COVID’s Lost Generation?

The New York Daily News just completed a three-part series, “COVID’s Lost Generation”, on the aftermath of the COVID pandemic – as it hit New York City school kids. (Behind a paywall, sorry, Part I: NYC school kids still face devastating fallout, Part II: Isolation, Anxiety present challenges to NYC school kids, and Part III: Money, time, running out for NYC school kids left behind.)

The stories are personal, and you feel for the kids. It’s well written. I happen to think that Bamberger is one of the better NYC ed journalists at this time. But the story is more complicated than compelling personal stories.

You probably can predict the narrative: Everything was good, even great. Then abrupt school closures. Disruption. Closures lasted too long. Students did not learn. Disconnected. Lost. When school finally came back, there was “learning loss.” Can’t catch up. Students were harmed emotionally. Some won’t come back to school, or are now chronically absent.

And while bits of that happened, let’s remember the big picture, the way it played out in New York City. Let’s look, or at least start to look, at the mistakes that teachers knew about, and the mistakes that leaders continue to make.

Timeline

Let’s remember some timeline – schools closed March 2020, and the closure was extended twice, until finally mid-April they announced schools would be closed until the end of June. During that time we were supposed to teach remotely. There was no actual guidance from the DoE on remote teaching. And there was precious little sharing of experience. Each school made it up as it went along, on its own. Mulgrew’s emails were infuriating “we got this” – well no, “you” are not “we” – and just no, why would you tell people who were struggling that they are doing fine? It was draining and stressful and just horrible to have the city turned upside down by the pandemic, and not to have support.

That spring and summer the DoE and UFT worked on the premise that some sort of “hybrid” schooling would be in place for at least the start of 2020-2021. Hybrid, I wrote about it at the time, was a very very bad idea. The idea that teachers would somehow teach remotely and live? Nah. It made no sense. I first learned about it when I was meeting with other UFT programmers, and one of Mulgrew’s reps showed up and told us to find a way – and then told us not to worry about details (we were programmers – so that was not going to work). Later I complained to DoE insiders I know – and I got the same reaction from all of them – “hybrid” did not come from the DoE – it was pitched, hard, by the UFT.

The planning over the summer got worse and worse. I am convinced that “Instructional Lunch” was also a UFT-inspired plan. The ventilation checks were comical. The space considerations had moving goalposts. And then the UFT made a big show of threatening strike action. Not over needing to go remote. Over testing.

And then schools opened, some. Not high schools. And there were delays. And opens and closes. And hybrid. It was weird. The whole year was like that. And then 2021-2022 we were back in person.

We lost a year and a half of schooling. We had some remote instruction. It went ok in some places (including my school), mixed in many places, and bad in a lot of schools. There WERE kids who never really signed on, who drifted away without the social interaction.

Remote Instruction

Little reality check. There was at no time a serious effort to improve remote instruction. Sure, some schools worked at it. Many individual teachers worked at it. But the UFT leadership offered little better than Mulgrew’s infuriating “we got this!” (Mission accomplished?) which wasn’t true. And the DoE always threw the responsibility onto principals, the majority of whom were poorly equipped to address remote instruction (and too many of whom are poorly equipped to address regular instruction).

Remote instruction sucked, but there was no attempt to improve it, to make it better. That seems to have been intentional. Carranza never initiated any joint work on studying or analyzing or improving remote instruction. And Mulgrew was so committed to telling the whole world that NYC schools were open (no matter what was happening on the ground) that he wasn’t going to risk that narrative by talking about remote – even though that’s exactly what teachers and kids needed.

So that’s a sore point, as I read the Daily News articles. Remote could have been better, if we’d try (and by we, I mean Carranza and Mulgrew), but we (RC and MM) apparently didn’t try, and didn’t want to consider trying.

My school, all instruction was remote, and we definitely got a better schedule than most schools, and we got better at teaching. It still sucked, but probably a lot less than at most other high schools. Hybrid would have been worse. Zoom in a room – that’s another post – was definitely worse.

Connecting

Hey, this was bad. There were kids who completely disconnected. There were kids who substantially disconnected.

And we’re back!

In some ways, the worst part of this narrative is the return.

Imagine you are in a movie theater. Technical issue. Movie stops playing. Twenty-five minutes. And then it starts again, not where it broke, but twenty-five minutes later. What do you do?

If you are me, you tell them to “rewind” or whatever they do today. Let’s pick up where we left off, right?

If you are the DoE, you keep playing, 25 minutes ahead. And then they moan when people walk out of the theater. This is a management problem, not an “attendance” problem.

That’s what the DoE did with schools. No attempt to adjust curriculum to meet students where they ended up, after a year of pandemic, of disconnection, of remote learning (not optimized, because Carranza and Mulgrew didn’t want to be seen as supporting remote learning). No, the DoE pushed schools to keep their regular curriculum, to get back to normal, and not to attempt to meet the needs of our students.

Of course they did suggest social and emotional learning – but as a non-tested suggestion – you can guess what happened in many schools, maybe most schools. Those who already attuned to their students’ emotional needs paid more attention. And those schools that were not, did not.

And then there is “Learning Loss.” Or actually, no there’s not. There’s no such thing. Learning Loss is a misleading label, a claim that kids know less now than before March 2020. Bunk. Kids learned less than they might have – but actually lose learning? Nope. When opponents of public education talk about learning loss, what they point to is that test scores of kids who came through the pandemic are lower than similar kids previously. Kids during the pandemic learned less than previous kids had during regular years. That’s not “lost learning” – it’s just “less learning” and was totally expected.

And this talk about “catching up” – they don’t mean catching up. They mean starting the movie 25 minutes ahead, and watching kids struggle. That’s not catching up. That’s bad pedagogy. That’s actually being mean to kids.

Summary

The pandemic was horrible. The effects on schools were horrible. But the DoE, and the UFT leadership, made it much worse than it had to be.

• They wanted to announce loudly that NYC schools were open, and so they refused to help improve remote instruction.
• Their decentralized approach guaranteed no Social Emotional support in the places that already had the least.
• There was no attempt to adjust curriculum to match what students now knew.
• Instead there was a demand to “catch up” – totally unreasonable, and kind of mean.
• The language of “learning loss” does not reflect reality – no one “lost” learning, (and consists largely of comparing kids to older kids who went to school without COVID)

And finally, I’ve been kind to the NYDN, but “a lost generation”? This is a tough story, what happened was not good. But a “generation?”