- Due to COVID-19, most students have been in an unusual learning environment.
- It is imperative that we strengthen our at-home learning situation with federal funding.
- We bailed out the auto industry and the banks after the 2008 financial crisis, and yet no one seems to be seeking to do the same for our educational system.
- Jose is the CEO of Bakpax, an AI tool that reads handwriting and auto-grades student work.
- This is an opinion column. The thoughts expressed are those of the author.
- Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories.
As a result of the novel coronavirus, most students in the US have been stuck in a bizarre learning environment since March.
The majority of US schoolchildren will still be trying to catch up at the start of the 2020-2021 school year in August. And while all students lose ground when school lets out to what is referred to as "summer slide" — a natural atrophy of skills while school is out of session —t here has never been anything that has resembled this level of academic disruption.
If only the academic setbacks would stop there. Unfortunately, it's going to get worse.
Trying to reopen
In addition to making up lost ground, schools and colleges must grapple with how to open in the fall. Some have already announced they will remain closed. Or they may open their doors and promptly shut them if students, staff, or parents start getting sick.
Schools are even more germ-friendly than airports when you consider the sheer number of people involved. With over 80 million students and staff in the halls over a typical 180 day school year, over 14 billion bodies go in and out of US schools each year, or 13 times the 1.1 billion total airline passengers in the US in 2019.
Schools are either going to have to stay closed or offer a blended solution where some students attend in person while others learn from home. Bottom line: at-home learning is going to be with us either until a vaccine is developed or Americans drastically alter their expectations.
It is therefore essential for American students, and US competitiveness, that we strengthen at-home learning as much as we can before the fall. Otherwise, it's entirely possible that when all is said and done, many American students will be up to a year behind where they should be.
If the rest of the world were similarly disadvantaged, perhaps all of this academic regression would at least result in competitive parity. However, with 4% of the world's population but 26% of infections and nearly 30% of deaths related to COVID-19, the US appears to be just about last in the efficacy of our response. The result is that a generation of American school children will be fundamentally disadvantaged versus their international peers.
Meanwhile, American higher education has long been one of our leading "export" industries, with students coming from all over the world to study here. Our colleges are being decimated by economic losses from COVID-19. Hundreds of otherwise healthy institutions may be forced to close.
We bailed out the auto industry in 2008, yet no one seems to be clamoring to help our higher education industry. Both industries create millions of jobs, but if anything, our universities also produce extremely valuable research and enjoy a stronger competitive advantage internationally than do our automakers.
The coronavirus pandemic has spawned gargantuan relief spending from the federal government. Congress has passed trillions of dollars in relief spending to date. The Federal Reserve's also added efforts including stimulus programs and interest rate cuts. Yet virtually none of it has gone to schools. That is self-defeating.
In order to support the education system, the federal government should immediately convene three task forces: one for schools and one for colleges led by the Department of Education, and one for worker-retraining led by the Department of Labor.
In each case, a diverse group of industry leaders who early on recognized the massive problems heading our way could be instrumental in widely sharing best practices now.
Some ideas that have been suggested are rotating students between morning and afternoon sessions or limiting attendance to activities that can only be done in person (such as science lab or sports). These task forces could also identify districts that have fallen far behind, and colleges that are in danger of shuttering, and provide additional support.
Re-skilling is an even harder problem but the Department of Labor could give funding to community colleges to offer worker-retraining classes. Our community college system is ubiquitous, operates at low cost, and already teaches a lot of technical and vocational content.
Giving all these schools and colleges more funding would help them retrofit facilities and invest in remote-learning tools, both of which will help stop the spread. All of that federal spending to slightly reducing America's short-term economic pain will be utterly wasted if we fundamentally cripple our future workforce.
Jose is the CEO of Bakpax, an AI tool that reads handwriting and auto-grades student work, which saves teachers time and solves student access problems by allowing them to complete all their work with just paper and/or a phone. He is an expert in using AI to personalize learning for students and has been recognized as a Technology Pioneer in education by the World Economic Forum.
