Will the Kids be OK?

Will the kids be okay? It's the question we hear so often these days. Given all we hear about the pandemic, learning loss, and mental health issues in K12, how will Covid era kids fare as they leave high school behind? And what will the ripple effect be on colleges and universities over the next decade?

Plus Jeff this is, of course, an incredibly complex answer. To help us examine some of the variables that both K12 schools and colleges will face with COVID era students today, we're welcoming Anya Komnentz. She's an education correspondent for National Public Radio and the author of several books. Her latest book is called the Stolen How Covid Changed Children's Lives and Where We Go now and is due in bookshelves in August of this year. It not only looks at the impact of COVID but also historical issues of K12 education that came to a head during the pandemic.

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I'm Jeff Salingo.

And I'm Michael Horne. Jeff, as you know, I don't just spend time focusing on the future of higher education. I actually got my start in the field of education, looking at and pushing for innovation in K12 schools and the pandemic. Jeff zipped me right back to K12 education because of so many of the challenges that I observed as schools reacted to Covid. I started a new podcast focused on the challenges and opportunities for innovation. I have a new book coming out in July about what K12 schools should build out of the pandemic, called From Reopen to Reinvent. But what I haven't really connected yet is how the impact on the current K12 students is going to impact the future of higher education.

And Michael, I think that's a really important question. Higher ed leaders need to be given consideration to now because these are their future students. Before the pandemic, many of these students were coming to campuses with many more mental health needs and colleges and universities were ramping up not nearly fast enough to support them. Now we're already seeing many high school graduates delay or forego enrolling in colleges and universities, and we're reading a lot about learning loss among K12 students. What will this look like over the next 2, 5, 10 years. It's a really important question that higher ed leaders need to start planning for because it will materially impact the programs and supports they offer, who enrolls, and what the experience needs to look like. To help us think through all of this, we're welcoming Anya Komnent, an education correspondent from npr. Anya has written books on higher education and Screen Time for Children and more. But it's her upcoming book, the Stolen Year, that interests us today because she went deep in reporting on the impacts of the pandemic. Anya, welcome to the show.

Thanks for having me, Jeff.

Anya, before we dig into some of the big questions for higher ed, specifically, let's lay out some of the foundation of your reporting for our listeners and what you cover. In the book the Stolen Year, you followed five families from around the countries that are all quite different, and you track their experiences from March 2020 through the spring and summer of 2021. So can you tell us more about them and what that experience was like for you in following them?

It was something that really kept me sane throughout a really tough year for everyone. You know, when Covid hit, of course, my job went remote covering education for npr. And so I was in touch with families right away. And the families that I ended up following up with, they really ranged, obviously. So there was a family I got to know pretty well in Oklahoma, a single mom with five kids who were members of the Cherokee Nation in Washington, D.C. i got to know a woman who's a community activist and a special education teacher with two kids of her own in San Francisco. There was a family that was really interesting. Their son had spontaneous special needs, and they took in an emergency foster kid who is basically their son's best friend from school and was also an immigrant from Southeast Asia. And they took him in in July 2020. So they had a real journey through the year dealing with two kids who have really different relationships to remote learning, for example. So those are just some of the stories. And, you know, I think for me, I didn't get to meet anyone until the spring of 2021. So it was really a matter of kind of checking in with people. And then in the incredible historical upheavals of this year, really having someone to compare notes with was amazing, I think for almost all the people that I talked to, I really felt like we got to know each other pretty well because of that.

So can you give us an overview of the conclusion you took away and what you've learned as you've done the reporting for this book? We know there have been Lots of kids who have fallen behind academically and are struggling with mental health challenges and more. But how do you think about the broad landscape of how students are doing right now? And what's been most surprising to you, or is it widely understood?

