Now, said the tutor, after the effects of the pandemic, not only is the risk a reality, but the gap is growing. 

“A lot of kids who were on the borderline before all the virtual stuff, they have fallen behind,” said Kapur, who can see just how wide the gulf has become for students who have spent two years in pandemic schooling because he begins tutoring at whatever level a child has mastered, not the level their age and grade suggest. 

The last time most second graders had the kind of instruction that lends itself to mastering reading skills, Kapur said, was the first half of kindergarten in 2019. 

It’s no secret that early academics across the country took a hit during the pandemic: Closures, masks, and distance learning changed the way students learned to read, and it often wasn’t as good as what they had in person. 

Now, experts say, for young students to fully recover will take more than picking up where they left off two years ago. They point to the social emotional and behavioral skills that cascade into reading, and warn against the temptation to rush things along.

Whether going back to fill in the gaps with a tutor like Kapur, or accelerating to keep kids on grade level, as most schools are doing, experts say kids will progress if the adults keep their social and emotional health and mind, and be patient.

In an ordinary year, young students would be honing their reading based on years of foundational literacy skills like listening, speaking, and following sentences along a page. 

And it’s more than just functional reading skills: By first grade they would also be old hands at raising their hands, veterans of circle time, practiced in the rhythms of the classroom.

It’s training a lot of early elementary school kids have not had. In addition to the challenges of pandemic schooling for students who were enrolled in school, national data show more parents opted to keep their young children out of pre-K and kindergarten during the pandemic, which means more children than usual are encountering classroom learning for the first time this year. 

Learning to read is more than letter and sound recognition, Kapur said. He has always worked with pre-K students on holding a pencil and focusing for longer than a couple of minutes at a time. These would usually be skills needed to be “kinder-ready” he said, but he’s seeing more kids at older ages needing help. 

“There has definitely been an uptick, especially the kids who were not at school,” he said.

Studies confirm that uptick in kids behind grade-level in reading. The University of Virginia that the number of 1st graders failing to meet grade-level was up by 18 percentage points. A nationwide showed losses in reading were concentrated predominantly in early grades, kindergarten through 2nd. These are usually critical years for literacy, as by 4th grade most students are expected to have learned to read, so they can start “reading to learn.” 

For those young readers, especially pre-K and kindergarten, Kapur said, virtual learning couldn’t give them everything they needed. They needed to be in classrooms. But even that wouldn’t be the silver bullet many hoped. 

Getting Back Into Classrooms Didn’t Solve Everything

Even as kids have gotten back into classrooms, something many predicted would help tremendously, teachers say the second year of the pandemic was still far from ideal. Intermittent closures or returns to virtual learning interrupted the school year, plus, it’s difficult to care about a sentence like “A rat has a hat,” when so many have been worried about the health of family members. It’s difficult to understand the difference between the “m” sound and the “n” sound when a teacher’s mouth is behind a mask.

Now that masks have begun coming off, and closures are fewer and further between, teachers are turning their attention to the cascade of skills students need to read fluently . 

say in children and adults, the pandemic had an effect on perseverance, attention, and other factors known in developmental science as “executive functions” that make learning possible. The solution, they say, is to prioritize what feel like “non-academic” skills right alongside reading and math.

“To get to the academics there’s more you need to know about your students,” said LaMonica Williams, director of early reading programs at Teaching Matters, a New York-based coaching and mentorship nonprofit for teachers in low-income schools.

It’s not as simple as just doing more flashcards or sending home more books. “A different level of engagement is required as we’re bringing students back,” Williams said. Teachers need to know what happened to students during the pandemic, and how they are feeling about being back in the classroom. What’s still worrying them? Where do they feel frustrated?

Less-Than-Ideal Environments

In California’s Palo Alto Unified School District, educators are seeing a familiar divide between children whose parents could afford private, in-person programs while schools were closed, and those who rely exclusively on public schools.

Disparities have always existed between the relatively small number of low income Black and Latino students in Palo Alto, and white and Asian students who historically saw better outcomes. That data prompted Palo Alto to develop the Every Student Reads Initiative before the pandemic. 

Because the initiative was built with differentiation and acceleration in mind, Palo Alto administrators expect it to be relevant in addressing the gaps exacerbated by the pandemic, when the best practice will be keeping kids with their grade level peers and reinforcing missing skills at an accelerated rate, rather than putting kids in remedial classes. 

More students might need the support, but the district plans to rally resources accordingly. For instance, summer programming—usually an enrichment program for low-income kids—offered direct reading instruction for any student behind their grade level in reading. The more time with teachers, the better, said Anne Brown, Palo Alto assistant superintendent of elementary education.

In a classroom, students have the predictability of schedules, rules, and rituals to help settle them into a learning-ready frame of mind. Time spent away has had a domino effect on other areas of learning. 

Cascades 

Teachers and parents can expect to see academics like reading develop hand in hand with social and emotional maturity, said Catherine Tamis-LeMonda, professor of applied psychology at New York University’s Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human Development. “Any given skill is the outcome of many many things coming together.”

