The Horrors of Virtual Schooling: A View From The Front Lines

For four months I served as a supervisor to many children doing virtual schooling at a daycare. As I discussed in a previous article, having that job has been an incredible privilege for myself, but it has also taught me just how much of a nightmare virtual schooling is for children. For starters, devices that run out of battery, poor connections, and forgotten passwords are all persistent issues. While these are fairly easily remedied problems, many other issues with virtual schooling are not nearly as simple to solve.

For one, it is simply nearly impossible for kindergartners and first graders to even begin to operate under remote learning without consistent adult supervision. The children have to follow a rigid schedule, be able to jump from app to app, and fill out various assignments. Without a parent around, kids who cannot read simply cannot perform these tasks sufficiently. And even students who can read can have a lot of difficulty succeeding in a virtual setting. Understanding what is expected of them requires a much deeper level of focus than in a normal classroom setting. Instead of a teacher simply putting a worksheet on their desk, kids now must listen carefully to instructions and find assignments themselves. Also, without an adult to monitor them in person, it’s very difficult to prevent kids from slacking off. While some parents are able to help, many parents have full time jobs and simply do not have the ability to provide the necessary attention. And while more well-to-do families are able to hire babysitters, mentors, or pay for a daycare service like the one I work at, not every family has that privilege. Ignoring this issue means ignoring the fate of children of low-income households who already have so many other hurdles to overcome.

Offering a daycare service like ours can provide the necessary attention that children need to succeed. However, there are a host of problems that arise in such a setup. For one, each child at the daycare has a different schedule, which, as you can imagine, is a logistical nightmare. When one kid is eating lunch, another needs help logging into their next class. While two kids play a game on the carpet, trying to enjoy their sole long break in their long day of sitting and looking at a screen, another kid who does have a class at the time complains they are being too noisy. Taking the kids outside and providing them with the physical activity they desperately need is generally only possible at the very end of the day when many kids have already left, or when there are a number of kids absent, which gives us a bit more flexibility.

But even if daycare programs like ours didn’t have these logistical issues, how is keeping them open any different than having the schools open? Both involve kids inside in relatively close quarters for many hours. Both involve adults working with them in person. The only difference is that at a school, each classroom has a group of kids that are the same age and have the same schedule, while at daycare, a group may include twenty kids whose ages range from five to twelve, and who have fifteen different schedules.

While a temporary decrease in the quality of education may seem a worthy price to pay to slow the pandemic, consider that some children are literally getting no education at all. We have had kids join our daycare program as late as November, without a single assignment from the whole school year completed. Not a single one. If your first instinct is to blame negligent parents, check your privilege. For one, some parents work extremely long hours and simply cannot provide the necessary attention. Secondly, many American parents either do not speak English or do not speak it well enough to provide sufficient support. Thirdly, many american adults are illiterate. One U.S. Department of Education study found that eight million U.S. adults - 4% of the population - are functionally illiterate.[1] And fourthly, some parents are negligent, but that doesn’t mean their child should suffer. Furthermore, virtual school can be extremely confusing - many students can use over a dozen different apps and systems, making it far from simple to just “check” to make sure a child completed their tasks each day.

And before you dismiss my personal experiences as anecdotal, there is a plethora of data suggesting that virtual school is a humanitarian disaster. In one part of their “School Matters” series, journalists at CBS News document many others’ personal experiences and frustrations with remote learning, and cite data to back up the individual experiences. In Houston Texas, 42% of students are failing at least one class in the Fall 2020 marking period - much higher than the 26% mark in Fall of 2019. Similar situations in Cleveland, Ohio and North Carolina were noted, and there are no doubt similar problems across the country and the world.[2]

Despite the clear struggle in academics, Dan Domenech, the executive director of the American Association of School Administrators, is even more concerned about something else. He noted “We know that there has been a significant loss of learning, but I'll tell you, we're less concerned about that than we are about the social and emotional factors. We're seeing an increase in the stress that students are feeling, the emotional impact that this is having on them. We're carefully tracking suicide rates, which is a major factor. So, we are more concerned right now about the emotional well-being of our students than we are about their academic loss."[2]. School has never been about just learning academics - it’s about children learning how to interact with others, how to work in groups, how to make friends, how to communicate with people that don’t look like them, that don’t think like them, that come from different walks of life. All of these important aspects of school are heavily stifled by virtual learning models.

But what about the teachers who feel unsafe? What about the parents who feel unsafe sending their children into in-person classes? First off, I would never suggest anyone should be forced to go into in person classes right now. We could have an opt-in for virtual schooling, so parents and teachers who would prefer that setup could do that, while people more comfortable with in-person classes could do that. But I would also caution people against overestimating the risk of coronavirus in comparison to the risk of losing education - especially for elementary school students. The costs of chronic absenteeism (missing significant class time) are well-documented: One study showed that just 17% of students who were chronically absent in kindergarten and first grade were reading proficiently by third grade, while 64% of students who were not chronically absent were. Students who are not reading proficiently by third grade were four times more likely to drop out of high school.[3]

It’s fair to say that the effects of chronic absenteeism and the problems associated with virtual school are not perfectly comparable. But, as the full scope of the current school virtualization has quite literally never happened before in all of human history, there is no study we can really look to to analyze the full impact of virtual schooling. But what we do know is that the early years are important. That grades and attendance in elementary and middle school are strong predictors of success in high school and college.[4] That adults who did not graduate high school or go to college are far more likely to die prematurely than those that did.[5] There are admittedly some issues with determining causality in some of these studies, but I don’t think it’s a stretch to suggest that children’s education being interrupted for months on end could have catastrophic effects for their futures.

