Here & Now

Costs and Consequences of Virtual Instruction

Frederica Freyberg:

Even as the Delta variant of COVID-19 causes a surge in cases across the state and in schools this fall, the fallout from last year with its virtual learning model and shutdowns has left many children adrift. For more on the effects of the pandemic in school and in the community, we turn to UW Madison associate professor of Human Development and Family Studies in the School of Human Ecology, Sarah Halpern-Meekin. Thanks very much for being here.

Sarah Halpern-Meekin:

Thanks for having me.

Frederica Freyberg:

So we had an anecdotal example of a second-grader this year who is functionally more like a kindergartener due to the loss of in-person learning during the height of the pandemic. How common is this kind of deficit?

Sarah Halpern-Meekin:

Well, kids have been in a really wide array of situations over the course of the pandemic. So we’ve had some kids who have received a lot of instruction, some of it in-person, some of it remote, and we have other kids who have had really very little instruction. The other thing that has varied among kids, however, is how much their needs were being met. So students who may have needed special education services, that they were not receiving during the pandemic, might have had even more learning struggles than a child whose needs were being met through online or in-person instruction.

Frederica Freyberg:

How heavy of a lift is it to get children then in that kind of circumstance back to where they need to be so that they can learn effectively?

Sarah Halpern-Meekin:

So one thing that we want to remember is how resilient kids are. So people are amazing. Kids’ brains are amazing, especially the brains of young kids. They’re doing so much growing all the time. And so what the situation is now is certainly far from destiny, right? But it’s a matter of connecting kids with the right services and supports and then also making sure that the adults in their lives have the services and supports, the resources that they need at their disposal so they can be those supportive, present adults in kids’ lives and they can be providing the kinds of interventions that kids need in order to meet their regular needs, continue building their coping skills and, you know, move forward in a positive way.

Frederica Freyberg:

You also talk about how obviously all children, and you mentioned it earlier, are not kind of suffering deficits or losses equally. How so?

Sarah Halpern-Meekin:

Well, we know that there were achievement gaps that existed before the pandemic, and so these inequities that have gotten a lot of attention during the pandemic are certainly not new. But the pandemic has forced us to face them perhaps in a different way. For example, just the basic issue of whether or not school districts could afford devices for students to use for online learning put some students in a more advantageous position than others. Whether families have access to high-speed internet varies a lot from place to place. But those issues of underfunded school districts or infrastructure limitations, those aren’t new during the pandemic. They’re just showing those problems in a new way. So those existed before. But we also know that some of the inequities that kids dealt with before manifested themselves in different ways during the pandemic. So when kids were sent home to learn, some of them went home to parents or caregivers who would normally be staying at home and could provide attentive support as the kids were doing online learning. In other families, parents or caregivers were trying to juggle work and first grade math at the same time. And some parents really had to make huge financial sacrifices to stay home with their kids, like giving up their jobs. In other families, some adolescents may have been left to supervise themselves, which could work well for some and not so well for others. So the level of support or supervision that kids had and the sacrifices that families had to make varied a lot, you know, from person to person. The other main point that I would emphasize is what I was talking about before with kids who normally receive special education services who have individualized learning plans. We know that online learning couldn’t replace or replicate what they needed oftentimes to receive an equitable learning environment, and so school-based speech or occupational therapy, for example, they might just not have happened and kids who might normally have had the support of a paraprofessional in the classroom throughout the day, they just didn’t have those things. So for those kids, they really went without a lot of their core learning tools throughout the pandemic.

Frederica Freyberg:

Easy to see why people say it’s so important to have kids back in the classroom as long as we can do so safely. Sarah Halpern-Meekin, thanks very much.

Sarah Halpern-Meekin:

Thanks for having me.