HOUSTON – Educating children during the pandemic has proven a challenge with consequences education advocates believe will take years to correct.
Some experts have pointed to what they call the COVID-19 slide: cognitive regression among children who forget what they’ve been taught, due to inconsistencies in how they’ve been forced to learn.
The back-and-forth between in-person and virtual learning is central to the debate over what to do to make up for what students have lost and parents are left waiting and wondering what will be done to fix the problem.
“Our son is most successful when he has that continuum of education,” said Charmetria House.
House’s 16-year-old son, Devin attends Langham Creek High School in Cypress-Fairbanks ISD. House said when the pandemic began school shuttered and when it resumed in-person learning didn’t cut it for Devin, who has Autism.
“Because he is on the autism spectrum, he really needs someone sitting with him and getting that work done. Just popping him in front of a computer just really didn’t work,” House said.
Devin returned to in-person learning as soon as the option was made available by Cy-Fair ISD.
“He needs that continuum of education, not just the ten minutes here and there, and being in person he has that throughout the day,” House said, adding the return to the classroom has worked for her son.
Still, House said learning from home came with troubling setbacks.
“We just had an annual meeting with his educational team at school and some of the areas that he had mastered, in previous grades, in middle school he wasn’t mastering those anymore,” House said.
Devin had difficulty remembering what he’d learned in math, according to his mother.
“Specifically in terms of math, carrying and borrowing of digits, I felt he had mastered that technique but I was surprised to learn in his annual meeting that there was some regression there,” House said.
Education advocates have said inconsistencies in the quality of virtual learning have fueled the cognitive slide they cite.
“We know that there are inconsistencies in the amount of education, particularly face-to-face education that we’ve had in the past, during the pandemic. So, there are obvious signs of decline,” said Dr. Carol Hightower Parker, an associate professor in the counseling department at Texas Southern University’s College of Education.
Parker said the inconsistencies have set all students back, adding the problem digs much deeper than the pits of virtual learning.
Food insecurity, brought on by the pandemic, last month’s deep freeze, water and power outages, along with inequities in technology, among other adversities further exacerbate the problem.
According to Parker, a fix requires everyone’s attention to fix not just school administrators.
“It’s really a community responsibility and that community responsibility means bringing together the advocates for students inside and outside,” Parker said. “Looking at all of the things that might keep students from optimum learning — those things are going on exponentially during the pandemic.”
School districts statewide are developing strategies to combat the regression they’ve seen. Fort Bend ISD allows families the option of in-person or virtual learning.
Fort Bend ISD’s superintendent Dr. Charles Dupre said he’s noticed setbacks among students from all backgrounds districtwide. Dupre said the district continues to work on a plan of attack.
“Time is one of those resources that you can’t make up for,” Dupre said, adding there’s been a lot of time lost – a loss that will be better assessed once most students return to in person. He suspects that will happen this falls.
“We are having to redesign our curriculum from the district level because we know there are things students did not get that next year’s teachers are going to have to fill in some gaps that they would not normally have had to fill in,” Dupre said, adding the district will turn to special scheduling to allow students who need more time to catch up.
Overall, Dupre said correcting the setbacks from the pandemic will take anywhere from two to four years.