(The Center Square) – Education advocates said it’s imperative to get students back in classrooms because virtual learning is negating months of education and could cost students nearly a year’s earnings in adulthood, according to one analysis.
Advance Illinois, a nonprofit education advocate, presented findings from a number of studies to the Joint Senate Education and Higher Education Wednesday. Their overarching theme detailed how schools and teachers are doing yeoman’s work to maintain a sense of normalcy for students but learning virtually creating significant impairments for students that no one can fathom.
“There should be statues and monuments erected,” Steans said of the educational effort but “this is a significant disruption…The amount of learning time that is lost, compounded by summer learning loss and the implications down the line on educational attainment, lifetime earnings, is powerful.”
Steans points to a June study by McKinsey and Co. that estimates the economic losses if students aren’t back to in-person learning by January 2021. McKinsey said that, even with remote learning, the average student “could lose $61,000 to $82,000 in lifetime earnings (in constant 2020 dollars), or the equivalent of a year of full-time work, solely as a result of COVID-19–related learning losses.”
In other instances of large-scale learning disruptions, Steans notes the learning interruptions stemming from Hurricane Katrina resulted in nearly a third of New Orleans students being held back a year, more than double the rate of other districts in the South. In Argentina, prolonged teacher strikes in the 1980’s left students there with a disadvantage that carried into adulthood, with a University of Chicago study saying childhood exposure to the strikes “reduce[d] labor earnings of males and females by 3.2% and 1.9%, respectively.”
Illinois, like 43 other states, gave school districts the ability to choose between in-person learning, remote learning, or a hybrid of the two. Many districts, including Chicago Public Schools, saw pressure from teachers unions, even threats of walkouts if schools didn’t begin the year with only virtual learning. The Chicago Teachers Union is demanding the district assess the air quality in their hundreds of buildings before they would agree to teach in-person learning, according to a report from ChalkBeat.
In districts that do not offer in-person learning, parents face the challenges of having someone home to watch over younger kids, connectivity issues that disproportionately affect rural and minority households, and student engagement, of which Steans said was severely impaired when schools closed their doors in the spring.
“Nearly one-quarter of remote students were not engaged in remote learning at all,” she said. “They were not seen. They were lost during that period.”
Once the dust settles on virtual learning, Steans said students will need longer school days, possibly costly year-round semesters, to catch them back up to where they would be had they not been forced into virtual learning.
“We recognize, fully, that we don’t know where the money is going to come from,” she said. “It is not cheap to add minutes to a day or days to a calendar year. It is our position, however, that if that’s what kids are going to need then we have got to talk about it.”