#WTH School closures, absenteeism, & the continuing devastation of Covid insanity

Kids are still out of school today.

More than once on the WTH podcast, we’ve suggested it would be important to have a commission to study the nation’s reaction to Covid — something along the lines of the 9/11 Commission. The odds of that happening are close to zero, and part of the reason is that no one wants to take the blame for the devastation Covid-induced school closures inflicted on America’s children.

We talked to AEI’s own Nat Malkus, who’s a senior fellow and the Deputy Director of Education Policy at the American Enterprise Institute. He’s just come out with a huge study looking at chronic absenteeism persisting in the nation’s schools, and the results will blow your mind.

Think about it this way: Chronic absenteeism refers to kids who are missing at least 10 percent of school every year. Before the pandemic, the rate was about 15 percent of kids overall, which is lousy. In 2022 it was over 28%, and it’s still more than one in four students. In minority areas, those numbers jump much, much higher.

What do you think it means if a child misses 10 percent of his school year? There will be massive learning loss, which nationwide testing confirms. Add to that the impact of school closures and asynchronous learning, and the imperative to simply catch up to what was lost, and absenteeism becomes even more dangerous. Kids are falling further and further behind.

Malkus is a data guy, and doesn’t like to lay blame in the caustic terms preferred by your podcast hosts. So let us say it: The school closures were a disaster — a crime perpetrated by the government and teachers’ unions against our kids. And why? To save lives? What lives? Kids were not affected by Covid. In Sweden, which had no closures, teachers were impacted at the same rate as the rest of the population. No children died. “Believe the science” my foot.

Teachers and school administrators took a taxpayer subsidized vacation from their jobs, and it’s no surprise they didn’t want to come back to work. And even less surprise they don’t want to work even harder to mitigate the effects those closures had.

Where’s the accountability? Who is supposed to care about those impacted most — the poor and minorities? How can we avoid this national nightmare again? There are answers to these questions, but not ones the mainstream press or the nation and state’s leaders wish to answer. Because blame can be laid squarely at the feet of those who made these decisions in the first place.

We all remember that those who could afford it took their kids out of public schools and put them in private and parochial schools where learning continued. But what about the neediest? Those who can’t afford school choice? They’re still twisting in the wind, and if you take a little time and read Malkus’ report, you will just be mad.

HIGHLIGHTS

What was the overall impact COVID school closures had on students?

NM: Everybody took it on the chin. They lost a little over a third of a year's progress in math. The ones that were closed the longest, closer to about 57% of the year. That's a big difference. That's a huge difference. Pre-pandemic, we wouldn't expect a quarter of a year difference for any large group of students, so it did make a huge difference. The key thing to remember and I want to keep our focus on is, look, those things were problematic. We have a lot of tough sledding ahead of us to do any catch-up on the pandemic damage that we've seen.

You have written about how the loss of learning did not end with the pandemic. How are the school closures continuing to harm our kids today?

NM: The thing that I have been focusing on most recently is chronic absenteeism. Now, this is a term that can get mixed up. Chronic absenteeism, it's the percentage of kids at a school or district that miss 10% of the year. Sometimes people will downplay that. "Well, that doesn't matter." That's missing at least 18 days in a school year. If that doesn't seem bad to you, just imagine you were running a business and your people didn't show up 10% of the year. You'd be worried. Well, those rates increased dramatically. It was about 15% pre-pandemic, which is not great. In 2022 it was over 28%, and still in 2023, more than one in four kids are missing a tenth of the year.

This is the long Covid, for two reasons. Number one, the learning loss happened because the things that happened, there were acute pandemic responses. "Oh, we've got to be closed for however long, or whatever we need to do. There's quarantine and so forth." That stuff has ended. This chronic absenteeism is an ongoing behavior. It's a result from Covid, but we haven't turned back the clock on some of these behaviors, and it's not that hard to imagine. If you miss 10% of school, how's your test going to turn out? Are you going to graduate? At much lower levels.

Sorry to be long-winded. It is worse for high-minority schools. It's worse for Black students. In 2022, it was 39% of Black students in the nation. It's gone up for everybody, and it's the number one pandemic problem.

If kids aren’t spending their time in school, what are they doing all day?

NM: I have some theories, but I don't think they're filling it with museum trips and independent study courses on their own. I think a lot of the things that kids are doing when they're not at school are going to be less productive. Of course, it's harder to run a school when you have a good chunk of your kids absent on a given day.

What are schools, parents, and policymakers doing to get kids back in school?

NM: A lot of folks are treating it like it's a policy problem, and coming at a cultural problem with policy solutions is like coming to a gunfight with a knife. It's just not going to take. I do think that we have some things that are analogous to, "Well, my mom's not going in to work every day. She can phone it in, so maybe I can." The problem is I think that behavior really hurts kids in fifth grade a lot worse than it does young adults going to work. It's a really pronounced problem.