So the question that I was looking to answer, Jeff, was exactly why we never prioritized children in any meaningful way during the response to the pandemic. Not in schools, but also not very much in the assistance that we provided to parents, allowing mothers to be driven from the workforce in droves, not really giving assistance to the caregivers, letting child cares close, letting people be driven from that profession. And as I sought the reasons behind all of these failures, it really was pointed up to me again and again that there are historical roots to this. The idiosyncrasies of America's lack of a welfare state is the legacy of a lot of different decisions. And, I mean, you know, there's usual suspects, obviously. I mean, I talk about racism in the book, I talk about capitalism in the book, but there's also these kinds of weird disjunctions. So there's been many times throughout our history where particularly women, particularly progressive women have gotten together and tried to create new systems and had some success. And then those successes have kind of faltered or they have failed to go from small examples in cities, for example, to big federal programs. And so there's a lot of really interesting history behind that. But, you know, to get to your second part of your question, in terms of the impact of the pandemic on children, it's been paradoxical, honestly. And I think it's fair to kind of point to some of the silver linings as well. There was a huge amount of financial assistance provided to families. Child poverty dropped in the first year of the pandemic because of the child tax credit, because of the CARES act money. You know, children benefited from, the moratoriums on evictions from, for example. And even in the area that you and I share of interest around online learning and what are the possibilities of learning, I think is something that we could look to as a bright spot. There's also really overlooked populations of kids. So I talk in the book about kids in foster care, kids in the juvenile justice system, kids at the borders, and all of them were affected in some good ways and in some bad ways by this sort of breakdown of the bureaucratic state during the pandemic.

This can be fascinating to read and capture all that history and then pull it forward. Anya but you also have the ability to put the pandemic and the interruption to schooling in some perspective, because you of course covered the impact of Hurricane Katrina on your hometown of New Orleans. And in the aftermath of that devastating event, schools were closed for six months to a year or even longer. So you've already seen what long term school closures can mean for students. Can you help us understand what you learned from that experience? Specifically, what are the long term implications for students? Because we can now pull that forward right to the impact on higher ed. And what are the lessons that we ought to take from that time that might be applicable to what students today have experienced? And where is the comparison useful and where isn't it?

Probably the most striking finding from the post Katrina education system. Doug Harris is like the guy, right, for education research in New Orleans. And college enrollment in New Orleans had not rebounded as of the fall of 2020 from pre Katrina levels. So that is a generational impact. And the really striking part about it is that most of the kids, it's true to say that public schools closed. You know, they started reopen November, December of the Katrina year. Most of the kids were back in schools within a matter of weeks. They were in schools elsewhere most of the time. And most of those schools were better performing schools than the ones that they had left. And despite that fact, despite that quick re enrollment, the social disruption and the loss of their home school and those relationships was measurable in terms of it was two years before those kids caught up on a trajectory, resumed what you would have expected them to be in terms of learning, in terms of test scores from that interruption. And so I knew, because I was familiar with that literature, that the interruptions from the pandemic would be something we'd be dealing with for years and for a generation. When I started working for NPR, the 10 year Katrina anniversary was looming. I went back down to the city and looked around. There was a lot of findings then around, you know, what we call disconnected youth or opportunity youth. New Orleans has a very high percentage of those kinds of kids. There's obviously a very punitive juvenile justice system there. Lots of kids getting arrested, getting into trouble. In terms of the bright spots, there have been more alternative schools opening up in different paths to diplomas and degrees. But the downturn in college enrollment that happened the fall 2020 was repeated in the fall 2021. I think without a major about face or a major kind of rededication to redressing what happened to kids, you can expect that to continue and to accelerate. Obviously, we were already on a trajectory of falling enrollment before this.

So let's turn a little bit more to the implications for higher ed institutions. So let's start first. What should colleges and universities be pre for? Right now? Let's just focus on the students coming out of high school right now, maybe in the next year or two. Then I want to kind of go more to the generational impact. But let's talk just about these next couple of years of high school classes.

