(upbeat music) (dramatic music) - "Eye on Education" I'm Fred Martino.

As the nation continues to deal with COVID, we're learning more about how the pandemic affected children.

My guest, Anya Kamenetz, covers it all in the book, "The Stolen Year: How COVID Changed Children's Lives, and Where We Go Now."

Anya has contributed to "The New York Times," "The Washington Post," and other publications, and previously served as an education correspondent for NPR.

Anya, thank you so much for being with us today.

- Thanks so much for giving me the time.

I appreciate it.

- Well, we appreciate you and this book.

It is outstanding.

A lot of information, and your book highlights a lot of different issues the country faced long before the pandemic.

We're gonna be talking about those, but first, you write about learning loss caused by the pandemic, and the fact that it can take a really long time for students to get back on track.

We're now uncovering a lot more about this.

What do studies tell us about learning loss?

- So it was predictable based on past experiences in other places where schools had closed that we're gonna see a drop off in test scores.

When those test scores arrived, the NAEP scores, we saw two decades worth of progress essentially erased in children's math and reading learning.

What that actually means for individual kids is obviously going to vary, but it's what we're seeing now is sort of a worrisome trend where the recovery paths are really separating.

So there's a slice of kids that are already all caught up, and they're doing fine.

And there's a slice that have fallen further and further behind, and barely made any recovery in the last school year even.

Even the 2020, 2021 school year, which was supposed to be a little bit more of a recovery year.

So, overall, on average it could take two, three years for kids to be back on the track that they were on before, but what we're also gonna see I fear is kids who have other disadvantages, learning disabilities, growing up in poverty, they're not going to catch up.

They're just gonna remain behind.

- It's so good to mention that, and you cover that in the book that just because you may have been out of school for one year it does not mean that it only will take one year to get back on track.

As you say, it may take two or three, depending on the child and the situation.

- Well, and we're also talking about critical periods.

So kids that missed out on preschool, so they didn't enter school, school ready, if you will.

Kids who didn't learn to read by third grade that's considered a critical point beyond which you really start to see their effort, and their enthusiasm for school to flag.

I'm really concerned about the enrollment drops, and particularly in high school level, and also in college.

There's a 20 percent drop in community college enrollment, and that has not recovered at all.

And, you know, that's a really big problem not only for if you have kids or care about kids, but even if you have employees, right?

Where are employees gonna come from if we don't have an educated population?

- And there are so many other challenges the pandemic highlighted those.

For instance, the federal school lunch program is the second largest public food program after SNAP, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, that a lot of people call food stamps.

Many students didn't get enough food during the pandemic.

In your book you point out, and this surprised me, that in April 2020, 17.5 percent of parents told the U.S. Census Bureau that their young children were not getting enough to eat.

That's a large percentage for such a serious issue, almost one in five.

And you say in the book that this is unprecedented, right?

- It's unprecedented as far as we've been keeping count, right?

Obviously, there was a Great Depression, and there were times in our history where we didn't have the social safety net, but I think what COVID really showed is what a patchwork we have.

Most other wealthy nations have income supplements that go directly to families, and prevent these high rates of child poverty, and even child homelessness that we have here in the United States.

And so during the pandemic, there were different parts of the pandemic.

There was a Build Back Better.

There were CARES Act.

There was money coming in at different times to families, but it was unpredictable.

And so the uncertainty that many families have been facing, and then with the volatile job market and inflation child poverty has really been on a rollercoaster the last couple of years.

And that's very, very hard to recover from because what's so important to kids, of course, is a routine and structure, and predictability of their lives, so they can grow up healthy and happy.

- Well, hunger is just one issue related to poverty in our schools.

You point out that as recently as 1989, about one-third of K-12 students nationwide came from low-income households.

Welfare reform gutted support for families in 1996.

The Great Recession, of course, came in 2008.

And by 2013, the share of public school students in low-income households crossed 50 percent for the first time in the richest nation in the world.

What do you want people to understand about the enormous impact of poverty on young people, and on our schools?

I think this is just an incredible service of this book because it's shocking enough in that statistic that you have in the book that nationwide we're talking about over 50 percent.

As you know, there are many, many cities where there are schools, and even in districts in some cases where it's almost 100 percent of students that are living in poverty.

