Four years ago this month, schools nationwide began to shut down, igniting one of the most polarizing and partisan debates of the pandemic.
Some schools, often in Republican-led states and rural areas, reopened by fall 2020. Others, typically in large cities and states led by Democrats, would not fully reopen for another year.
A variety of data — about children’s academic outcomes and about the spread of COVID-19 — has accumulated in the time since. Today, there is broad acknowledgment among many public health and education experts that extended school closures did not significantly stop the spread of COVID, while the academic harms for children have been large and long-lasting.
While poverty and other factors also played a role, remote learning was a key driver of academic declines during the pandemic, research shows — a finding that held true across income levels.
“There’s fairly good consensus that, in general, as a society, we probably kept kids out of school longer than we should have,” said Dr. Sean O’Leary, a pediatric infectious disease specialist who helped write guidance for the American Academy of Pediatrics, which recommended in June 2020 that schools reopen with safety measures in place.
There were no easy decisions at the time. Officials had to weigh the risks of an emerging virus against the academic and mental health consequences of closing schools. And even schools that reopened quickly, by the fall of 2020, have seen lasting effects.
But as experts plan for the next public health emergency, whatever it may be, a growing body of research shows that pandemic school closures came at a steep cost to students.
The longer schools were closed, the more students fell behind.
At the state level, more time spent in remote or hybrid instruction in the 2020-21 school year was associated with larger drops in test scores, according to a New York Times analysis of school closure data and results from the National Assessment of Educational Progress, an authoritative exam administered to a national sample of fourth and eighth grade students.
At the school district level, that finding also holds, according to an analysis of test scores from third through eighth grade in thousands of U.S. districts, led by researchers at Stanford and Harvard universities. In districts where students spent most of the 2020-21 school year learning remotely, they fell more than half a grade behind in math on average, while in districts that spent most of the year in person they lost just over one-third of a grade.
Such losses can be hard to overcome, without significant interventions. The most recent test scores, from spring 2023, show that students, overall, are not caught up from their pandemic losses, with larger gaps remaining among students that lost the most ground to begin with. Students in districts that were remote or hybrid the longest — at least 90% of the 2020-21 school year — still had almost double the ground to make up compared with students in districts that allowed students back for most of the year.
Some time in person was better than no time.
As districts shifted toward in-person learning as the year went on, students that were offered a hybrid schedule (a few hours or days a week in person, with the rest online) did better, on average, than those in places where school was fully remote, but worse than those in places that had school fully in person.
Income and family background also made a big difference.
A second factor associated with academic declines during the pandemic was a community’s poverty level. Comparing districts with similar remote learning policies, poorer districts had steeper losses.
But in person-learning still mattered: Looking at districts with similar poverty levels, remote learning was associated with greater declines.
A community’s poverty rate and the length of school closures had a “roughly equal” effect on student outcomes, said Sean F. Reardon, a professor of poverty and inequality in education at Stanford, who led a district-level analysis with Thomas J. Kane, an economist at Harvard.
But the combination — poverty and remote learning — was particularly harmful. For each week spent remote, students in poor districts experienced steeper losses in math than peers in richer districts.
That is notable, because poor districts were also more likely to stay remote for longer.
Some of the country’s largest poor districts are in Democratic-leaning cities that took a more cautious approach to the virus. Poor areas, and Black and Hispanic communities, also suffered higher COVID death rates, making many families and teachers in those districts hesitant to return.
“We wanted to survive,” said Sarah Carpenter, the executive director of Memphis Lift, a parent advocacy group in Memphis, Tennessee, where schools were closed until spring 2021.
“But I also think, man, looking back, I wish our kids could have gone back to school much quicker,” she added, citing the academic effects.
Other things were also associated with worse student outcomes, including increased anxiety and depression among adults in children’s lives, and the overall restriction of social activity in a community, according to the Stanford and Harvard research.
Even short closures had long-term consequences for children.
While being in school was on average better for academic outcomes, it wasn’t a guarantee. Some districts that opened early, like those in Cherokee County, Georgia, a suburb of Atlanta, and Hanover County, Virginia, lost significant learning and remain behind.
At the same time, many schools are seeing more anxiety and behavioral outbursts among students. And chronic absenteeism from school has surged across demographic groups.
These are signs, experts say, that even short-term closures, and the pandemic more broadly, had lasting effects on the culture of education.
“There was almost, in the COVID era, a sense of, ‘We give up, we’re just trying to keep body and soul together,’ and I think that was corrosive to the higher expectations of schools,” said Margaret Spellings, an education secretary under President George W. Bush who is now CEO of the Bipartisan Policy Center.
Closing schools did not appear to significantly slow COVID’s spread.
Perhaps the biggest question that hung over school reopenings: Was it safe?
That was largely unknown in the spring of 2020, when schools first shut down. But several experts said that had changed by the fall of 2020, when there were initial signs that children were less likely to become seriously ill, and growing evidence from Europe and parts of the United States that opening schools, with safety measures, did not lead to significantly more transmission.
“Infectious disease leaders have generally agreed that school closures were not an important strategy in stemming the spread of COVID,” said Dr. Jeanne Noble, who directed the COVID response at the UCSF Parnassus emergency department.
Politically, though, there remains some disagreement about when, exactly, it was safe to reopen school.
Republican governors who pushed to open schools sooner have claimed credit for their approach, while Democrats and teachers unions have emphasized their commitment to safety and their investment in helping students recover.
“I do believe it was the right decision,” said Jerry T. Jordan, president of the Philadelphia Federation of Teachers, which resisted returning to school in person over concerns about the availability of vaccines and poor ventilation in school buildings. Philadelphia schools waited to partially reopen until the spring of 2021, a decision Jordan believes saved lives.
“It doesn’t matter what is going on in the building and how much people are learning if people are getting the virus and running the potential of dying,” he said.
Pandemic school closures offer lessons for the future.
Although the next health crisis may have different particulars, with different risk calculations, the consequences of closing schools are now well established, experts say.
In the future, infectious disease experts said, they hoped decisions would be guided more by epidemiological data as it emerged, taking into account the trade-offs.
“Could we have used data to better guide our decision-making? Yes,” said Dr. Uzma N. Hasan, division chief of pediatric infectious diseases at RWJBarnabas Health in Livingston, New Jersey. “Fear should not guide our decision making.”
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Source: Fahle, Kane, Patterson, Reardon, Staiger and Stuart, “School District and Community Factors Associated With Learning Loss During the COVID-19 Pandemic.” The study used estimates of learning loss from the Stanford Education Data Archive. For closure lengths, the study averaged district-level estimates of time spent in remote and hybrid learning compiled by the COVID-19 School Data Hub (CSDH) and American Enterprise Institute (AEI). The AEI data defines remote status by whether there was an in-person or hybrid option, even if some students chose to remain virtual. In the CSDH data set, districts are defined as remote if “all or most” students were virtual.