So the first thing that a lot of colleges did was they dropped entry tests. And that was an interesting kind of way of saying that we're going to try to look at the whole kid and maybe widen the catchment a bit to see if we can get more kids in the doors. Right. Frankly. But I think understanding a little bit more of the nature of what students have missed out on or how weird their experience may have been and how varied it may have been is really important. And I think I would sort of draw, you know, the colleges to look to. The ones that you want to model yourselves on are the ones that are already good with non traditional students. So if they're good with homeschool kids, if they're good with transfers, community college transfers, students who are already older, that's the kind of flexibility they're going to need to have. That's the kind of staff student relations they're going to need to have. They're going to need to be able to assess learning beyond what it says on the transcript. Because students have had very different experiences. A lot of high schools have relaxed their grading policies. They may not have had the opportunity to do the same kind of learning experiences. I mean, they didn't go to Washington, D.C. in eighth grade and they didn't do an internship. There's a real mismatch of experiences. And so, you know, it's really expending that time and helping students define their own learning goals and not assuming that, you know what their needs are going to be. Because certainly there are kids who are raring to go and get super social and get super engaged. And there are others who need a little bit more help. I mean, one of the things I've heard anecdotally is just a lot of students that don't know how to socialize. They're two years behind in social interactions. And so maybe they need a little bit more of that hand holding or deliberate kind of social engineering that some colleges do.

So then let's talk longer term, Anya, because all three of us have kids in elementary and middle school, and we know that a lot of students, particularly students from low income and students of color are foregoing college right now as well. So that certainly seems like one of the considerations for colleges to be prepared for for the next 10 years. Right, but what else should they be aware of that they might not be thinking of, especially for those students who are in middle school and elementary school right now? Now maybe they might change by the time they get to high school, but say it doesn't change, those trend lines don't change. What should colleges be preparing for for essentially the next 10 years, plus figuring

out how they make the case that they are, you know, the right place for students to go because you know the downstream effect is going to be if my big brother or sister is not going to college in the fall 2021, then I might be less likely to go to college as a middle schooler. So not really seeing myself there, not really seeing that pathway or making it feel approachable or acceptable. So how do colleges then push themselves back down and show up in communities and create the dual enrollment programs, create the interaction opportunities to say, yes, we are here, we're in your community, and we are for you? I think it's going to be one of the biggest tasks for equity.

Makes a lot of sense. Anya, let's take the next step then beyond sort of what they should be prepared for. But what role should they be playing to actively support these students? What will they need to change about their operations? How might it change the academic and student support functions? And you mentioned how they do outreach to students already. But like on the day to day lived experience, what are the sorts of changes that they need to be putting into place right now?

I think one of the wisest descriptions of this that I've seen is the idea that we need to have a public health approach to mental health. So the utilization of mental health services is through the roof. And it was already at capacity before for young people and adolescents. And so in order to meet that need, everybody in a school community needs to have those mental first aid skills. We need to have normalization of talking about mental health and wellness, social and emotional skills, conflict resolution. And so, you know, nobody can say it's not my job to deal with my students well being. It's everybody's job. And it's going to take everybody in a school community to address these things. And knowing how to do that while also maintaining rigor and high expectations, I think is something that also needs to be talked about because the sort of paradoxical effect that I found, I remember I talked to a high school student in Washington state who was a foster kid. He was in a mentorship program, and he was a really good student. And when his high school took away all rating during the first semester of the pandemic, he was bummed because he said, my school is all about getting that grind, getting that A. And when you take that away, it's like there's no point. So figuring out how to create opportunities for growth and challenge, even though we all know that we've been through so much, is really a task for colleges to think about.

So, Anya, more broadly, I know you've thought about what role higher education can play in the recovery process post pandemic. So beyond the immediate questions of the support systems on campus, for example, what's the role these institutions should be playing in their communities, and what would need to change for them to fulfill that vision that you might hold?

