As we all sit here watching COVID-19 steadily making its way through each and every country like a highly focused general on a mission to win its war, one has to stop and realize that we are NOT in control of this situation. The effects of this virus are far more than a couple of weeks experiencing “social distancing”.
Each morning, as I open my email, there is yet another article in Higher Ed or the Chronicle on the disruption that this has caused in academia, be it for current students or the admissions process. Yet being on the “other” side, I can’t help but see this from an even greater perspective. While “events” such as graduation, study abroad, accepted student day, and even freshman deposits are disrupted a greater “event” is being overlooked: the absence of education.
Depending on where you live in the US, some students in K-16 may be missing close to a full semester of school. Regardless of the effort to put classes online, we do not have in place the infrastructure to monitor or carry out the evaluation and assessment of this type of large-scale event. We are at entire classes of students in their senior year of high school and college that are missing out on close to a semester’s worth of material; that material can be highly critical, particularly in STEM fields.
This lack of learning doesn’t just fall on high school and college students. In the primary levels, developmentally, students are missing out on important phases: reading and math skills are being developed at every level. For students with special needs, that reliance on daily continuity is being lost.
As we look toward the Fall, we need to realize that an entire population of students will now be behind at least a half semester’s worth of learning. Colleges and Schools already struggle each year with remediation – now they must plan to remediate an entire class.
So as colleges worry about filling their freshman class, are they considering what they are doing about their returning students that didn’t finish last semester? Are they considering those incoming freshmen and the courses they didn’t finish? Are they considering the AP exams that aren’t being taken and the entire freshman class that will enter without having had the opportunity to take AP exam from their senior year?
Do schools know how they are going to handle students that missed out on a semester of Algebra 1 and are supposed to move to Algebra 2 (in a real math world). Or students that missed half of Biology, but are now ready for Chemistry? And the same for Foreign Languages and any other course that follows a sequence? And while I completely support the closure of our schools, the educational ramifications are huge…
So as I get ready to meet with a junior this afternoon, I am already revising parts of our meeting as we don’t have his course requests for his senior schedule, nor do we know when his AP exams are, and most importantly – he can’t go on that college trip to visit colleges.
COVID-19 isn’t just a two-week social isolation. It is going to change the way we have done things in the past and how we will do things in the future.