The Third Pandemic School Year is Better than It Appears
In headlines across the nation, back-to-school stories are painting a grim portrait of the coming school year.
The Delta surge sent COVID case rates soaring to record levels in ten states. Pediatric hospitalization rates increased nearly fivefold in the span of seven weeks, reaching all-time highs at the beginning of September. Meanwhile, the proportion of case rates among school-aged-children continues to skyrocket. Debates over school mitigation practices, especially mask and vaccine mandates, rage on. Hundreds of thousands of students have faced quarantines in the first few weeks of school as stories of dreaded school closures appear to be mounting. Teachers, administrators, parents and students may naturally fear that the third pandemic school year looks to be just as chaotic and disrupted as the last.
However, there is plenty of reason for hope. I spent last year tracking school district closures across the country, and three key changes in how schools are responding this year are building the foundations for a dramatically different, and better school year.
The first change is that districts have rejected preemptive district-wide closures. Data from Burbio show that as of mid-September, in-person learning has been restricted or suspended in about 1,700 schools, from within 386 districts in 38 states. That may seem like a lot, but the contrast to last September is stark. A year ago, over 2,000 districts that included more than 30,000 schools in all 50 states were fully remote, according to AEI’s Return to Learn Tracker. Far more were only partly in person. National COVID case rates, which are four times higher this week than a year ago, cannot explain this change. States and school districts are working off a new playbook, one that is putting in-person learning over defensive district-wide closures.
In a second major change, when specific COVID spikes trigger closures, they are happening at the individual school level. These school-specific closures, which are usually in response to substantial COVID cases in schools or quarantine-induced staffing challenges, result in small portions of a districts’ students missing school. Some states have even gone so far as to prohibit district-level closures by law or executive orders. For most states, however, this shift is merely a new standard operating procedure. Indeed, this fall is the first time since March 2020 that district-wide closures have been the exception, rather than the rule. The shift to responsive, school-level closures mean far more students will spend the fall learning in-person.
Finally, closures this year have been much, much shorter. When the pandemic first ensued in March 2020, closures lasted through the end of the school year. In the 2020-21 school year, district shifts to hybrid or remote instruction were measured in months. By comparison, this year’s closures have been temporary — some lasting two weeks and many for less than a week. This year’s closures resemble last year’s quick quarantines, where schools would briefly shut their doors after an exposure to COVID.
Why the changes to schools’ mitigation strategies? Several factors tell the story.
Vaccines blunted the threat to the country’s most vulnerable populations. Parents, administrators, and students alike have growing fatigue from last year’s closures. Mitigation methods proved to be successful over the course of last school year. Nearly all school districts had returned to some in person learning by the end of last school year, and having tasted some normalcy again, few are ready to go back.
Should districts keep their present course, these new patterns of school district responses will make for a better school year for millions of students and their families. Students will spend far more time in classrooms. Given remote schooling’s devastating effects on student learning, especially for disadvantaged students, the benefits of keeping schools open cannot be overstated.
This school year will have serious challenges, most often from targeted quarantines. Not only will quarantines cause abrupt disruptions for families, schools will have to provide meaningful instructional opportunities for quarantined students with no warning. Families and schools will have to bear these short-term burdens. On net, however, time out of school will be episodic, rather than extended and the exception, rather than the norm. That will make for a better school year in the long run.
This third pandemic school year won’t have a carefree fall that we had in 2019, but neither will it be the same doom and gloom so many endured over the past 18 months. Done well, targeted limited closures can temper the chaos, limit disruptions, and maximize student learning in this third pandemic year.
Nat Malkus is a senior fellow and deputy director of education policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute.