- That's exactly right.

You know, one of the families that I followed was from St. Louis, which isn't too, too far from where you are.

And this was a family a mother with eight children, growing up in really substandard conditions.

I mean, at different times when I was following her, she didn't have heat, she didn't have major appliances in her house, like a working refrigerator.

She's struggling to support her family on a $15 an hour job, and she was not able to keep her kids safe during the pandemic.

One of her children wandered off, and this is also a neighborhood issue, right?

So she lives in a neighborhood that's downtown, that's full of abandoned vacant houses.

And so she was, actually, her little boy ran off during the time that school, and childcares were closed, and he was shot in an abandoned building.

Thank God he survived, but there are so many compounding effects to this.

We might feel like, okay, it's fine.

We have social security for elderly folks, and there's this and that program for younger folks, but the reality of what we're doing as a country we're choosing to have our children grow up in unsafe conditions because we're not giving them the basics that they need to survive and be safe.

- So beyond our schools, you highlight the crisis for parents as well when it comes to childcare.

Before the pandemic, average annual public spending on early childhood care across rich countries was over $14,000 per child.

In the U.S. $500.

And this is a problem as you know, for not just low-income families, but families with higher incomes as well, that this is very expensive.

- It's a huge problem all across the board.

It's particularly timely right now because one of the unintended consequences of the pandemic was that it was brought before Congress for the first time in a very long time that we actually have a public childcare system that we, and the way that it works now, I mean, our childcare workers they're making poverty wages.

A lot of that work is informal.

There's a lot of in-home providers, and we just don't have the structure and the support that we need for people to be able to access this care.

The pandemic made all of that worse.

There are 84,000 jobs missing in the childcare sector.

So people are getting hired, they can make more money working at a gas station than they can taking care of our most precious children.

And so without continued public support, and renewed public support this problem is poised to get actually even worse than before.

- It is a huge, huge problem.

And something that I had to mention early on in this interview.

I don't want it to get forgotten when folks watch this.

It's something that affects so many families.

You know, I wanna touch on another one that's affected, unfortunately, more families since the pandemic, and, currently, and that's mental health.

According to new data in 2021, more than a third of high school students, more than a third reported that they experienced poor mental health during the pandemic.

And almost half, 44 percent, reported that they persistently felt sad, or hopeless during the past year.

That data is from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

And you talked to a lot of people.

Beyond the numbers that you know so well, I'm sure you got a real sense of this.

- I did, I heard from clinicians who treat teenagers, and young people from the very beginning of the pandemic just to tell me that the kids are not okay.

They weren't dealing very well with the social isolation, the uncertainty, the fear and anxiety, and the caregiver's stress.

So I talked to the mother of a little boy who developed an eating disorder, and not something you're used to seeing in a seven-year-old.

And that was accompanied by hopelessness, and suicidal ideation.

One of the boys that I followed, Jonah, during the pandemic actually got even worse after school started again.

And he became very suicidal, actively suicidal.

Thank goodness he's doing better now.

And I just wanna emphasize that we don't have enough resources, we don't have enough practitioners, we don't have enough psychiatric beds.

These services are not available to non-English speakers.

It takes a lot longer for them to access it.

So mental health cuts across class lines, but the access to mental health is very, very unequal.

Just another inequality in this system.

- Yeah, you know, related to mental health, I wanna touch on another issue from data from the CDC.

The CDC also says that more than half, 55 percent of high school students reported that they experienced emotional abuse by a parent, or another adult in the home, including swearing at, insulting, or putting down the student.

11 percent experienced some sort of physical abuse by a parent or another adult in the home, that could include hitting, beating, kicking, or physically hurting the student.

This is, again, I think some would say an under-reported tragedy during the pandemic where students were at home for a longer period of time in maybe a household experiencing more stress than ever before.

Not just stress on the child, but stress on the entire family.

And this may have been one of the results.

- I think it's really important that you frame it that way.

It makes a lot of sense because what we really wanna be focusing on going forward is how we're gonna nurture and support children, and the family structures that they're in, right?

So caregivers need that kind of support.

They need that kind of focus.

And oftentimes they need resources in order to be able to better deal with the stress that they're experiencing every day.

And so I see that in parents today.

I see it in teachers.