In Steinhardt’s Play and Language Lab, Tamis-LeMonda studies the phenomenon of “developmental cascades”—skills that spill over into each other in early childhood. For instance, children develop social and emotional skills while learning new words to express their feelings.

The pandemic affected many of these cascades as students were isolated and anxious, she explained, but there’s good news: Those skills might have fallen down like dominoes but they can develop concurrently as well.

 “Practice…will make you a master at any given skill,” she said. 

Sitting still is an area for gradual, age-appropriate, pandemic-adjusted development, just like reading, Tamis-LaMonda said, and she encourages parents who want to help, to build the skill like you would any other: patiently. For instance, if a kid doesn’t want to sit longer than five minutes to look at sight words, she recommends trying to build up to ten high-quality minutes instead of forcing a miserable hour.

Enrollment more than quadrupled among Black children and tripled among Latino students when the Chicago Public Schools expanded full-day pre-K, according to researchers from the Consortium for School Research at the University of Chicago. The findings also focused on an expansion effort in the city’s North Lawndale community.

For all racial groups, attendance was higher among children in full-day pre-K, compared with part-day. For Black children, the difference was the largest — 4 to 5 percentage points. Attendance rates also improved among English learners and students from low-income homes.

The results, researchers said, suggest classes operating on a normal school schedule alleviate many of the logistical challenges that might lead low-income and working parents to turn down a free part-day program — like the need to secure child care for the rest of the day, transportation costs and the inability to leave work.

Past research points to more for children in full-day programs, compared with part-day. But for policymakers making decisions about how to spend limited funds, “there are trade-offs,” said Elaine Allensworth, a co-author of the report and director of the consortium. 

“Full-day preschool requires more resources — personnel and space,” she said, and with full- instead of part-day programs, the “same funding would result in fewer spots available for students to have any preschool.”

Pre-K programs nationally saw a decline in participation at the start of the 2020-21 school year — a drop from 61 percent of 3- and 4-year-olds before the pandemic to less than half, While there was last spring, initial counts from fall of 2021 show enrollment has not reached pre-pandemic levels, which experts say could impact future funding for programs. The lack of a vaccine for 5- to 11-year-olds is also influencing parents’ decisions about pre-K this year. Earlier data from the National Institute for Early Education Research’s ongoing survey of parents during the pandemic showed concerns about COVID-19 transmission was the major reason why they decided not to enroll their children. 

Allison Friedman-Krauss, an assistant research professor at the institute, said she understands parents’ hesitation.

“A vaccine would certainly make me more comfortable sending my child to preschool, but in reality, I work full time and need child care,” she said. “Plus, the socialization benefits are very important. And the school does take a lot of safety precautions. That said, we all got COVID during Omicron, and I’m pretty certain one of my kids brought it home from school.”

But access to pre-K is still a factor as well. The institute’s annual state preschool shows that public programs nationally serve about a third of 4-year-olds and only about 6 percent of 3-year-olds.

Looking ahead to next fall, many state leaders and early learning advocates were expecting to see new federal funding for universal pre-K from President Joe Biden’s plan. Instead, they’re waiting on details of a — one they hope West Virginia Sen. Joe Manchin will support. The moderate Democrat blocked the earlier $1.7 trillion package that passed the House, but he’s voiced support for universal pre-K.

“Our crystal ball is not working that well right now,” Steven Barnett, senior co-director of the institute, said about prospects for new federal pre-K funding. As the research center prepares to release its 2021 yearbook in about a month, he said he sees “much increased need.”

According to last year’s report, just New Jersey, North Carolina, Oklahoma, West Virginia and the District of Columbia spend enough to deliver high-quality, full-day preschool. The authors estimated it would take $30 billion to expand access to all 3- and 4-year olds in low-income families and another $32 billion to provide access for all preschoolers.

The Chicago study, the consortium researchers wrote, can inform leaders’ decisions about where to target full-day expansion efforts. Chicago, for example, focused expansion in communities with large Black and Latino student populations, but where pre-K enrollment rates were low. They also prioritized elementary schools with available classroom space. Between 2012-13 and 2015-16, enrollment in full-day pre-K in the city increased from 1,700 children to more than 6,000.

Even without new federal funds, some states have recently launched full-day pre-K expansion efforts. In , 14 school districts will receive $300 million in COVID-19 relief funds for pre-K, enough to serve 500 children. And New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy announced he would spend $17 million to increase enrollment in full-day pre-K in 19 school districts.

“He looked at me [and said], ‘Mama, I’m ok. You can leave now. This is no different than my other school. I’m good,’” said Larson, who is raising him.

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She gives Avarian’s Head Start program in Racine, Wisconsin, a lot of the credit for his self-assurance, despite the fact that interaction with his preschool teacher from the program last year often took place through a screen. Like many preschoolers nationwide, children in the Grand Avenue center spent much of the 2020-21 school year at home. It’s a period that set young learners back academically, socially and emotionally. But a on Acelero Learning, the New York City-based company running Grand Avenue and 43 other Head Start centers in four states, offered a more hopeful outlook.

