Students Left Behind as Public Schools Fragment

By Zainab Cheema 

I was lucky. My parents were immigrants, and I am a second generation American. My parents moved to an area that had the best public high school in Maryland, the kind whose alumni get fast tracked into the top universities of the nation. That meant that I got a private school-quality education for free, subsidized by the taxes of our county. Our teachers were like rock stars. Alongside the core high school curriculum, I enrolled in an advanced humanities program that made us research and write a 200-page book in our junior year. I chose to write mine on silent film, fascinated by expressive physicality of old-time movie stars like Greta Garbo and Buster Keaton. My high school education defined the path I have taken towards becoming a professor. Yes, our public school system has always had massive issues—a school in the suburbs looked and functioned very, very differently from a school in an urban, inner city area. But what does the whole sale collapse of the public school system mean, and are we willing to pay that price?

Minority and Disadvantaged Students Left Behind 

I think about other children from immigrant backgrounds, and I realize that in our current education landscape, unless their families have the funds to bankroll a private school education, they won’t get to have the same chances that I got. In her January 16, 2022 article for The Boston Globe, “Students like mine are left behind,” Elizabeth Scarboro observes that “some students are more ‘back’ than others.” Describing the experience of teaching reading to first grade students from minority and disadvantaged backgrounds, she notes that the teachers who are returning to teaching are confronting classrooms with wildly different ranges of preparation. Some students had the benefit of parents who were able to spend time with them and fill in the gaps of online education. Others’ parents were economically disadvantaged or belong to professions that did not give them “the option to work from home and oversee their online learning.” During COVID-19 lockdowns, students missed out on the immersive learning experience that live classrooms are able to provide. The result? An unprecedented range in the classroom ranging from “students learning letter sounds to others reading ‘Harry Potter.’”

Returning students are also bringing learning and mental health needs that schools are not staffed to deal with. This week, I spoke to Nicole Routon, a former middle school science teacher based in Kentucky, who transitioned this year to the financial services industry. “Our kids are damaged after coming out of COVID and losing people [in their families to the virus.]” In her 13 year career as a teacher, Nicole mostly worked at schools serving economically disadvantaged and minority student populations. She noted that such students were already dealing with mental health issues stemming from their experiences growing up in marginalized communities suffering from poverty, broken families, and high rates of crime. Schools where one mental health counselor and two to three guidance counsellors are assigned to 600 or so students in the pre-COVID era, are simply not equipped to deal with post-COVID challenges. Nicole went into education because she saw something of herself in students dealing with difficult childhoods and who were reaching out for better futures through education despite trauma and hardship. “I identified with them,” she said. An educator’s decision to walk is never made lightly. Nicole spoke passionately about her own pain at having to leave at a beloved career in education, but which is simply becoming untenable because of the lack of financial, political, moral, and mental health support for teachers.  

As public schools weaken, the project of a national education is becoming endangered. Students from minority, disadvantaged or working-class backgrounds are getting left behind in the United States. COVID-19 has pressurized our systemic underfunding of education to the fracturing point. The net effect is that students with the least resources are facing increasing obstacles to return to public schools where many highly qualified teachers are leaving (aka the Great Resignation), programs are flailing, and support staff are overwhelmed. Many students are simply opting not to return to public school. In “Bottom of the Class,” her article for the most recent issue of The Economist (The World Ahead 2022), Tamara Gilkes Borr discusses how many students are turning to home schooling, their families having determined it to be a safer and stress-free option. Others are exploring other kinds of schooling—remote only schools, non-traditional schools, charter schools and private schools. Some have opted out of education entirely. It goes without saying these students are generally from families with the resources and knowledge to buy out of the system. The students who will be left in a weakened, broken public school system will be minority and low income student groups. “Kids who are from high poverty populations often don’t have the resources and knowledge to reach out and figure out what to do next,” observed Nicole Routon. Privileged students walking away from the public school system means danger for the system as a whole. In the United States, funds are allocated to public schools on a per student basis. Less students means less federal and state funds for the school system. Once a system crumbles, it is hard to build it back up again.

Dropping Higher Ed Enrollments

Higher Ed is being impacted too. In her Jan 2022 article for The New York Times, Stephanie Saul reports national research on changes in Higher Ed enrollment numbers since 2019 when the pandemic hit. According to the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center’s Jan 13, 2022 press release, total undergraduate enrollment has dropped by about 1.2 million students since the fall of 2019. The study bases its finding from data collected from 3,600 postsecondary institutions. “Our final look at fall 2021 enrollment shows undergraduates continuing to sit out in droves as colleges navigate yet another year of COVID-19,” said Doug Shapiro, the executive director of the research center. In the post-World War II United States, public schools and universities have been the well-trodden highways that launched millions of families into the middle class. The study shows that tens of thousands of low-income students were forced to delay or drop out of school following COVID-19 and its economic shock to their families’ livelihoods. Not only is the middle class at risk to shrink further, our pool of skilled labor is also at risk. The study also shows that that enrollment in community colleges has dropped 13.2 percent (which roughly averages 706,000 students) compare to 2019. “Without a dramatic re-engagement in their education, the potential loss to these students’ earnings and futures is significant, which will greatly impact the nation as a whole in years to come,” said Shapiro.

Individual Right Decisions, A Collective Wrong One 

In Education, the Great Resignation is comprised of tens of thousands of correct individual decisions made by educators to walk away from jobs and institutions that do not support them. However, these right (and often necessary) individual decisions are adding up to the collectively wrong decision to let weak and vulnerable students to fend for themselves. The solution must be a social one—a collective one. Yet, given our difficulty of overcoming political divisions to have conversation, there doesn’t seem to be any chance of coming to the table anytime soon. In her Boston Globe article, Scarborough writes about building a solution around the core relationship of the educational experience: the teacher-student bond. “I fantasize about a coordinated, multiyear infusion into the education budget. Two assistant teachers per class as students recover from the pandemic’s disruption to both their formal education and their lives. Or in the absence of extra funding, shifting our resources to meet the moment at hand — using money and time now spent on data collection and oversight to help students directly.” She argues “[w]e don’t need new assessments or curriculum to solve this crisis. We need the freedom to adjust our teaching to respond to our students and the human power to help students . . . make up for lost time.” But it’s precisely because teachers feel silenced and marginalized by the educational system that they are walking away.

Education matters. People care. That’s why the Great Resignation and the teacher walkouts are being covered in the media so frequently. Certainly, innovative solutions are being designed. From advocacy and funding programs for at-risk students to a range of in-person and online programs geared to supplement the gaps in student learning, people are thinking of ways to leverage existing tools and EdTech innovations for hungry minds. But once again, the vast majority of available solutions either benefit a sliver of the total population or else, they come with a price tag that the most at-risk student populations simply can’t afford.