I see it in other solution providers, like mental health counselors themselves.

I mean, the burnout and this flashback of all of these events as they affected children, it is so important to recognize and to say, we don't have resilient kids unless we have a nurtured grassroots framework that helps them to be resilient.

- And what a transition to the fact in terms of the stress in the home.

It highlights that students were not just socially isolated, and missing school, missing their friends.

There were so many problems sometimes at home.

And this is another piece of data from the CDC.

More than a quarter, 29 percent, reported a parent or another adult in their home lost a job during the pandemic.

I think as the economy improved, we've forgot about this, that this was the setting for everything else that was happening that children were maybe in a home, almost one in three children according to this CDC study, where a parent or another adult was out of work.

- That's right, absolutely.

And, you know, it's part of the upheaval, part of the uncertainty of this time that left its mark on many kids.

There's actually research showing that even a transient experience of hunger, for example, can leave its imprint on the psyche of a child, and even a teenager because as they get more mature, they're thinking more about their collective responsibility in the household.

And that's something that leads them to kind of worry, and internalize these worries.

We also have to think about our teenagers who during this period of economic uncertainty might have changed their own plans, and ideas about the future.

So there was a survey I saw after the book came out, that showed a really worrying drop in the percentage of teenagers, Gen Z'ers, who said they were considering four year college.

So it dropped 20 points to 51 percent.

And that's a downsizing of aspirations for this COVID generation.

And that's something that I think that we should really focus on because we need to figure out how we're going to show as a society that we are ready, and willing and able to give these kids hope, and help them reach their full potential.

I believe that every single one of these kids can reach their full potential, you know.

The whole thing about children is they are full of potential, and they can improve their circumstances but they're not gonna do it without the investment.

- Yeah, and another service of the book is that you point out many of the challenges faced by families and their children are disproportionately shared by minorities.

Give us a sense of that.

- So I think what's important to realize is when you look at the numbers, Black and Brown Americans had a different pandemic entirely than white Americans.

And their pandemic was worse.

Asian Americans had their own whole experience, which was centered around a flaring up of anti-Asian racism, but for Black and Brown Americans they experienced wildly disproportionate impact of the COVID disease itself.

And that had to do with many different factors like having more intergenerational households, having more frontline jobs, having underlying social determinants of health, which meant that they were more likely to have confounding comorbidities or conditions at a younger age, that has a spillover effect into Black, and Hispanic children being more likely to lose family members to COVID, and becoming what we call COVID orphans, or bereaved children.

So this is really a full community problem.

And, of course, we all probably remember as well that just a few months into the COVID-19 pandemic the entire country convulsed in interracial justice uprising around George Floyd.

And I just think that's such a momentous event that we can't really push too far into history when we think about how are we as a country gonna recover from this pandemic, and are we going to finally put racial justice in the center where I also believe generational justice, or justice for children also belongs.

- And despite all of that, Anya, while we have such great inequity in society, programs to help the less fortunate are used as political weapons by some.

You write some about politics and its influence in the book.

- I do, absolutely, and I couldn't have foreseen, honestly, the way that schools would become the center of a culture war.

And particularly around things like mask policies, but also LGBTQ curricula, even social and emotional learning, and how race and history are taught in schools.

All of these have been weaponized incredibly effectively in really what's a new chapter, and a long-running tug of war between the left and the right over the true nature function purpose of public education in the United States.

And I think it's really worth noting, and as I do go into in the book that there is a vision of public schools as an essential engine of democracy, and a place where people of all types come together.

They have to be secular, they have to be open to everyone.

And as much as possible they should be having different groups in society mix in their local public schools, but there have always been people in America who don't agree with that and don't believe it.

They want their children to be educated privately, educated at home, educated in their own culture's religious beliefs.

American society allows for that type of freedom of education, but not for exclusion.

And so how do we think about the role of public schools as we think about the threats of democracy that are taking place right now, right?

Are school's gonna be tolerant and open to all types of students whatever their gender identity, orientation or race?

Can they be safe places if there are places that people are coming and yelling and arguing and saying, we have to ban books, we have to shut down debate.

- Yeah.

Of course, we talked about an awful lot of problems, and challenges, some of which got even worse during the pandemic, but we will not finish the program I promise, without raising a very important point that you have in the book.