Shouldn’t the schools be following up and clamping down on students skipping class?

NM: I don't think that we've seen a clamp down in part because I don't think we saw from a lot of leaders, whether they're superintendents of districts or governors, a hard pivot that said, "Look, we sort of took a break from normal operations because of the pandemic, and that time is now over and we are turning the page on it." I don't think we've seen that. So if you're a principal and you bring those consequences, I don't know that you've kind of got the overall messaging, the cultural messaging that backs that up. So we see sort of some of those efforts and I applaud them, but I don't think we see the big push that we need to turn around this cultural tide of increased absences.

If the schools aren’t working to get kids back into class, what, if anything is the education system doing to make up for the COVID learning loss? What should it be doing?

NM: The Feds spend $190 billion for public schools and they're sort of swimming in a lot of money that was not done well. But from that, we do have a lot of programs that are out, and there's sort of two things that I think we need to say here. First of all, scores are catching up. So last year we closed these big gaps about a third of the way. That is fantastic news and we shouldn't shy away from it. The other news is we're still way away from baseline. We have a ton more work to do, and what we've seen is oftentimes when these tutoring programs are offered, there's just not a lot of uptake. Not a lot of kids are taking advantage of these things. When there's some district leaders or states that are pushing for extended time, oftentimes parents aren't dying for it, and a lot of times teachers unions are certainly not looking.

To some degree, I chalk it right back to the cultural problem. If we are announcing clearly we are deeply in the hole in our schools and we have to work to get out of it then we might see more work to get out of it. But right now, I think we're somewhat coasting. I'm pleased to see moderate recovery with that kind of coasting, but I don't think that we've seen the real sort of force march that we're going to need to and who's going to pay for that? The students, this kind of COVID generation, they're going to pay over the long term in terms of opportunity.

The opportunity cost for these kids skipping school must be huge. What’s going to happen to them if we don’t make this up?

NM: Eric Hanushek says it's a $1.3 trillion problem at the 2022 levels. There's other folks that put it at close to $1 trillion. Look, those are big numbers, but what they really are extrapolating numbers from pre-pandemic as if we know what's going to happen post pandemic, as if it's going to follow the playbook. What we do know broadly speaking is that if you have lower test scores and lower achievement, generally speaking, you're going to have lower lifetime earnings. You're less likely to go to college, and those things are going to hit people in their pocketbooks.

They're going to hit those students' kids if they have them over the long term, these are real effects. And that's why I think it's important for us to treat it like the national emergency that it is, but it's not just an emergency where if we just spend some more money. I mean, we've already tried that. We haven't seen a whole lot of effort from that. I think the missing key is to call on parents and students and say, "The key to success with the school is that you do your part. You bring your kid to school every day to learn. You demand that they bring their A game." And right now we're seeing lots of C game and no one seems up in arms about it.

Teachers' unions helped keep schools closed during COVID and aren’t helping catch kids up. How do we hold them accountable?

NM: If you're looking for an apology from the teacher's unions, I think you're going to be left wanting for some time. And I think that generally speaking, they abetted longer closures. I think you can see that in the data, even if it's hard to nail down in particulars. But the other thing that is worth saying is we don't need an apology from them to see some of these things. Look, the chronic absenteeism, it's bad for those who had extended closures and shorter closures. It's a little better where it was shorter closures. But it is also something that I want to make clear that the problems we have right now, they're American.

They're American problems. We see them in red states and blue states. They are worse in places that close. That's true. But the bulk of the problems, we're seeing them everywhere. And so we can push for some responsibility in blue states, bring it on. I'm fine with it. As long as we don't sit and say, "If they broke it, they can fix it," because it is a broader problem. And it's not just in disadvantaged schools. These problems are two things to hold in our hands at the same time. Are these problems worse in disadvantaged schools? They are. Are these problems in the schools, in your district and in your backyard? They are.

If extra time and emphasis on attendance and content are key to solving this problem, are the teachers’ unions cooperating at all?

NM: You don't see any urgency on the part of teachers’ unions. You can see platitudes, but I'm not seeing the urgency that I want to see from teachers’ unions.

Look, these are their problems, right? If you're a teacher and you're seeing that 25% of your kids are missing 18 or more days of school, your job sucks compared to how it was when kids were missing less school. These are workplace problems. If we don't express urgency to fix them, then they're not even meeting their members' needs much less the needs of the kids.

So I expect to see much more urgency before we're going to see these gaps close and get us back to baseline. And quite frankly, I think I need to see the same thing from the president. In the State of the Union, he talked about spending $8 billion more on tutoring. He didn't mention the fact that one in four students across the nation are missing far too much school. Didn't put the responsibility on parents and students. Until those messages come, why would we expect these fundamental behaviors to markedly change?

