than him. I think he had behavioral problems or ADHD as well. I am confident he got nothing out of the instruction.

Frankly, despite my killing myself to make it work, my son wasn’t getting much out of it either. I remember they would try to do online gym class — again, LOL. You really feel like a fool participating in things like that. We would be the only one there. The poor gym, teacher — he’s a young guy, I assume he probably would have been comfortable with in person teaching, but who knows I guess — he would say things like “take a balled up sock and throw it into the garbage can.” And that would be gym.

One day I told him, “I have time I can take the kids to the school yard next door, I’m going to do that instead of Zoom gym.” And he was like “I don’t blame you.” It felt weird to sort of acknowledge openly we were going to “skip” school, at the same time, it was so pointless, such a waste of both of our time and energy. It wasn’t the teachers’ faults — they were great in our case, amazing actually. The whole thing was just a bad idea.

We had sorta lost the plot. Now my five year old is just like in the middle of some culture war that has little relationship to what is actually happening in my life and what I am observing first hand. So I was standing with this teacher awkwardly, who was instructing my 5 year old son to throw a sock around in my kitchen.

At the time, my kid was regressing socially emotionally and learning nothing. My house was chaotic. I couldn’t make any money while caring for a 3 and 5 year old in home (my kindergartener was expected to report to three Zoom meetings a day.)

Meanwhile, everything else in society opens. College and pro football and basketball are happening. The rest of the state is open. All the suburban schools are open at a certain point. (We could see them, “oh look North Olmsted isn’t experiencing mass school casualties and their schools are open.”) But the goal posts kept shifting. We invented rationalizations for keeping public schools that poor kids attended closed while everything else was open. We defended that double standard somehow on equity grounds.

Here I was, quitting my job to do Zoom school, and as soon as I started questioning this, I was no longer credible. In fact, I was a bad person. The abuse I took was epic. People who had zero experience with Zoom school, and I could tell weren’t curious enough to investigate the actual outcomes, would scold me in the most condescending imaginable terms. I mean, how could we ignore the fact that all of Europe had schools open and that it was going well? I was floored. Somehow we did.

Anyway, in my family that December we all got covid anyway. I hadn’t left the house in six days when my husband brought it home (he was being cautious too) and gave me a mega dose. Oh and also we infected my 66 year old mother who was staying with us to help with Zoom school so I could try to scrape together a little money and work a few hours. My kids were barely impacted by the disease. The youngest never even became symptomatic.

At this point my son had missed almost a full year of school. Soon I was (double) vaccinated. Cleveland and Akron were the only districts still closed. But there was a near media blackout. Nobody was talking about it. People went out of their way not to wade into the debate. They could see for themselves how ugly it was. So nobody was inquiring how it was going with CMSD’s 35,000 vulnerable kids, who were the subjects of the most extreme experiment in education in my lifetime.

I will never forget it. I don’t think the kids will either, even if Twitter’s most self righteous PhD holders haven’t given it a second thought (I can verify that).

There are people who will say “water under the bridge.” “We didn’t know any better.” I could look right across district lines and see school functioning semi normally. My mom friends who opted for in person catholic school, their kids attended school for nine months longer without issue. Just a few blocks away my kids brand new school sat empty. In fact, those moms didn’t get corona — despite one of them being a nurse and the other working in person the whole time — and we did.

Anyway, like I said, I knew it was going to be bad. I knew very soon that Zoom school was useless. That most Cleveland students were not able and/or willing to do it. I knew trying to do it was super frustrating and exerted enormous economic and emotional stresses on families. And also that it was no guarantee you wouldn’t get covid anyway. There was never any way to guarantee that.

I thought, I have to do something. At the time I had a little following on Twitter. My followers were mostly progressives from major cities. And I started say, “hey guys the science on this looks pretty compelling.” People got really pissed off and called me a terrible person essentially. It was a full-on character assassination. Often it was explicitly misogynist (silly “wine moms” etc.) I was no longer credible. People wagged their fingers and dismissed me, and moved on with their lives. People I was friends with, who had been to my house and eaten, just to like score points with their friends, it seemed to me, but they probably don’t see it that way, but I can’t unsee it. The hypocrisy and cowardice that under lied the whole failure was spectacular.

I haven’t been able to put it behind me. I think I’ll be trying to understand it my whole life.

And here’s the thing. Even if, let’s be charitable, we say “water under the bridge.” It’s not under the bridge. The bridge is sorta on fire. And still the same dogma, still the same dismissals and disinterest, but now the extent of the suffering and fallout is being realized and recorded and we still emphatically do not care.

At this point a lot of media figures have acknowledged the extent of the problem (but in my opinion not the ones who bear the most direct responsibility). Some of them (again not the right ones) have said pretty plainly that school closures were a huge mistake. But we haven’t ever taken stock of how this huge disaster unfolded. Of who is responsible, what mechanisms protect them. We introduced an enormous degree of chaos into a fragile system and we’re going to pay a high price (Well not “we”, the people who can least afford it).

I don’t have a lot of hope at this point that we are going to right the ship. There doesn’t seem to be any hopeful realignment on this, a big change in course. Only a slow, maybe irreversible, withering of this important institution that I took for granted.