You note there is hope.

There are programs that were initiated during the pandemic that offer hope.

Those programs providing aid for schools, for children, for families, right?

- That's right, absolutely.

And I think it's also important to recognize the sense of agency that so many people discovered in stepping up.

I note that almost every single family that I covered, and talked to engaged in helping their own communities, even when they themselves were having trouble making ends meet.

And that's really the American spirit, right?

Now we're in a situation where our schools have billions of dollars to spend still, extra money from the federal government to recover from the pandemic.

And it's on all of us, everybody here who's watching has a connection to a community, and therefore to a public school.

How is your community spending those funds?

Are they being directed to those most in need?

Is the community stepping up, and responding in things like the mutual aid efforts that we saw during the early pandemic?

I really do believe that these kids are all our children.

Justice James Baldwin had the sentiment.

And we have to all be implicated in whether or not they're going to get better.

- Such a good point.

And, of course, as you know many Democrats want to make some of the programs that were initiated during the pandemic permanent programs, but that is unlikely to happen in the next two years with divided government.

From what we're learning it appears that some of these programs, though, could make a real impact.

I mean, I want to give you time to highlight that, that some of these were even called transformative.

Like the child tax credit.

- The child tax credit, within less than a year dropped child poverty between a third and 40 percent if I recall correctly.

And I mean, it's a moment to recognize the fact that we are choosing to have millions of children grow up in poverty.

We have the means to stop child poverty, to limit child poverty.

It's been proven in not even an experiment, but in an actual federal program.

So for anyone who doesn't make that a priority I just have to ask you, what do you think is more important than that?

- Yeah.

You have covered education for a long time.

I enjoyed listening to you many times on our NPR station here and elsewhere.

What surprised you most when writing the book?

Because that is a very deep dive that you don't get to often do when you're constantly doing stories in the news cycle.

- That's a really great question.

I think one of the opportunities the reporting gave me was to get to know some teachers really well, and look at them both in their roles as teachers, and as parents.

So of the five families that I followed at least three of them had a school teacher in the family, so their father or mother.

And they were dealing with things going from both sides, and just thinking about the sacrifices that so many people make every single day.

I mean, I had a teacher in Brooklyn where I live, tell me that she dealt with kids who were learning English who were newcomers to the country.

When school shut down they were all struggling to get online, and to get connected.

And she said, "You know what?

My son is gonna be fine.

I know he's gonna be fine.

I've gotta focus on these kids.

These are my kids too."

- One final thing that we learned for sure, and, again, I wanted to give you a chance to talk about this, and have folks think about this is that online education is not a replacement for in-person schooling.

Are you concerned, and I know a lot of educators.

I've talked to a lot of educators who are.

Are you concerned that that lesson isn't fully understood not only by the general public, but also by some educators, and some of the boards that control the budget?

- You know, ever since the computers first got invented there have been people looking for a quick fix in education.

And it probably goes far on beyond that.

I would hope that people have learned enough to be allergic to Zoom as a form of school, but I know for a fact that that's not true.

I know that people are looking to it to solve some really insoluble problems around things like teacher shortages.

And so the tricky part here is for us to kind of take our rose-colored glasses off, and stop thinking about technology as something over the rainbow pot of gold, and think about it as a tool that has some things that it does well, some things it doesn't do so well, and just try to evaluate it in that way.

I do believe it has a role in learning.

I don't think it can replace learning.

- Yeah, and a growing role, of course, as you know in higher education, more and more students taking courses online, sometimes exclusively online, but this was the first kind of national experiment where it was so much spread across the nation in this way when we're talking about K-12.

I just thought that was important to leave folks with that it is not a replacement.

- Absolutely, even though we're here talking online.

- Yes.

- It does have it's nice conveniences.

- It's a supplement.

You could not be with us in studio, but we could talk to you and it can help in education.

It isn't a replacement.

Anya, thank you so much for being with us today.

Anya Kamenetz, it's been great having you with us.

- Thanks so much for having me.

It's been really fun.

- Anya's book is "The Stolen Year: How COVID Changed Children's Lives, and Where We Go Now."

Well, that is "Eye on Education."

For all of us at WSIU, I'm Fred Martino.

Thank you for being with us.

Have a good week.

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