Returning to the classroom

When the coronavirus pandemic first emerged in the U.S. in early 2020 and forced shutdowns in schools across the nation, most experts assumed that in-person learning would be paused for only a few weeks. Instead, it took many months before children returned to the classroom — and in the Seattle area, it took more than a year. Teachers and districts scrambled to put together online learning, often with little or no training on what works best.

What happened to children during that year of virtual schooling? Educators still don’t have a good measure of how they fared academically, because standardized testing and even simple screening tools to measure specific skills, like reading comprehension, were put on hold. But evidence suggests that students lagged academic expectations by several months or more, and that there were sharp increases in the number of students who failed courses, especially among students from low-income households and students of color.

Education Lab is a Seattle Times project that spotlights promising approaches to persistent challenges in public education. The Seattle Foundation serves as fiscal sponsor for Education Lab, which is supported by grants from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Amazon, Comcast Washington and City University of Seattle. Learn more about Ed Lab. 

Many students, especially those from low-income households, struggled with internet access, making it difficult for them to attend virtual school. Children whose parents had to report to work in person were left with a patchwork of caregiving arrangements. Thousands of homeless children in Washington disappeared from school enrollment counts, even as homelessness grew around the Puget Sound area. The pandemic was especially hard on children with learning disabilities, and some districts — like Seattle — were called out by the state superintendent’s office for doing a poor job of supporting those students.