We have needed our universities so much during this pandemic. We have needed their hard scientists and their social scientists. We've need their communications expertise. Everybody's been on a hunt for expertise, and people have been trying to make sense of the world and public so much. And we've also needed their help with economic innovation and getting the country back in prosperity. So I have seen some research that shown that, you know, scientific literacy is up, so people are paying attention and they're interested. They know what a preprint is. You know, they know how to read a different kind of graph than they used to know. Universities have a huge role to play, and I think it has to do with this notion of, you know, helping the communities understand how knowledge is constructed and what exactly their goal is. So a really great example of that is I covered a Coursera course that was created by the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health, and it was specifically on becoming vaccine ambassadors. So how parents in the community could talk to fellow parents about the vaccine and what the latest social science said about how to do that. Well. So that's an example of a university really saying, well, how can we help? And how can we be there on the front lines and not just use the media, but really give people a glimpse of what it is that we do, how we create research, put it together, and create courses that people can learn from and make their lives better?

A great example. So as we wrap up, I want to go back to where we started and wanted to ask you this big picture question that's probably very difficult to answer now, but I know a lot of parents are talking about it everywhere that I go, and so I'm going to Ask it anyway. So are the kids going to be okay? Because there's so many stories out there that make it seem like they're not right, that this is a big issue for this generation growing up during the pandemic. But you know, you've spent a lot of time with students and families over this pandemic. We all have our own kids. Like, what do you think about that?

The kids and the families that I followed all made progress and they all recovered and many of them used mental health services. Many of them made developmental strides despite some of the delays of the pandemic. So in my non scientific sample, there were some really bright spots. The kid who was emergency foster placement went back to live with his mom, which was really great in the big picture. In the closing chapter of the book, I talk about not just resilience, which is springing back to status quo, but we know with children they're always growing and they're always moving ahead, so we don't want to go back. And so the concept that I'm learning more about is post traumatic growth. And this is the idea that, you know, there's a percentage of people that they don't just recover, but they end up in a better place and there are ways of fostering post traumatic growth. So talking about what happened, telling stories about what happened, highlighting the gratitude, highlighting the strengths that our children expressed and discovered in themselves and really kind of honoring that, upholding it, you know, I'm thinking about how I'm going to mark the second year anniversary of the pandemic with my kids and talk to them about it and help them say, you know, you live through a part of history. This is always going to be a story that people are going to tell. And what is the story that you're going to tell of your pandemic?

Anya, with that focus on growth, I think that's a great place to leave it. Here on Future you. Thank you for joining us and for all the work that went into this important book. And we'll be right back.

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Welcome back to Future. You off that conversation with Anya about her upcoming book the Stolen Year, which promises to provide a fascinating look at, as she told us, why the interests of kids were consistently Deprioritized in the response to Covid. And Jeff, I want to dive right in because her point that years after Hurricane Katrina, college enrollment still hasn't rebounded in the New Orleans region seems like it should be a really sobering thought right now for colleges. We're living in an environment where pre pandemic college enrollment was falling. And as we've discussed multiple times in this show, Jeff, we know that after 2025 times are likely to get even leaner for colleges in many states with the demographic cliff stemming from the fall off in birth rates, which started in 2008. And then you have Covid and we've seen the immediate fall off in enrollments, like undergraduate enrollment, for example, decreased by just over a million students from fall of 2019 to fall of 2021. And it just seems to me that given the long term impacts we've seen from Katrina in enrollment, Covid is really just pouring gasoline on top of the college enrollment cliff that was already coming. And it's going to have significant long term ramifications. Now. Obviously, with all that said, history doesn't need to be destiny. And Anya suggested that colleges need to improve their outreach, make themselves more welcome to students that they haven't traditionally served. She specifically said, for example, that college leaders ought to look to schools that work well with homeschoolers, for example. So I guess I'm just curious, Jeff, from your perspective and your vast knowledge of college admissions and enrollment from the perspective of colleges, are you pessimistic or do you see glimmers of hope? And if the latter, where are they and where should college leaders look to?