It’s also important to consider that the novel coronavirus is quite simply not very dangerous to children. A total of 47 children aged 5 to 14 years old have died from COVID-19 in the United States so far.[6] While this number is still tragic, we must put it in context. In that same age group, 765 American children died in car accidents in 2018.[7] In 2017, over 2,400 school-age children were killed by firearms in the United States.[8] Motor vehicle accidents are always a possibility. School shootings are always a possibility. But children are still sent to school anyway because the opportunity cost of missing out on education is far greater. Furthermore, while I can’t give you specifics on each of the children that died, it’s likely that many of them had specific conditions that made them more susceptible to the virus. For example, they may be immunocompromised. This means that high-risk children could receive virtual schooling, while those at lower risk could have in person classes.

Ultimately, it is impossible to tell just how much of an impact a year of virtual schooling will have on the country’s children. But I think it’s a fairly safe assumption that, if we continue to use a primarily virtual model for our children’s education, well over 47 of the nation’s millions and millions of schoolchildren will die premature deaths one day because they got behind in school this year. One study conducted by doctors at the U.S. Department of Pediatrics, the Department of Anesthesiology and Pain Medicine, and Department of Health Policy & Management, found that the missed instruction of American schoolchildren as a result of school closures will result in 5.53 million life years lost[9] - meaning that, American children who missed out on education due to school closures will die sooner on average than they would have otherwise, totaling 5.53 million years of potential life erased. This number is higher than all the life years lost in the USA in the entire pandemic (which, using the methodology in the cited study and prorating for updated death totals, equals about 5.10 million years of life lost). This means that a case could be made that school closures are a greater tragedy than the pandemic itself - the main difference being that pandemic’s toll is happening all at once, while the closures will take their toll slowly but surely over the next century.

But don’t take all of this from me. Dr. Anthony Fauci, the infectious disease expert that has been the face of the pandemic response in the United States and has advocated for many pandemic restrictions, has called for the schools to be open.[10] President-elect Joe Biden, leader of the more coronavirus-restriction friendly Democratic Party, has stated he wants to open most of the schools in his first hundred days in office.[11] Furthermore, research has found that school re-openings have not ever really been associated with spikes in virus cases.[12]

While research on the full impact of school openings and closings on both the pandemic spread and education is incomplete and changing every day, one thing should be clear: today’s children are paying a dear, dear price right now. Even if keeping the schools closed is beneficial on the whole, there should be no doubt that the incredibly low chance of a schoolchild becoming sick with COVID-19 is far, far, outweighed by the very high chance that their educational and social development is being irreversibly damaged. When this crisis is over, I would go so far as to suggest reparations for this generation of children, especially those from the ages from five to seven and those in low-income households, who are being hurt the most by the closures. Because one of two things is true: either school closures were a mistake, or school closures were a necessary evil, and in either situation, our nation’s children will suffer greatly because of decisions they had no part in.

Cited Sources

[1] Adult Literacy in the United States. (2019, July). Retrieved December 19, 2020, from https://nces.ed.gov/datapoints/2019179.asp

[2] CBS News. (2020, December 07). All-remote learning is failing many students all across the country: "These children are struggling". Retrieved December 15, 2020, from https://www.cbsnews.com/news/coronavirus-pandemic-students-grades-suffering-all-remote-learning/

[3] Chang, H., Gomperts, J., & Boissiere, L. (2019, February 21). Chronic Absenteeism Can Devastate K-12 Learning (Opinion). Retrieved December 19, 2020, from https://www.edweek.org/leadership/opinion-chronic-absenteeism-can-devastate-k-12-learning/2014/10

[4] Adams, C. (2020, November 19). Grades and Attendance in Middle School Are Key Indicators for Later Success. Retrieved December 19, 2020, from https://www.edweek.org/education/grades-and-attendance-in-middle-school-are-key-indicators-for-later-success/2014/11

[5] Hummer, R. A., & Hernandez, E. M. (2013). The Effect of Educational Attainment on Adult Mortality in the United States. Population bulletin, 68(1), 1–16.

[6] COVID-19 Provisional Counts - Weekly Updates by Select Demographic and Geographic Characteristics. (2020, December 16). Retrieved December 19, 2020, from https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid_weekly/index.htm

[7] Deaths by Age Group. (2020, February 20). Retrieved December 19, 2020, from https://injuryfacts.nsc.org/motor-vehicle/historical-fatality-trends/deaths-by-age-group/

[8] Rice, D. (2019, March 21). Firearm deaths of US school-age children at 'epidemic' levels, study says. Retrieved December 19, 2020, from https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2019/03/21/gun-deaths-school-age-children-study/3231754002/

[9] Christakis, M. A. (2020, November 12). Estimation of Years of Life Lost Associated With School Closures During COVID-19. Retrieved December 19, 2020, from https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/fullarticle/2772834

[10] Dorman, J. (2020, November 29). Fauci said authorities should 'close the bars and keep the schools open' to cut down on coronavirus infection spread. Retrieved December 19, 2020, from https://www.businessinsider.com/anthony-fauci-close-bars-school-instruction-coronavirus-infections-health-2020-11

[11] Deaths by Age Group. (2020, February 20). Retrieved December 19, 2020, from https://injuryfacts.nsc.org/motor-vehicle/historical-fatality-trends/deaths-by-age-group/

[12] Kamenetz, A. (2020, October 21). Are The Risks Of Reopening Schools Exaggerated? Retrieved December 19, 2020, from https://www.npr.org/2020/10/21/925794511/were-the-risks-of-reopening-schools-exaggerated