Public school educators are calling for a post-pandemic reset. Can it be done?

(NEW YORK) — Four years after the coronavirus pandemic closed much of the nation’s education system, thousands of the more than 50 million U.S. public school students and teachers are returning to school this month.

In interviews with ABC News, education experts suggest the impact school closures had on the public education model could leave students with long-term developmental issues from lost learning time.

It has already exacerbated issues such as chronic absenteeism and teacher burnout, and now the persistent problems public educators face are causing leaders, experts and caregivers to sound the alarm.

One prominent educator told ABC that “public education is on life support.” Another said the greatest current education challenge is the need for it to “reset,” which the educator projected could take five to 10 years to achieve. And, polling suggests the American public also believes there could be grave consequences if nothing is done to fix public education.

Pew Research Center found about half of Americans think the public education system is going in the wrong direction. Eighty-two percent of people surveyed by Pew said it has been trending that way over the past five years — even before the pandemic hit.

“It’s needed restructuring for a while,” STEM Equity Alliance Executive Director Arthur Mitchell told ABC News. “Education as it exists is unsustainable.”

Mitchell shares the viewpoint of many educators ABC News spoke with — that the issues facing school districts predate COVID-19. However, the pandemic exposed the need for an education reboot.

“The message that the pandemic sent was that you’re not going to be successful teaching math and reading and science and social studies if kids haven’t eaten, they haven’t slept, they’re worried about their dad’s job or their grandmother’s recent death,” FutureEd Director Thomas Toch said.

‘These kids aren’t going to learn’

During his first year as Education Secretary in 2021, Miguel Cardona said the system is “missing the point” if school districts fail to restructure schools with better social and emotional support such as mental health resources.

Emphasizing the need for Social Emotional Learning (SEL) curriculums could serve as a start, according to Katie Kirby, a principal and experienced educator in Union City, New Jersey.

“These kids aren’t going to learn,” Kirby told ABC News, adding, “All they’re thinking about [is] the trauma that happened in their house. Or, even during COVID, just being isolated is a trauma.”

“I feel like more could be done to address the mental health issues and social emotional things around, you know, not just the students but the teachers also,” Kirby said about post-COVID schooling.

The New Jersey elementary school principal said more mental health practitioners and teachers will energize school communities.

Experts told ABC that innovative models, such as communities in schools, have worked with local agencies to provide positive SEL results over the years.

Toch said these communities in schools structure is a solution to the typical public education framework because it is a “difficult” time to grow up in America.

“We need to recognize that students need a range of supports in order to be successful academically,” he said.

Due to the complexity of American children, Toch said the community is responsible for helping raise students.

“These models, at best, they are partnerships where other agencies are contributing resources to the partnership so that schools don’t have to shoulder the entire burden, financial burden, of a more comprehensive model on behalf of the whole child,” he said.

Jonte Lee, a science teacher in the nation’s capital, also said a reboot is enhanced by community partnerships.

“We need parental support as well and we need other entities in the community to support [teachers],” he said. “It’s like we support you, you support us — we need to come together as a community and a culture.”

Lee said a public education overhaul isn’t necessary though. The system only needs minor “tweaks” such as hiring and paying more teachers, according to Lee.

“Hasn’t the model been recreated multiple times?” Lee told ABC News, adding, “When we say recreate the public school education model, it has already been recreated multiple times, which is why I believe in school choice, because ‘this model may not work for me.'”

Injecting “choice” into education refers to a largely conservative movement that supports charter schools. Public charter schools are taxpayer funded and state-run, but the schools have the ability to turn students away, according to the National Center for Education Statistics. Their curriculums are agreed upon or chartered by local or state government, which gives the school more freedom than a traditional public school.

In contrast, tuition-free public education is schooling provided under the public’s supervision or direction, according to the Cornell Law School.

‘Education is always about the economy’

With several school districts back in full swing this summer, experts told ABC News that challenges stretch beyond academic and social emotional learning.

“Education is always about the economy,” Mitchell said. “We just don’t discuss those two things together.”

In the wake of an educator shortage, Mitchell described school vacancies as an economic issue since workforce trends have outpaced the public education sector. Therefore, leaders such as Cardona and Harvard Center for Education Policy Research Executive Director Dr. Christina Grant stress the need to make public high school a pathway to careers for students. Research supports these proposals. After graduation, adults are a “direct reflection” of the preparation given to them by the school system, according to Mitchell.

For the most part, experts said they believe some reconfiguring of the education system should occur. Christina Grant, who was Washington, D.C.’s state superintendent during the pandemic, said she fully supports large-scale adjustments such as adding high-impact tutoring for all, utilizing federal investments and resources, and rethinking the high school structure.

Meanwhile, many conservative policymakers are pushing to defund the U.S. Department of Education as a whole. They argue that the word “education” doesn’t appear in the Constitution, so the individual states have to work through issues on a case-by-case basis.

At CEPR, Grant is researching evidence-based solutions for students across the country. She said intentional revisions are required for improving public education.

“The data is telling us that we have work to do,” she told ABC News. “Do I think that that means we need a whole system overhaul? I don’t think that you can eat a whole elephant at one time. I think you have to be laser-like focused on which chunks you would attack in which ways.”

Toch warns changes, whether sweeping or incremental, could take up to a decade on a widespread scale.

He and Grant agree the roughly $190 billion in elementary and secondary school emergency relief from the federal government during COVID has been helpful in tackling these concerns — particularly student recovery — over the last three years. But the Biden administration’s American Rescue Plan (ARP) money expires on Sept. 30.

With that deadline looming, Grant hopes more investments will move the needle.

“I do think that the federal government still has to make seismic commitments in public education because we are far from out of this,” she said.