*Note: The student “Joseph” is referred to by a pseudonym to protect his privacy as a minor.
In the fall of 2021, Garden Grove’s Sunnyside Elementary reopened its doors, returning to in-person learning after the COVID-19 pandemic shut down Southern California’s public schools. At this time, Kellee Kim had just started teaching second grade at Sunnyside. She had previously been a teacher for kindergarten and transitional kindergarten, a grade level between pre-k and kindergarten. Ms. Kim knew the first year back in-person would be challenging. Kids would be behind. But the reality she faced was far more drastic than she ever imagined. “That year was the worst year in my 27 years of teaching,” she told The Politic.
In the classroom, many of Ms. Kim’s students struggled to perform at a second-grade level. They had difficulty spelling simple words and adding and subtracting double digit numbers. Beyond academics, even simple social skills—sharing, raising their hands—were entirely absent. These skills, which ordinarily would have been taught in the kindergarten classroom, could not be taught over a computer screen.
“My students were in dire need,” Ms. Kim said. “They had no idea how to hold a conversation. They were behind academically. They struggled to write their names. Most of them couldn’t even hold a pencil.”
After two years of online learning, many of Ms. Kim’s seven- and eight-year-olds lacked the foundational knowledge and skills that kindergarten and first grade normally provide. While they had all, ostensibly, attended Zoom school, family and household complications created a challenging learning environment for many students. According to Ms. Kim, even those students living in situations conducive to academic success absorbed frighteningly little while online.
Ms. Kim’s situation isn’t unique. Several years after emerging from isolation, it has become clear that students across the U.S. are struggling to recoup pandemic-related learning loss. Teachers and parents alike recognized that the quality of education and student engagement suffered in the transition to online school. Many publications have reported the pandemic’s adverse effects on education. In particular, many articles argued that a student’s socio-economic status largely determined their degree of learning loss during the pandemic.
In October 2022, Tom Kane, director of the Harvard Center for Education Policy Research, and Sean Reardon, a sociologist at the Stanford Educational Opportunity Project, created the education recovery scorecard, a national “report card” that tracked COVID-based academic achievement losses in U.S. public schools. According to the scorecard, learning losses were significantly higher in higher-poverty districts. The quarter of districts with the highest proportion of students receiving federal lunch subsidies lost two thirds of a grade level of learning, and students living in low-poverty districts lost nearly half a grade level.
In the United States, poverty and race are highly correlated. Relative to their total populations, vastly more people of color (POC) live in poverty than white people. According to a study by George Farkas, a professor emeritus of education at University of California, Irvine, Black children tend to be less prepared for kindergarten than white children. Additionally, many Asian and Hispanic students have lower achievement levels because a high proportion of their parents lack English skills. The COVID pandemic exacerbated pre-existing racial inequalities in the education system.
During the height of the pandemic—in order to mitigate the harmful effects of COVID on their children’s educations—many parents and guardians became active participants or educators themselves, hiring outside tutors or homeschooling. According to an article in Frontiers in Education, family involvement plays a crucial role in supporting student learning and well-being. However, not all families had the time or resources to dedicate to their child’s education. In the U.S., the people with the fewest resources are disproportionately POC. “When you have a massive crisis, the worst effects end up being felt by the people with the least resources,” Reardon said on PBS’s NewsHour.
Sunnyside Elementary, Ms. Kim’s school, exemplifies this reality.
Sunnyside is a public school in Garden Grove, California—a city of 170,488 in Orange County. Garden Grove is not an affluent city. Approximately 13% of Garden Grove residents are “persons in poverty,” meaning that their family’s total income is below the U.S. Census Bureau’s poverty threshold. The percentage of Garden Grove residents considered ‘persons in poverty’ is higher than that of the state of California and the U.S. as a whole.
Garden Grove is a diverse city with a large immigrant population. Over three quarters of Garden Grove residents are Asian or Latine. A large portion of the immigrant community comes from a Vietnamese heritage, with strong Korean, Mexican, Chinese, El Salvadoran communities as well. Roughly 44% of Garden Grove residents are classified as immigrants as opposed to California’s one quarter, and two thirds of households speak a language other than English at home, which is well above the state average.
