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Bay Curious

How Will a Year of Pandemic Learning Impact Bay Area Schools Long Term?

Teaching and learning during the coronavirus pandemic have been difficult for everyone involved. Now that we're starting to have conversations about safely reopening schools, it's clear that the inequitable effects of the pandemic on families will be felt by schools long into the future.
Katrina Schwartz
Parents and students hold up signs in support of reopening schools at Thousand Oaks Elementary School in Berkeley, CA. Parents and students staged a sit-in for equity in school reopening on January 13, 2021. (Anna Vignet/KQED)

Parents have come to understand their child’s school day — and what it’s like to be a teacher — more intimately than they ever wanted.

Last spring, social media was filled with memes featuring tired parents applauding their children’s teachers. Everyone wanted to celebrate teachers’ heroic work and their resilience as they adapted to difficult conditions.

“It’s been interesting to see the empathy arc develop since the start of the pandemic and shelter in place last spring,” says Janelle Scott, a professor at the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Education.

“We saw a kind of immediate outpouring of public empathy for teachers, but also this groundswell of ‘pay teachers whatever they want.’ And that we’ve been woefully under-compensating them for what they do.”

Scott says that empathy has been tested recently as many parents call for schools to reopen for in-person learning. Some families and many teachers fear their going back to in-person school will expose them to COVID-19. School administrators have been caught in the middle, trying to meet the needs of all parties.

“One of the more critical challenges in front of us in the next few years is to restore some two-way empathy between families and schools,” says Scott. “And to really appreciate that teachers and school leaders and district leaders are bound up in the same kind of destiny that families are.”

That includes devastating personal losses, mental health challenges, the lasting health effects from COVID-19 and economic hardship.

Even after it’s safe for schools to reopen for in-person learning, Scott says, schools do not exist in a silo — and they’ll be affected by all the inequalities and hardships of the pandemic.

“The concentration of illness in Black and Latino and poor communities in California is important because it means that some communities, given our segregation, have no idea of the scale of loss and devastation,” says Scott.

She herself has two kids: one in middle school, the other in high school. Scott understands how challenging learning online and at home has been for families like hers.

She’s also teaching university classes online. In both cases, she has tried to prioritize the mental health and well-being of her children and her students, knowing that they can pick up their school work once those fundamental needs are met.

It has been a long, frustrating year. Teachers are as tired as families. Many educators were not trained to teach online, and have had to learn new tools and techniques — while balancing the needs of their own kids and families.

“None of us would prefer to be doing it this way,” says Scott. “And yet the conditions require it.”

“I think about the over 400,000 people who have died and I just remind myself how fortunate we are to be frustrated by not being able to get into the Zoom room,” she says.

Scott also points out that not only are Black and Latino families experiencing higher COVID-19 infection rates, proportionately, but their rates of severe illness and death are much higher as well. Some families have lost multiple loved ones, and haven’t even been able to grieve for them in the usual ways. She says these disparities are likely contributing to the racial divide between parents calling for a return to in-person learning, and those who are more cautious.

“In cities like New York and Chicago, where in-person learning has been offered, Black and Latino families are much less likely to elect to return to in-person learning,” says Scott.

One long-term effect on education in the Bay Area she sees may be higher private school enrollment, as wealthier parents opt out of the public school system, frustrated at what they perceive as a slow return.

“Part of the political chaos of the last year has meant that there is a lot of very conflicting and confusing information about what constitutes a safe school reopening. And I think the problem is that we have not centralized that information,” says Scott.

Scott points out that the pandemic is not the only big news from this year. The nation — and its schools — have been grappling with institutionalized racism, a contentious election and a violent mob of pro-Trump supporters taking over the U.S. Capitol building on Jan. 6.

“Teachers and school leaders and children and families have been at the nexus of all of those things,” Scott says. “I am actually encouraged by the conversations that I have been a part of in my local community, about really wanting education to be more holistic, to be more humane — to really help students make sense of their world and to become informed democratic citizens.”

Scott says she hopes that as we emerge from this pandemic, we don’t forget that all the economic, healthf and emotional difficulties of this year will still be with teachers, kids and families. They are going to need support — and help weathering a storm that will continue long after everyone has been vaccinated.

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