Thank You Kids (We See You)

 A lovely op-ed from the Atlanta Journal-Constitution by mom Beth Gollum. Here's the start of it:

For a few years now, our children have borne many of the sacrifices in the battle against COVID-19. They’ve sat out of proms, kindergarten graduations, field trips, and even for some, being in the schoolhouse in its entirety.

As the era of assessing impacts of the fallout from the pandemic are here in the form of mental health statistics and academic performance numbers, it’s a good time to say thank you during this season of gratitude.

Children are thirsty for a framework and narrative to draw meaning and conclusion to difficult experiences. One way to teach children how to write the narrative of experience is to teach the practice of gratitude. Keeping a keen eye for the glimmer of hope, the silver lining in the dark clouds. Gratitude draws our attention to what can be gained to help us cope with what has been lost. As youth so often do, they learn best by example, so here is a message to our children.

In her message to American children she says (bold mine):

On behalf of the 71 million baby boomers, 65 million Gen Xers, 73 million millennials in this country, all who benefited from this generation of students making sacrifices, thank you.

I have seen many signs displayed throughout the pandemic, all inspiring, encouraging and beautiful (many of which you’ve even made). “Thank you, essential workers; Thank you, teachers; Thank you, health care professionals; Thank you, researchers.”

One that I didn’t see was, “Thank you, kids.”

We see your sacrifices and lingering impacts of this pandemic and are thankful for your tenacity, your resolve, your valor. We are committed to helping give your generation the ability to advance like the generations before ours did for us.

While this is a kind editorial, what I am hearing on Twitter is that there are some who believe that districts and teachers who supported school closures are going to be in for a world of hurt, whether directly or indirectly. Teachers' unions are a big target. 

It is true most districts had not prepared themselves, their schools, their staff and certainly not parents for remote learning for students. That is a fault that needs to be corrected because this kind of situation could happen again.

However, what were districts to do? Stay open with a pandemic that we knew little about? It turned out that COVID was less of a problem for children and we are all glad for that. But did scientists, physicians and superintendents know this for certain? Should they have played with students' lives with little data? 

My belief is they did the right thing but were badly prepared. But it feels like many people think districts and teachers should be punished in some way for these choices. 

For example, here's a story from Education Next, Parents Punish Schools That Stayed Physically Closed During the Pandemic (bold mine). Their premise is:

Many parents, frustrated with the lack of in-person schooling options, began to pull their children from public schools.

During the 2020–21 school year, enrollment in public schools fell by an average of 3 percent nationally. These declines were larger in districts that reopened remotely compared to those that returned to in-person learning, but a careful look at enrollment data reveals that the story is more complicated than it would initially appear. 

That’s because the districts that chose to remain closed during the 2020–21 school year were already losing enrollment in the years leading up to the pandemic. These pre-pandemic declines make it challenging to determine how much of the enrollment drop that accompanied the pandemic was driven by districts’ decisions to remain remote in 2020–21. Nor have researchers yet examined whether enrollment losses continued into the 2021–22 school year.

And that's a great question for Seattle Schools where we know that their enrollment numbers were going down. But the pandemic can't explain all that. Birthrates, housing costs, etc. could all be factors. 

Our findings provide the strongest evidence to date on how remote instruction affected public-school enrollments over the first two years of the pandemic. 

They confirm that it was how districts responded to the pandemic, and not simply the pandemic itself, that caused enrollment to decline. Districts’ pandemic instructional responses explain the bulk of the difference between the large enrollment rebound the most-in-person districts saw in the second pandemic school year and the continued declines in the most-remote districts.

 In fact, the widened gulf seen in the second full pandemic school year suggests that enrollment impacts from school districts’ responses to the pandemic may have been as large as or larger than impacts from the pandemic itself. 

At a more basic level, our results confirm that large numbers of parents are willing to vote with their feet when their fundamental preferences are not met. To be clear, our findings do not support assertions that a majority of families are dissatisfied with their local schools. They do, however, suggest that a subset were dissatisfied enough to find alternative placements because of district actions. 

In short, how districts chose to respond to the pandemic mattered—and may have consequences for their finances for years to come.