Sunnyside is very much a reflection of its city. Currently, 95% of students at Sunnyside are non-white, and as of the 2021-22 school year, 73.80% of Sunnyside students were classified as socioeconomically disadvantaged. Sunnyside is considered a Title One school and is part of a federal education program that supports low-income and high-poverty students through grants.
Four in ten students at Sunnyside are English learners. Ms. Kim estimates that a quarter of her students’ parents either can’t read and write in English or are barely doing so at an elementary level. These parents were unable to supplement their children’s education and help them with their homework during the pandemic. Additionally, some non-English-speaking parents couldn’t understand school announcements or written correspondence from teachers.
The living conditions of many students also complicated their online learning experiences. For families struggling financially, creating space for their child to participate in online learning was not the number one priority; putting food on the table was. Ms. Trcka, a first-grade teacher at Sunnyside witnessed, firsthand, this reality.
“Already living in multi-family homes or apartments, families were constantly forced on top of each other,” Ms. Trcka said. “They did not have reliable WiFi, nor did they have their own spaces to learn. Too many interruptions made for inadequate absorption of materials. Many Sunnyside families had to put education on the back burner in favor of survival.”
In short, their ability to learn was compromised.
Dr. Christina Cipriano, an assistant professor in the Child Study Center at the Yale School of Medicine, offered an additional lens through which to view COVID-era learning disruptions: the impacts on students’ availability to learn. Dr. Cipriano defines ‘availability to learn’ in terms of the social, emotional, and affective components of things such as stress, anxiety, safety, responsibilities at home, and experiences of discrimination or prejudice.
“During the first phase of COVID, with loss of income, loss of jobs, and loss of life compounding, particularly in pockets of the US where we saw disproportionate rates of deaths among families of color, we’re having a kind of disproportionate loss of life,” she said. “Those factors can contribute both to how students show up in school, at the onset.”
Ms. Trcka sees the reflection of this loss every day in her first graders. “As we all know, the pandemic has left a huge emotional scar for many people. There was so much sickness and loss that families are still healing and dealing with these losses. Kids are now coming to school with major behavioral issues that have not been diagnosed for a treatment plan, and Gen-ed teachers are expected to help them cope. It’s almost too much to ask of us,” she said.
Ms. Cho, a teacher at the neighboring Allen Elementary, had a different experience of online learning altogether. “While families of students in low-income areas were on survival mode, my school community continued to thrive due to the extra support they received from their family and resources,” Ms. Cho said.
Allen Elementary is located four miles south of Sunnyside—a roughly 14-minute drive. Despite its proximity, Allen’s neighborhood is demographically very different from Sunnyside’s. While also a part of the Garden Grove Unified School District, Allen is not technically in Garden Grove, but Fountain Valley, a smaller, whiter, and more affluent city.
The percentage of persons in poverty in Fountain Valley is 8.3%, five percent less than in Garden Grove. Additionally, Asian and Latine people—the dominant POC groups in Fountain Valley—comprise just half of Fountain Valley’s population, and the percentage of immigrants is 31.4%; recall that for Garden Grove, these numbers are over three quarters and 43.9%, respectively.
Overall, the demographics of Fountain Valley were more conducive to successful online learning experiences than those of Garden Grove. This is reflected in the contrasts between Allen and Sunnyside. At Allen, only 40.50% of students are socioeconomically disadvantaged as opposed to Sunnyside’s three quarters. On average, Allen parents are wealthier, better employed, and better educated than Sunnyside parents. They have the time and resources to help their children. Additionally, a greater proportion of Allen parents and students speak English—over 80% of Allen students are English speakers. “Unlike most of my friends that taught at schools with a lower socio-economic demographic, I had a lot of parents that sat with their child during class time to help,” Ms. Cho said.
The 2021-22 California state test scores for Allen and Sunnyside are a testament to the impact of city demographics on children’s quality of education. In the 2021-22 school year, Allen students greatly outperformed Sunnyside students in mathematics and English language arts (ELA). Over 86% of Allen students met or exceeded state standards in both subjects. At Sunnyside, just 58.66% of students met or exceeded standards in mathematics, while 65.24% did so in ELA.
