Governments can also implement schemes like mobile libraries that will ensure children can get the reading materials they need.

“Children's emotional needs are completely being neglected at the moment,” Rapa says. So although children have been given abundant material on the physical effects of the disease and the ways to avoid contagion, government health campaigns have provided very little guidance on how to cope with the stress. “[Children] are now experts on viral transmission, but they're not being taught how we can talk about this and deal with such important things.”

children are highly perceptive of their parents’ and carers’ worries and it seems likely that they will absorb some of this angst – whether it’s worry about the disease itself, the job losses, or the strains of isolation.

Van Lancker agrees that access to a quiet study area, with an internet connection, is a huge issue for many people. “Those are the circumstances which are not very likely for children living in poverty and over-crowded households,

A recent study from the UK found that children from richer families are spending about 30% more time on home learning than those from poorer families.

Some studies have found that richer children actually improve their reading performance over the period, while it is the poorer families who tend to show the greater losses, since they have fewer educational resources over the holidays.

since they will also lack the opportunity for intellectually nourishing activities like music lessons, trips to the museum and library, or summer camps.

If schools don’t reopen until September, many children will have spent more than 20 weeks in a row away from school – an unprecedented amount of time away from education, meaning we can’t simply extrapolate from the existing data.

The more serious concern is that, when schools are closed for long periods, many children will begin to forget what they already know – a regression that will be much harder to remedy.

Some clues to these effects come from studies of short-term school closures due to snow. In 2007, Dave Marcotte, a professor in public affairs at American University in Washington DC, examined the standardised test scores of third, fifth and eighth graders in Maryland. The effects of school closures were greatest for the youngest children, with each lost day resulting in around 0.57% fewer children reaching the expected grades in reading and maths. The average school lost around 5 days, in total, due to bad weather – resulting in around a 3% drop in the overall pass rate – equivalent to roughly one child in a classroom of 30.

before it is too late?

Some experts, such as Wim Van Lancker, a sociologist at the University of Leuven in Belgium, go as far as to describe it at as “a social crisis in the making”.

Crucially, children may become carriers who transmit the virus to the most vulnerable members of society, such as their grandparents. After all, they’re not exactly known for their fastidious hygiene.

But according to Richard Armitage, in the division of public health and epidemiology at the University of Nottingham, those legitimate scientific questions about the effectiveness of school closures should not be taken as a justification for re-opening them prematurely. “An absence of evidence is not necessarily evidence of absence,” he says.

According to Unesco, the education of nearly 1.6 billion pupils in 190 countries has so far been affected – that’s 90% of the world’s school-age children. And at the time of writing, there are still no definite plans for opening the schools of around half of these children.

In general, children with more siblings appear to develop social skills at a quicker rate, so it may be that it’s only children who are worst affected.

While the child’s intellectual development may be the most obvious victim of these shutdowns, it’s by no means the only thing at risk. Teachers are often the first people to notice deteriorating mental health among their students and to encourage them to seek treatment, and many schools provide counselling and psychotherapy on site. In the US, for instance, around 13% of adolescents receive mental healthcare from their schools. Indeed, for a sizeable chunk – 35% – of vulnerable adolescents being treated for mental health issues, schools are the only source of support for their problems.

If nothing is done to make up these amplified class divides, the effects may linger for years. “The younger you are, the more likely it is that there will be consequences well into your adult life,” says Van Lancker. “We know these effects accumulate over time.”

But pretending that everything is fine — and that no extraordinary measures are needed — is a recipe for disaster.

emote instruction was clearly a factor in driving what researchers call disenrollment. For example, research by Thomas S. Dee, a professor at Stanford University, and his associates finds that schools that went strictly remote experienced a 42 percent increase in disenrollment compared with those that offered full-time in-person learning. Beyond that, as The Times recently reported, more than a million children who had been expected to enroll in local schools did not show up, either in person or online: “The missing students were concentrated in the younger grades, with the steepest drop in kindergarten — more than 340,000 students.”

Children’s advocates at the United Nations got it right last month when they admonished governments around the globe for reacting to the pandemic by ending in-person schooling for long periods instead of using mitigation strategies to contain infection. This communiqué, issued by UNESCO and UNICEF, noted that the shutdown placed children at risk of developmental setbacks from which many of them might never recover, pointed out that primary and secondary schools are not among the main drivers of the pandemic and called for governments to resume in-person instruction as quickly as possible.

Perhaps the most grotesque of these minimizing arguments holds that concerns about learning loss are being manufactured by educational testing companies with dollar signs in their eyes.

Among other things, it notes that the pandemic has widened existing opportunity and achievement gaps and made high schoolers more likely to drop out. As the authors say: “The fallout from the pandemic threatens to depress this generation’s prospects and constrict their opportunities far into adulthood. The ripple effects may undermine their chances of attending college and ultimately finding a fulfilling job that enables them to support a family.” Unless steps are taken to fill the pandemic learning gap, the authors say, these people will earn less over their lifetimes.

An analysis by N.W.E.A., a nonprofit that provides academic assessments, for example, found that Latino third graders scored 17 percentile points lower in math in the spring of 2021, compared to the typical achievements of Latino third graders in the spring of 2019. The decline was 15 percentile points for Black students and 14 percentile points for Native American students, compared with similar students in the past. As Sarah Mervosh of The New York Times describes the situation, the pandemic amplified disadvantages rooted in racial and socioeconomic inequality, transforming an educational gap into a gulf.

That story is coming to light in studies and reports that lay out the alarming extent to which all groups of students are behind where they should be in a normal academic year and how the most vulnerable students are experiencing the steepest drop-offs in learning.Image

The analysis shows that many states have urged localities to return to in-person schooling while promoting policies that conflict with the goal of educating young people in safety. For example, as of this month, nearly one-fourth of the states had banned Covid-19 vaccination requirements, hamstringing localities that want to prioritize student safety. As of early August, only 29 states had recommended that students wear masks — down from the 44 states that did so last fall — and nine states had banned masking requirements.

These policy failures are compounding at a time when the highly infectious Delta variant is surging and the coronavirus seems likely to become a permanent feature of life.

The resulting learning setbacks range from grave for all groups of students to catastrophic for poor children.

His decision is never dependent on ads, or a particular review, or whether a film sounds like something he would enjoy. Instead, he says, “I live by base rates. I don’t read a book or see a movie unless it’s highly recommended by people I trust.

“You can’t improve intuition. Perhaps, with very long-term training, lots of talk, and exposure to behavioral economics, what you can do is cue reasoning, so you can engage System 2 to follow rules. Unfortunately, the world doesn’t provide cues. And for most people, in the heat of argument the rules go out the window.

For example, while present bias has so far proved intractable, employers have been able to nudge employees into contributing to retirement plans by making saving the default option; you have to actively take steps in order to not participate. That is, laziness or inertia can be more powerful than bias

mocracies must advertise democracy. With-out emulating propaganda methods typical of authoritarian regimes, democracies should support literacy on democratic decisionmaking on both local and national level and on the values that guide public service and democratic processes, while strengthening anti-corruption efforts. As the democratic model has long been taken for granted, states should make a greater effort to raise individual awareness of democratic freedoms and civic responsibilities, and encourage impactful participation

Evidence suggests, however, that political regimes are not good predictors of pandemic management. Some democracies, among them Australia, Germany, Greece, New Zealand, and South Korea among others were fairly successful in containing the virus and limiting deaths. Others, like the United States, the United Kingdom, Brazil, Mexico, and India have not performed as well.

Countries who relied on science early on produced good results and received international praise.