Well, believe it or not, Michael, I'm actually, I see glimmers of hope. I'm actually pretty optimistic if colleges can get out of their own way and think of different segments that they're serving. You know, there's always going to be this direct pipeline to college from high school, but we know that's thinning. And during COVID it clearly had a lot of leaks. So if I were in charge of enrollment at a college right now, I think I would do three things to make sure that we don't repeat what happened in New Orleans after Katrina. So first, I would develop a plan to re recruit, re enroll and re engage the pandemic classes. You know, we lost a million enrollments in higher ed during COVID 19, so we need to go back out there and recruit them like they're new students. For those who enrolled and stopped out, we need to develop a plan to re enroll them and then for those students still in college, really think of approaches to re engage them so that they remain retained in college and eventually graduate? Second, what I think we need to do, and this is really coming off that episode we just had with Sean Gallagher around credentials, where we talked with him about the future of credentials. We really need to stop thinking about the legacy credentials that we have awarded for more than 100 years in higher ed. But what are the new credentials we can think about to engage students who are disconnected during the pandemic? Can colleges, for example, go deeper into high schools and middle schools much more than they do now with dual enrollment and help K12 schools with learning loss and at the same time, maybe with those courses offer some sort of credit or certificates that can be good at that institution when the student is ready for college four or six years later? Or can we think more about the booming post baccalaureate market that Sean mentioned and make the college degree more valuable by ensuring that every bachelor's degree also comes with a certificate or industry recognized credential? Or can we really rethink the bachelor's degree altogether and make it really much more stackable with an associate's degree that has much more currency than Sean talked about. Right. Because right now it doesn't provide much more than a high school diploma to some students. So I think that's the second thing we need to do around credentials. And then third, maybe more colleges should follow the lead of Arizona State, where of course I'm affiliated, and start an online high school at ASU or K through 12, I should say, not just high school. Right. At ASU, it's ASU Prep Digital. And that can also be a pipeline to colleges. It might be appealing to, to one of the groups that Anya mentioned, which was homeschooling, which of course grew during the pandemic.

I think that's a fascinating set of thoughts. And obviously that's addressing the pipeline of students, if you will, which is the front half, although it starts to get into the second half of the student experience itself while students are enrolled in student success efforts. And I guess I'm curious because so much money and attention and programming has gone into student success. Jeff, over the last decade plus. Right. We said the central question of higher ed over the last decade has really been not just how do we expand access, but how do we help students complete and increasingly get good jobs. We've seen some real investments in mental health that predate Covid. You know, Georgetown in your backyard, for example. Right. Has made significant investments to support mental health in A comprehensive and maybe even more importantly, proactive way, as opposed to constantly reacting to. But in your opinion, Jeff, after you hear Anya's take and with what you're seeing, do you think colleges and universities are about to take a serious step backward on student success and a lot of what's been done over the last decade plus will effectively be undone?

Yeah, I think there's no doubt about it, Michael. I think that many colleges in some ways were on autopilot before the pandemic around student success. And then I think the pandemic really revealed what was wrong. In fact, I recently wrote a white paper on student success post pandemic, and we could add that to the show notes. And in it identified five key areas where institutions, I think, really need to rethink their student success playbook post pandemic. One was to allow for flexibility in how students access not only their education, but also how those services are delivered. So doing some of that hybrid, doing some of that face to face, doing some of that online, we need to build structure and culture required to encourage students to connect with each other and faculty research has shown that students who have a strong sense of belonging at their institutions are more likely to persist and graduate. And again, I think students are missing that in the pandemic. Third, need to really examine student success plans through a diversity, equity and inclusion lens, because we know that the plans have not worked for all students equally. Fourth, we really need to evaluate leaders for their commitment to putting students at the center of decisions. You know, so much is really focused on everything else at the institution except for the students. So we need to really start to walk that walk by evaluating leaders on that. And related to that, the fifth piece here is really rethinking student success after the pandemic as a leadership challenge. And campuses known for reform before COVID I think, really had presidents who prioritize students over, say, rankings or research. And I think that we really need to do that again. And then finally consider the transition points at the beginning and end of college as critical choke points for student success. I guess that's six. I think I divided two of them up there, not just five, but I think that we need to really look at all of these. And again, we could add that paper to the show notes for people who want to read more about it.