What is the number one long term problem that we’re facing from COVID?

NM: Everybody's going to tell you learning loss is the number one long COVID problem. I keep banging the drum that it's actually chronic absenteeism, because you can't fix the learning loss until we address the chronic absenteeism problem. But you're right, Dany, there's lots of other things that went on. One of the biggest differences that I documented by school closures is kids leaving public schools. So in the third of districts that were the most remote, they lost one in 20 students over the first three years of the pandemic. That translates into closed schools and pink slips for teachers. By comparison, the most in-person schools lost one in 200 students. That's a pretty big difference. Now, some of that's population change. It's not all one thing. But a huge factor of that is the pandemic closures.

And the other big question that I think we have to grapple with is what schools did with the $190 billion, the biggest federal infusion of funds. And look, on the one hand, I don't want to be a superintendent who had to spend unprecedented amounts of money in a short time and not hire a bunch of people, because then you'd have to fire them when it runs out. Not a great way to spend money. But at the same time, we spent it all, and the question about what did we get for it is really fundamental. We don't know what kind of outcomes we got from it. We don't even know where it went.

How did people spend that federal money?

NM: When Congress put out this money, they put almost zero reporting requirements or guard rails on it. Literally. I had friends calling me and saying, "Hey, really quick, can I buy exercise equipment with this money?" And of course, I said, "Well, I'm not a lawyer. I don't know. But probably, although I don't think you should." It was kind of the wild west. And it's sort of a poster child for let's be careful with emergency spending because if you don't have any evidence that it was worth it, why would we spend more money next time around?

School choice feels like an obvious solution to this problem, but it’s often only available to the wealthiest Americans. Did people exercise school choice during COVID? Did it help?

NM: So it's not a question, did this happen? Oh, it happened. It happened a lot. And the question about the justice of that, I don't think is that hard to argue.

The alternative thing to say here is that there just wasn't enough supply of private schools in the pandemic to meet the need. So a lot of folks couldn't find a slot, and there were lots of sort of these micro schools that would open or some other sort of hybrid homeschooling, all kinds of things increased, and homeschooling shot through the roof.

So I think a good healthy private school choice ecosystem is essential. Is it a magic solution? I don't know how long we'd have to wait for things to develop such that we'd have enough private schools to fix this chronic absenteeism problem. So I think we need to preach it pretty hard and work on school choice at the same time.

How is chronic absenteeism affecting the mental health of our kids?

NM: I collect data at 30,000 feet. Schools just don't collect good indicators of mental health. So from a data perspective I can't say much on that, and from a non-data perspective I can say, "Of course, Marc, it's absolutely connected to their mental health."

Look, they spend a ton more time on screens, right? This is both sort of... And we think about this, "Oh, well, it's their cell phone." It's also that they're still doing just a ton of their schoolwork on these screens that we bought them during the pandemic and keep running on. A lot of school runs through computers, and in my mind, shouldn't.

And there's a question about, "Well, what's the chicken and the egg here? Is it mental health is causing chronic absenteeism or chronic absenteeism is contributing to mental health?" I think it's probably sort of a both/and situation, but a lot of parents I will hear say, "Look, my kids are having mental health problems, so we need to give them mental health days. We need to give them breaks from school."

It's not the answer. Look, being engaged with community is what we need to do. You need reps, you need practice. And I think this is not sort of a clinical recommendation, but I think as sort of a population solution, consistently belonging to a community and rebuilding those communities so they're important so that kids are engaged, that's going to help turn off the phones and turn up the indicators of mental health over the long term.

I think schools are great. I love schools. I loved school when I was in it. My kids love their school and I want your kids to love their school, and part of that is showing up and working at it every day. So I think that's part of the way forward.

Read the full transcript here.

SHOWNOTES

Long COVID for Public Schools: Chronic Absenteeism Before and After the Pandemic (AEI, January 31 2024)

What the Data Says About Pandemic School Closures, Four Years Later (New York Times, March 18 2024)

Return 2 Learn Tracker (Nat Malkus, Last Updated Feb. 29 2024)

Chronic Absenteeism Could Be the Biggest Problem Facing Schools Right Now (Education Week, February 22 2024)

California Schools Must Spend $2 Billion COVID Funds to Help Remote Learning Loss (KQED, February 19 2024)

Students Are Making a ‘Surprising’ Rebound From Pandemic Closures. But Some May Never Catch Up (New York Times, January 31 2024)

Missouri v. Biden (District Court, W.D. Louisiana, May 5 2022)

Harvard Tramples the Truth (City Journal, March 11 2024)