The recent New York Times headline questioning whether the $190 billion provided to districts and schools for pandemic aid “worked” was the latest example of how little nuance there is in coverage of our nation’s young people and their education. It is well past time for our nation, leaders and media to reckon with how the myopic focus on “academic catch up” post-pandemic has failed students. For the 2024-25 school year, we must pivot to first create substantive space for healing as the foundation for true learning.
As a country, we were goaded to focus on contrived “learning loss,” failing to reckon with the human toll on students and educators. In the aftermath of trauma, healing must always precede efforts to push forward. Yet for students returning post-pandemic, this fundamental need was displaced by frantic calls for interventions like “high-dosage tutoring” to get kids “caught up.”
Imagine being a teenager, ripped away from friends, routines, and support systems for months as COVID raged. You were denied experiences needed to mature and gain independence. Many grieved loved ones’ deaths or faced family crises like job losses, evictions, hunger – bearing witness to America’s cruelest inequities. Then imagine returning to school only to be instantly drilled about being “behind” and needing academic remediation.
We effectively demanded that young people and educators compartmentalize any grief, anxiety or trauma from their upended realities during the pandemic. Individual educators tried to support students, but it’s hard to support others when you’ve had no time to focus on your own healing. Beyond that, we neglected to consider that young people were all about two years behind developmentally so that incoming third graders actually had the skills and mindsets of first graders; or high school freshman were developmentally more like middle school students.
For three years, students, educators, families and communities have suffered the impact of that decision. This is evidenced by the data around youth well-being. EducationWeek’s Research Center reported that rates of student aggression and misbehavior spiked in 2021, and persisted through this academic year. In April 2022, 69% of public schools reported stark increases in the percentage of students seeking mental health services from school compared to pre-pandemic levels. Strikingly, 87% of public schools expressed concerns about effectively providing mental health services to all students in need.
Chronic student absenteeism spiked as high as 37% in some high-poverty districts between 2021 and 2023, and nearly doubled nationwide to 30% as compared to the 2017-2018 academic year. In 2023, suicide was the second leading cause of death among youths aged 8-17 in the U.S. It turns out that being hostile, absent or simply giving up is how young people grappling with anxiety, depression and dislocation plead with us to listen to their needs.
In an ironic twist, prioritizing reactive academics over proactive healing also undermined efforts to remediate “loss.” An analysis by the Northwest Evaluation Association (NWEA) involving 6.5 million students showed academic “backsliding” in 2022-23 compared to pre-pandemic trends. Some high-poverty districts performed worse in 2023 than 2019.
Let’s be clear: the concept of “learning loss” itself is a flawed framing. As Harvard’s Jal Mehta notes, grade-level benchmarks originated from bureaucratic aims, not evidence-based developmental science. We made it up. And if we made up the rules, we can pause them in the best interest of young people given the pandemic’s lingering upheavals.
As schools came back in-person, our nation should have prioritized rebuilding relationships and healthy school cultures, which had disintegrated due to school closures, virtual learning, masking, and social distancing. Relationships are the foundation for social-emotional healing; research shows even one strong relationship is incredibly protective for those who have suffered trauma.
We should have allowed schools to hit pause on traditional academics for 3 to 6 months, allowing them to re-cultivate cultures of care and belonging, rebuild caring relationships, and scaffold the development of foundational skills and mindsets through:
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Group artistic expression through music, dance and painting to process emotions;
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Outdoor adventure programs supporting students and educators to reconnect their minds and bodies through nature;
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Community service projects providing opportunities for students to feel empowered by giving back;
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Autobiographical storytelling uplifting students’ and educators’ lived pandemic experiences;
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Cultural circles and mentorship programs engaging the broader community to create safe healing spaces for students and educators.
Research shows well-implemented therapeutic approaches foster holistic growth and social/emotional (SEL) resiliency. The Collaborative for Academic, Social and Emotional Learning found that quality SEL programs can improve mental health indicators and, with that as a foundation, improve students’ academic performance by as much as 11 percentile points.
We cannot keep failing our children. During the 2024-25 school year we must prioritize efforts to address the on-going social-emotional crisis catalyzed by the pandemic. When schools reopen, we should allow them to use as much as half a year to intentionally engage in healing-centered activities, with district leaders and educators using the summer to design authentic, relational programming in partnership with community partners.
Critically, federal and state policymakers should pause test-based accountability for two years to provide moral permission for this trauma-informed pivot. Higher education institutions, parents and community members must also reconsider the ways in which a focus on metrics like GPAs and AP scores have added to the pressures felt by young people and schools – and play our part in supporting healing in service of longer term outcomes.
When our children’s worlds turned upside down, we robbed them of the space, time and compassion to heal. And even now we fail to recognize that error. Having witnessed incredible resilience from young people alongside their desperate pleads for support, we owe them a radical recalibration that centers their holistic well-being. Students cannot truly re-engage or succeed unless we first center their overall well-being as human beings.