Just coming out of that, I have just two more reflections as we wrap up this part of the conversation. Then I have one more question for you. But before we get there, I thought what Anya said about maintaining rigor even as Schools, on average, provide more supports was really important. And I don't think what we need right now is a lot of grade inflation or lowering of standards. What's needed is more personalization of learning, more personalized and comprehensive supports, and really, wherever possible, a rethought experience that ensures that schools are set up to support the students that they are actively enrolling and bring them through to meet their goals. And then the second thought that I had, Jeff, was that she pointed to something I think none of us talk enough about, which is the role of research in higher education. A couple hundred institutions, and I know some of our listeners will say it's more than that, but I'm going to say around a couple hundred, conduct cutting edge research that contributes meaningfully to the knowledge base of society in ways that are external, extraordinarily beneficial to society. And we've seen just how important that can be during the pandemic, whether it's through the MRNA vaccines and the CRISPR advances or the research about how to address vaccine hesitancy, which, by the way, has been ignored far too often, unfortunately. But I think we have to do a better job, and these institutions that prioritize research must do a better job of being clear about the value proposition that that research has to sustain society, being clear, frankly, about how expensive that research can be, and then playing the sorts of public roles that Anya outlined to support progress in their local communities and the nation writ large. So that's sort of my monologue, I guess, about the importance of research that we often don't talk about in this equation. But I want to go back to the students, though themselves. And a final question from me, Jeff, which is you asked Anya, will the kids be okay? And you said you get this question a lot. So I'm really curious, what's your take? Will the kids be okay?

I really do think so. Right. I think that they're often more resilient than adults give students credit for. I know that even in my own family, and I hate to dip my toes into the mask debate, but I think our kids cared so little about wearing masks. I think the adults cared a lot more about whether kids were wearing masks, but kids didn't really care. In fact, my kids are at school now and they're half masked and half not masked, but they don't really even seem to notice very much whether they're inside or outside. And in the course of their long lives, remember, this is a few years. Right. They're critical years. I get it. And we're going to have to do a lot of research to see the long term impacts and then be diligent about filling those gaps. But for the most part, I think that they're going to be more resilient than we give them credit for and I think they're going to be fine. So, Michael, I'm not going to let you off the hook, though, with that same question. So what do you think?

Gosh, you got me. All right, so I have similar takes to you on a lot of this. I think kids are way more resilient than we give them credit for. On the mask conversation, I'll dip a toe in there and say the same thing you've observed, which is that from my perspective, like, frankly, a lot in education, we get caught up in adult arguments and don't look at what kids actually care about. And they seem not to care that much about masks or no masks. They are way more adjustable and flexible than we are, is my observation. And I think the research, frankly backs that up on average. And there's exceptions, but on average I think the research strongly backs that up as well. And I would say from my writing, you know, my new book from Reopen to Reinvent, there clearly are some gaps, right, that kids have social, emotional gaps, they have learning gaps, no question about it. But I think to really move us forward, we need to shift from seeing this as a conversation about learning loss to asking what did students master and gain during the pandemic? And build off those assets. And I would hope start to orient the education system more concretely around the mastery of the skills and knowledge and how you can apply them to really help these kids, you know, lean in, frankly, to a lot of the passions that they developed or questions that they have coming out of this pandemic. Because I think it's a great jumping off point to create a whole generation of civically engaged kids that really want to grapple with the challenges that we did not handle terribly well as a society over the last couple years. I think on balance, I'm an optimistic person. But I think that we're going to see a lot of positives also come out of this, not just the negatives that often get highlighted. So with that, I'll just say thank you, though, to Anya Kamenetz for joining us in future you and for talking about her upcoming book, the Stolen Year. And thanks of course, to all of you for tuning in. And we will be back next time on Future you.

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