COVID Panic Syndrome and Public School Performance

School systems in Virginia featuring the highest levels of students opting for fulltime, remote instruction have performed the worst post-COVID. Did COVID panic drive this result?

They just can’t let go of COVID panic.

The performance of public schools through the course of the COVID phenomenon has remained much in the news.  Public school performance first made it into the news in August after the Department of Education started to put out the 2022 edition of its “National Assessment of Educational Performance.”  The report revealed that, two years after COVID first emerged, school performance on standardized exams had yet to recover to pre-COVID levels.  School performance has made it back into the news, it seems, because the Department posted more results on October 23.

In August and September, I posted some number of pieces about public school performance in Virginia.  The analyses in those pieces worked out of data from the state’s own “Standards of Learning” exams. 

Results in those analyses paralleled much of headline results in the press: performance in all general subject areas—math, reading, writing, history and science—declined in all school systems, but there is evidence that performance among black and Hispanic school children had deteriorated more sharply than the performance of white and Asian school children.  That said, the highest-performing school kids proved to be the most resilient.  Their performance exhibited the least deterioration.  As the Los Angeles Times has put it, “[L]ow-performing students’ scores declined at much higher rates than higher-performing students.”

What policy-relevant conclusions might come of all of this?  It is easy to amorphously blame school closures for the precipitous (and persisting) loss in performance, and school systems have done just that.  (“Don’t blame us!  It was COVID!”)  Admittedly, there may be some basis for that.  But, what is it about school closures that might reveal any actionable wisdom?  One could argue—and many observers have argued—that closing the schools to in-person instruction was a mistake, but, given the politics of COVID abatement in 2020, would keeping the schools open have been a politically-viable option?

So, what have we learned from the 2020 experience?  We learned that schools were not ready to accommodate remote learning.  The schools had not already established mature remote-learning platforms.  Thus, forcing students and teachers out of in-person instruction into remote-instruction did not conform to an interesting experiment.  It is not as though we had conducted a clean test of in-person instruction against remote instruction.  We learned that no one was ready for it. 

But what of the 2020/21 school and the 2021/22 school year?  When would the excuse of “the pandemic” become stale?  In the 2020/21 school year, all but two school systems in Virginia afforded the students the option of at least some share of in-person instruction.  By the time the 2021/22 school year rolled around, the State of Virginia required all school systems to afford students some degree of access to in-person instruction.  It is not obvious how liberally school systems went on to provide in-person instruction, but the State does report data on the proportion of students who opted to stick with fulltime, remote instruction in 2020/21 or to revert to fulltime, in-person instruction in 2020/21.  These data exhibit much variation across school districts.

The data show that students performed much better in school systems that featured higher shares of in-person instruction.  It might be tempting to suggest that barring access to in-person instruction induced precipitous declines in performance, but the data we have really don’t afford a clean test of such an hypothesis.  Part of the difficulty is that the most of the data on remote instruction and in-person instruction derive from processes that involve self-selection on the part of students as well as on the part of school systems.  One might have rationalized the fact that the deterioration in performance was concentrated on “low-performing students” by guessing that such students were coming from households that had been least equipped to deal with school closures.  Such students might have tended to be the children of working parents—of people who had to go off to work rather than stay home and manage their kids.  These were people for whom public school amounts not merely to a mode of education but also to a kind of all-day child care.

The difficulty with such a rationalization is that most school systems did start to open up in 2020/21, and all of them were required to offer the option of in-person instruction in 2021/22.  And, yet, one can still find much variation across school systems in the proportion of students who had opted for fulltime, remote instruction in certain school systems.  It was in just such school systems that performance tended to be the worst.  Were the lowest-performing students in such school systems opting for remote, online instruction even after being offered the option of in-person instruction?

Hard to know, and commentaries in the press provide no answers.  Commentaries on the “right” seem to concentrate on the proposition that “closing schools was a mistake.”  But, I ask again, what would have been the politically-viable alternative in 2020 or even in the 2020/21 school year? Commentaries on the “left” seem to concentrate on the fact (abundantly supported in the data) that the deterioration in performance post-COVID was concentrated on the lowest-performing students.  These students were more likely to be black or Hispanic.  But what policy-relevant conclusions derive from any of that?  Nothing, really.

One might hope that matching data on performance on standardized exams with data on school system attributes might provide some policy-relevant clues, but that is not obvious.  The data reveal certain correlations.  Post-COVID, the deterioration in performance tended to be concentrated on school districts that featured heavier reliance on remote instruction.  These same school districts have tended to be concentrated in “blue” counties rather than “red” counties.  (I measure ideological leanings by the proportion of the vote by county that went for Democratic candidates in gubernatorial elections.)  Such counties also tend to be either wealthier or to feature high proportions of black and Hispanic students. 

One might be tempted to suggest that this clustering of attributes has the appearance of a COVID panic syndrome: The leadership of certain school systems and the populations of those same school systems were more likely to fetishize “the pandemic.”  Such school systems were more likely to discourage in-person instruction, and the local population was more likely to go along with it.  Students paid the price.

Would “COVID Panic Syndrome” explain the data?  Perhaps, but it would not illuminate a policy response other than “Don’t Panic!”.  Even so, one thing we may have learned from the business of closing schools is that students really had been learning something.  At the very least, they had been coached with some success to perform well on standardized exams.  Getting in-person training for standardized exams may not amount to much of an education, but it looks better than remote, online training for standardized exams, at least for the lowest-performing students.

What do the experts in Big Ed have to say about all this?  They say, give us more money:

Even the federal government’s record education spending isn’t enough for the scope of kids’ academic setbacks, according to the American Educational Research Association. Researchers there estimate it will cost $700 billion to offset learning loss for America’s schoolchildren – more than three times the $190 billion allocated to schools.

“We need something on the scale of the Marshall Plan for education,” said [Jason] Kamras, the Richmond superintendent.

Superintendent Kamras was a great leader of the fetishization of COVID panic in the Richmond Public Schools.  Of course his solution is to throw more money at a problem he helped create.