This imbalance existed long before the pandemic; it’s representative of a greater cycle in which societal advantages breed success, while disadvantages breed stagnation. Since 2014—which is the earliest year for which the Department of Education contains data—roughly 20-30% more Allen students than Sunnyside students have exceeded state standards in math and ELA each year.
Garden Grove and Fountain Valley—thus, Sunnyside and Allen—are a microcosm of the way city demographics impact education and student outcomes nationwide. When students lack an educational support system at home, as do many socioeconomically disadvantaged students, who are often also POC or children of immigrants, it’s easier to fall behind. It’s also harder to catch up.
What results is the reinforcement of cycles of poor education and poverty. According to Opportunity Atlas—a platform that uses census data to map the social mobility outcomes of children into adulthood based on their parents’ incomes—in Garden Grove and surrounding areas, higher parent incomes lead to better child outcomes. Lower parent incomes, on the other hand, translate to children having lower employment rates, lower individual incomes, lower household incomes, and higher incarceration rates.
As many immigrant and POC families—those of Sunnyside, included—have discovered, poverty is an incredibly difficult cycle to break. When the education system fails already disadvantaged children, as it did during the pandemic, their hope of breaking the cycle decreases exponentially. Children who face cumulative, systemic disadvantages are effectively predisposed to fail.
Still, state and local governments are trying to bridge the educational gap created by the coronavirus pandemic. Through various COVID-relief grants and aid programs, California in particular has taken the first steps towards addressing COVID-related learning loss. In 2021, the California Department of Education created the $4.6 billion Expanded Learning Opportunity Grant, which allows schools to expend funds for the following categories: extending instructional learning time, accelerating progress to close learning gaps, integrated pupil supports, community learning hubs, supports for credit deficient pupils, additional academic services, and training for school staff.
While grants like these are certainly important, their categories of use are broad, and there is not much oversight to ensure that the funds have a positive impact on students’ academic recovery. Often, it is school districts or county offices of education who make decisions about the specific uses of such funding. Teachers and school support staff—those on the ground and actually responsible for the day-to-day academic and social welfare of students—are rarely asked for their opinion.
Ms. Kim believes that money is not enough. “Even though much money is poured into the school system, how is it being spent? It isn’t how much money we have, it’s how it’s spent that will make the difference.”
Were teachers asked their opinion on how government funding should be spent, the likely response would be an emphasis on the need for more individualized student support. In an interview for The Politic, Ms. Trcka cited the dearth of staff available to support in-need students. “What we really need is physical, human support to share our workloads,” she said. This comment highlights one of the larger issues with one-time or temporary grants: they limit the ability of schools to implement permanent academic support programs or hire additional full-time staff.
According to Ms. Kim, what students require, more than anything, is personalized attention and time to heal from the pandemic and recoup what they have lost academically, socially, and emotionally. This need is particularly evident in one of her students, a young boy named Joseph.
Joseph was in kindergarten in 2020 when the pandemic began. During this time, Joseph’s mother took Joseph from his birth father and left town. The entirety of Joseph’s first-grade year was spent not in a classroom but bouncing around motels.
In 2021, Joseph enrolled as a second grader at Sunnyside. When he came to Ms. Kim two years ago, he could barely write his name. He was, essentially, a kindergarten student. By the end of the 2021-22 school year, Joseph had learned his letters and sounds, could count, and could write some numbers, but he was still far below a second-grade level. Ms. Kim had no choice but to retain him.
Now, as he begins third grade, Joseph can read simple sentences. He can add and subtract double-digit numbers, and, with assistance, three-digit numbers. Nevertheless, Joseph is still behind his peers both academically and socially. The nearly two-year-long interference to his education had disastrous effects, and Joseph’s father—who he currently lives with—is illiterate and unable to help him. Bridging the gaps in Joseph’s development would require Ms. Kim to devise and tailor an entire curriculum just for him. “Do I think he is ever going to catch up?” Ms. Kim asked. “I highly doubt it. I would have to adopt him and work with him forever.”
Like many of the nation’s educators, Ms. Kim would need to put in superhuman levels of work to undo the disastrous effects COVID had on her students. And even then, students like Joseph will likely not escape the damning cycles in which they are entrenched.