We all know Generation X, Millennials and Generation Z. And who can forget The Greatest Generation of World War 2, the Silent Generation of the 1950s and those wild and crazy Boomers who gave us bell bottom pants, Woodstock, Bill Clinton and Donald Trump?
Say hello to the new, as-yet-unnamed generation.
Let’s call this “Generation R” — as in remedial.
The COVID-19 pandemic not only killed off a million Americans so far; it set back a generation of young children in school.
That’s not just a prediction anymore. We now know the truth.
In the early days of 2022, with most students back in classrooms, New Jersey education officials dumped a pile of startling statistics that showed what had taken place for nearly two academic cycles as students tried to decipher Shakespeare and algebra from home over Zoom-like computer hookups. The message from those statistics was scary: Huge numbers of students had fallen behind in math and reading during the coronavirus crisis.
Strangely, this announcement was greeted with little fanfare — and almost no alarms.
Understandably, we were distracted by the infection rates from the latest omicron variant that were rising faster than a Jeff Bezos rocket ship. Deaths increased. So did hospitalizations. People wondered if COVID-19 would ever disappear.
Meanwhile, inflation was on the uptick, too. America suddenly faced the prospect of paying nearly $5 for a gallon of gasoline.
With such looming problems, it’s hard to worry that elementary school children may not be able to read about Clifford the giant red dog or add a string of numbers without counting their fingers.
But the situation is worse that we imagined. New Jersey’s warning in January was just a foreshadowing of what is taking place across America.
A series of well-researched reports, released in recent days, shows that the youngest children — kindergartners and first and second graders — are dangerously far behind in basic math and reading. The solution extends far beyond forcing kids to spend more time on their homework, enrolling in summer school or hiring a few more tutors. This is one of those massive structural problems that affects the future.
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If kids don’t know the basics, how can they move to more complicated work? Put another way, if young children can’t read and pronounce words by understanding phonics, how would they ever think about Shakespeare? And if they don’t master basic addition and subtraction, how can they ever move on to compound fractions, geometry and algebra?
A national study of 400,000 students by Amplify, a respected educational assessment firm, found that performances by elementary school students in all grades was lower than pre-COVID levels. Or as the study noted: “Across all grades the percentages of students at risk, and at greatest risk, are still worse than they were at the middle of the 2019–20 school year, before pandemic disruptions began.”
That’s no surprise. As the COVID-19 virus swept through our world during the late winter and spring of 2020 and schools were closed along with all manner of businesses and government offices, most education experts predicted that students would need to catch up in some way if they were left at home to learn over computer screens while they played with their cellphones and gazed at TikTok videos.
The good news, Amplify said, is that students in the “upper elementary” classes — grades 3-5 — made dramatic improvements or “instructional successes” in 2021 after they settled back into their seats in classrooms. But those students were already schooled in the basics of reading and math.
The problem, the study found, centered on kids in the lower elementary grades. Children in kindergarten and first and second grades never had a chance to master the basics. And it’s these students, the study found, where the biggest losses occurred, especially with reading skills.
Across America during the 2020-2021 school year, an average of 41% of kids in the lower grades could not pass basic reading requirements and needed “intensive intervention” if they were going to become successful students. The numbers were especially alarming among first graders where nearly half of the students — 47% — were not meeting reading benchmarks.
The figures improved slightly for the current, 2021-2022 academic cycle — but not by much. The Amplify study found that an average of 36% of kids in kindergarten, first and second grades still could not meet the most rudimentary reading standards.
In practical terms, that means kids who started kindergarten as COVID-19 struck during the 2019-2020 cycle, then tried to master first-grade work with “remote learning” during the 2020-2021 year, are now in dire shape as they finish second grade.
Not surprisingly, the problem is even worse for Black and Hispanic children who may not have had access to computers and other technological gadgets to participate fully in remote-style learning. “In these three early grades,” the study said, “persistent learning losses have widened the national gaps in early reading skills between Black and Hispanic students and their white counterparts.” The New York Times reports that nearly 60% of lower grade elementary students in high poverty neighborhoods in Boston have been identified as “high risk” for reading problems.
You don’t need a doctorate degree in linguistics or sociology to understand that these kids face a difficult future — unless something is done to set them right. Experts say that kids who don’t master reading comprehension in elementary school are likely to drop out of high school. After that, they can forget college and complicated technical schools.
Math is also a problem. A study of some 6 million students by another respected educational analysis firm, Curriculum Associates, found that math performances were “lower in nearly all grades than what we saw prior to the pandemic.” As with reading, the math problems were especially acute in the lower elementary grades — the kids who started their educational lives as the coronavirus struck.
This is why education experts are predicting the equivalent of a lost generation of students.
What can be done?
So far, few practical solutions have emerged.
One concern is that the ultimate solution is out of the hands of education analysts. The folks from Amplify and Curriculum Associates are quite good at examining problems in schools. But the solutions lie in the hands of people who control the purse strings — the state legislators and even county and local officials who run school boards and distribute tax dollars if kids need more remedial help and tutors.
Meanwhile, the National Center for Education Statistics, which is part of the U.S. Department of Education, reports that the COVID-19 pandemic also created a staff shortage in many schools. Fearing infections, some teachers retired or just quit. Others found other jobs.
As with math and reading scores for young children, the teacher shortage is hardly inconsequential. The Center reported in March that 44% of public schools said they had some sort of vacancy in their teaching ranks.
Just when more kids need more attention, the Center says, many schools have been forced to expand classroom sizes or — incredibly — assign “non-teaching staff” to classrooms.
As spring emerges and our masks come off, we are hoping for a return to pandemic-free times. And why not?
But what about the kids who can’t read or add and subtract?
Let’s not forget them.
Mike Kelly is an award-winning columnist for NorthJersey.com. To get unlimited access to his insightful thoughts on how we live life in New Jersey, please subscribe or activate your digital account today.
Email: kellym@northjersey.com
Twitter: @mikekellycolumn