Schools closed and went remote to fight COVID-19. The impacts linger 5 years later.
American schools and the ways students learn have changed since the height of the COVID-19 pandemic five years ago.
After local and federal health officials ordered schools to closein March 2020, most campuses in the U.S. shuttered and educators pivoted to virtual learning. Many students lost fundamental reading and math skills after learning remotely for months, and some teachers left the profession altogether by the time schools returned the next school year, national data from the U.S. Department of Education shows.
Educators nationwide have said that their students returned to classrooms after the pandemic with weaker academic skills and that it has been a challenge to catch kids up.
Student academic setbacks are proving difficult to reverse. Recent national test scores from the National Center for Education Statistics show a bleak picture of recovery aftermath the pandemic. Reading scores are worsening and math scores haven't recovered on a national average.
"The abrupt shift to remote learning challenged student and teacher engagement, dramatically decreased instructional time, and hindered student understanding," reads a report about the effects of the pandemic on education from the Annie E. Casey Foundation, a philanthropy focused on ensuring young people have access to opportunity.
Michael Petrilli, president of the national education policy think tank Thomas B. Fordham Institute, said the test results showing dismal academic recovery lead him to believe American education won't return to pre-pandemic levels until there's "a generation of kids who were not impacted by the pandemic."
Many of the kids kept home by school closures during the height of the pandemic lost some of the most foundational skills in reading and math, Petrilli said.
"The fourth graders now were in kindergarten when they were sent home. Many were doing Zoom school," Petrilli said. "It's absolutely worth noting that this is a precious period – the early grades."
Though the consequences linger, supporters of school closures have said it was the right choice.
Last year, Rep. Jahana Hayes, D-Conn., a former high school teacher of 15 years, pushed back against Republican criticism and said closing schools was a safety response based on information available at the time.
“We don’t need Brookings (Institute) data to tell us that if kids are not in school, they won’t learn. That’s pretty basic,” Hayes said, referencing the Washington think tank. “But we also know if kids are dead, they don’t learn.”
Here are a few ways education has changed in the past five years.
Remote learning has enhanced digital interfaces in classrooms
Many internet tools educators used during pandemic-based remote learning ‒ from the math learning platform Zearn to the game-based platform Kahoot! ‒ have a lasting presence in American classrooms today.
"One of the most immediate and visible changes brought about by the pandemic was the rapid integration of technology into the classroom," reads a recent report called "Rewiring the Classroom: How the COVID-19 Pandemic Transformed K-12 Education" from the Brookings Institution, a nonprofit public policy organization.
"Before COVID-19, many schools were easing into the digital age," Brian Jacob and Cristina Stanojevich wrote for the Brookings Institution. "The switch to remote learning in March 2020 forced schools to fully embrace Learning Management Systems (LMS), Zoom, and educational software almost overnight."
Teachers now frequently use these digital tools – along with artificial intelligence – in their classrooms.
Behavioral problems
Educators are struggling to teach kids the skills they lost out on during remote learning while managing a surge in post-pandemic misbehavior, recent data from EdWeek shows.
More than 70% of 1,000 educators said in an EdWeek Research Center national survey that students were misbehaving more than they did before the pandemic.
Several studies show that kids lost out on fundamental socialization skills during pandemic school closures. Student behavioral problems and mental health needs have become a persistent problem for schools since then.
A spike in outbursts in America's classrooms coincides with a national youth mental health crisis, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Several educators have also told Paste BN over the past few years that students misbehave in class more often since the onset of the pandemic.
Wendy Gonzalez, a fourth grade teacher at Downer Elementary School in Richmond, California, said many of the students in her class didn't "know how to talk to each other" during the 2022-2023 school year.
“These are kids who spent most of their formative years – kindergarten, first grade, second grade, third grade, when you’re supposed to be learning social skills – not learning them. They don’t have those social skills,” Gonzalez said.
More recently, Brittany Archibald-Swank, a veteran fourth grade teacher at a public school in Urbana, Illinois, said she has had to pause her lessons almost daily over the past several years to help or comfort a student who is off task.
Many students in her class "bring a lot of trauma with them that impacts how they learn and how they react in a school setting," she said late last year.
Teacher turnover
Educators who were frustrated by remote learning and other conditions quit teaching and departed from classrooms across the nation, leaving school administrators nationwide with shortages of teachers and substitutes on staff, according to a RAND survey from 2021. About 8% of educators left the teaching profession after the 2020-2021 school year, according to the U.S. Department of Education's National Center for Education Statistics.
New teachers have replaced some veteran educators since the pandemic, according to the National Council on Teacher Quality.
New research on the lingering effects of the pandemic on teachers from Lora Bartlett, professor of education at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and her colleagues show that the pandemic era "hastened a downward spiral in career satisfaction and longevity for teachers."
"The biggest declines in satisfaction took place in places where teachers described experiencing a lack of support and respect from school leaders and the public during the pandemic and felt that their expertise was often ignored, including in plans to address post-pandemic learning loss," Bartlett wrote in an email.
Some educators shared in the research that "increased political intervention" during the pandemic "that sought to curtail teacher freedom and decision-making around curriculum materials and instruction" also played a role, Bartlett said.
Disadvantaged students were the most likely to enter classrooms with new teachers, substitutes, teachers with the least amount of training, and a shrinking number of the most experienced teachers, based on a Paste BN analysis.
To address teacher shortages, some states have tailored their requirements and funded programs to attract teachers to the profession, according to the National Council on Teacher Quality.
Alternative schools to traditional neighborhood schools
Many parents who were upset by school closures opted to move their kids outside their neighborhood public schools – and have kept them there, according to data from EdChoice, a nonprofit organization that advocates for school vouchers.
One set of survey results by the National School Choice Awareness Foundation shows that interest in school choice grew during the pandemic. More than half of the 3,820 parents of school-age children the group surveyed in 2023 either had considered or were considering a new school at the time.
Some families chose to enroll their kids in micro schools or other small learning communities, while others moved to charter schools, home-schooling or private schools that were open for in-person learning during the pandemic, according to data from EdChoice.
School choice advocates also capitalized on parent dissatisfaction with public schools to create new alternatives to traditional education.
Several states have since passed legislation that entitles every child's family to use public funds for other schooling options, according to EdChoice's "School Choice in America" dashboard.
President Donald Trump has elevated the modern school choice movement since his first presidential term during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Now in his second term, Trump signed an executive order in January directing his newly appointed education secretary, Linda McMahon, to bolster school choice programs and calling on Congress to pass two related bills: the School Choice Now Act and the Education Freedom Scholarships and Opportunity Act.
Chronic absenteeism
New data from the National Center for Education Statistics shows that student attendance dipped during COVID-19 and that student attendance rates haven't recovered to pre-pandemic levels.
Chronic absenteeism rates among students grew 15% to 26% from 2018 to 2023 because of the pandemic, according to an analysis from the American Enterprise Institute. Chronic absenteeism refers to when a student misses 10% of more of the school year.
The organization reports the trend began during the pandemic and continued when schools returned to in-person learning.
"The urgent need to recover from pandemic learning loss will be severely hampered by current rates of chronic absenteeism, making it the most pressing post-pandemic problem in public schools," according to the American Enterprise Institute's analysis.
Contributing: Savannah Kuchar
Contact Kayla Jimenez at kjimenez@usatoday.com. Follow her on X at @kaylajjimenez.