Figure 3.1 How coronavirus lockdowns disrupted education systems worldwide [YouTube Video]

Please watch the first 8.5 minutes of this video on COVID-19 and the education crisis (figure 3.1). As you watch, please think about the following opening questions: How has physical distancing, school closures, and remote learning (due to the COVID-19 pandemic) impacted your ability to complete college? Are the experience of the people in this video the same or different than yours?

Figure 3.2 Learning during COVID-19

“You’re on mute” may be the most commonly heard phrase in education during the COVID-19 pandemic. You probably can tell stories about how hard it has been to stay in school. Some of you may have a couple of kids in school, with a computer at home that needs to be shared between the three of you, and no internet. You may have struggled to get your six-year-old to wear a mask so that they could go to school, like in figure 3.2. For students who needed physical therapy or speech therapy to succeed, doing therapy online was a poor substitute for in person care. Some of you needed to quit school for a while so that you could take care of your kids or your sick family members. Still others of you graduated high school, but didn’t get a chance to have a graduation ceremony or celebrate with family and friends.

For others, school at home became a time in which students flourished, because they could learn at their own pace. Students from wealthy families might get better grades, because their parents were able to hire teachers to teach their kids one-on-one. Some parents could put their kids in learning pods, small socially isolated groups of kids with one teacher. For introverts like me, quarantine had an unexpected benefit. I could focus on creative projects without having to leave home.

Our experience of education during this pandemic also illustrates the interdependence of our educational system. Both the federal government and state offices made rules about what social distancing looked like and when schools could be open. Our teacher’s unions advocated for the safety of everyone in our schools. Some of our teachers, cafeteria workers, and school bus drivers staffed food deliveries for our most vulnerable students on school bus routes. Our janitors implemented safety protocol after safety protocol. And all of us learned with our technology professionals to find computers, hotspots, and other technologies, and get them into our student’s hands.

Each of our COVID education stories is a bit different. As we widen our lens to look at education in our society, we see that education itself can be both a social problem and a response to social problems. In this chapter, we will explore your experience with going to school during COVID-19 so that we begin to surface some of the underlying social problems in this area. We expand our understanding of education as a social problem by exploring inequalities in access and outcomes for specific groups of people. In order to understand why the inequalities exist, we look deeper at the historical and current models of education. Finally, we look at how education impacts poverty. To finish our exploration, we end where we started, examining how an interdependent approach, based in both individual agency and collective action, is closing the digital divide.

3.1.1 Focusing Questions

It is curious to think that education can be a social problem and can be an interdependent solution. The following questions help us to sort out this complex topic:

1. How do social identity and social location impact who learns?
2. How do the changes in models of education reflect the social problems process?
3. What is the relationship between education, poverty, and wealth?
4. How can education be an interdependent, transformative solution to social problems, particularly during global health crisises?

Let’s start learning!