Preschoolers who attended the centers in person most of the year made significant gains in three areas of school readiness, but those in the virtual model kept pace with their peers, showing strong progress in two areas — early reading and math skills. In addition, the infants and toddlers served in Acelero Learning’s Early Head Start programs developed language skills beyond what is expected for their age.

“We serve a population that is typically struggling when there’s not a pandemic,” said Cate Smith Todd, Acelero Learning’s vice president of monitoring, systems and analysis. “We were super proud to see that the kids were learning at home.”

The study doesn’t compare children’s growth to that of their peers before the pandemic. But in a year when many preschool programs operating virtually saw a in participation among families, the results provide some direction if classrooms need to close again, said Susanna Loeb, director of the Annenberg Institute at Brown University and a co-author of the study.

The findings, she said, show “the importance of in-person educational experiences for young children, but when those are not possible, other approaches including virtual classes, can support child development, particularly if coordinated well with families.”

Serving over a million low-income children annually, Head Start has long been the subject of partisan debates over whether the program lives up to its promise. Skeptics point to showing any academic benefit children gain from the program disappears once children attend elementary school, and have often voted in favor of cutting funding to the program. , however, shows there is a long-term, positive impact on participants that can last into adulthood.

Deborah Bergeron, deputy director of community engagement and innovation at the National Head Start Association, added that Acelero’s response to families reflects Head Start’s whole-child approach.

“Head Start is certainly about school readiness, but we get to that through comprehensive family support,” she said.

Acelero staff delivered meals and baby formula, and it wasn’t unusual for staff meetings to start with a tally of how many diapers the centers had distributed to families, Todd said. Avarian’s center provided Pull-Ups training pants, which Larson said were as hard to find in the early days of the pandemic as toilet paper.

They followed up with tablets and hotspots, dry erase boards and bags of crayons, paper and small pompoms for counting activities.

Reflecting Head Start programs overall, released in June 2020 showed that 93 percent of programs were still in touch with the families enrolled in their programs, 73 percent were interacting with children online for at least an hour per week and 53 percent had organized virtual groups for parents.

Head Start’s connection to families during the pandemic is one reason why Bergeron — a former high school principal who led the Office of Head Start during the Trump administration — has stayed involved with the program.

‘A huge value’ to K-12

Since the beginning of the pandemic, Head Start has received $2 billion in , which grantees could use for an array of costs related to enrolling children, meeting families’ basic needs, implementing COVID-19 mitigation measures and supporting staff. Acelero, part of what Loeb called a “research-practice partnership” with the Annenberg Institute, also used relief money to fund the study. Victoria Ankrah, a vice president who oversees 16 Acelero Learning centers in Camden and Philadelphia, said despite the disruption, leaders felt it was still important to assess children’s progress.

Congress is now considering a budget reconciliation bill that includes additional funds for Head Start as part of a $200 billion plan to move toward universal preschool for 3- and 4-year-olds. calls for $15 billion to increase pay for Head Start staff and would ensure that Head Start programs reach full enrollment before state pre-K systems add more children. Finally, the president’s fiscal year 2022 budget recommendation adds another $1.4 billion, which would increase annual Head Start funding to $12.2 billion.

Michael Maxwell, a vice president who leads Acelero Learning programs in Clark County, Nevada, said outside of Washington, there’s “an appetite” for expanding early-childhood education programs.

“You’re seeing it at the city and county level, especially here in Las Vegas,” he said. “They’ve realized that kids coming into kindergarten ready to learn are a huge value to the K-12 system.”

Created as part of the war on poverty in 1964, Head Start has always focused on the broader needs of children, including health, nutrition, mental health and employment support for families. But like most schools in the U.S., many Head Start programs didn’t have a lot of experience with delivering services virtually.

Ankrah said staff members in her centers were just beginning to use the Remind app to communicate with parents before the pandemic but accelerated use of the program when centers shut down. Teachers held virtual classes each day — usually less than two hours — and Acelero developed to give families access to activities such as ebooks and Khan Academy Kids, a preschool version of the popular online education website.

At Avarian’s center in Racine, children learning remotely also had the option of morning or afternoon sessions. Larson, who had to leave her job to stay home with Avarian, said she appreciated that teachers tried to accommodate parents coping with distance learning for the first time.

Avarian, she said, is usually “bouncing off the walls,” but his teachers were able to hold his attention. “Everyday they reinforced counting and the alphabet and sang a greeting song,” she said. The children couldn’t see each other on the screen, but Larson said her grandson would get excited when he heard the teacher sing one of his friend’s names.

Centers shifted parent meetings, another major component of the Head Start model, to an online platform.

“We wanted to make sure parents still had a voice in this,” Ankrah said.

Bergeron expects Head Start’s leap into technology to be a lasting impact of the pandemic across the majority of programs — not just Acelero’s. Virtual meetings allow more parents to participate and children have gained technology skills they might not have learned until they were older.

Like all early-childhood programs that shifted to a remote format, Head Start centers still saw less participation among families with school-aged children learning at home and from those facing COVID-related sickness and trauma. In the June 2020 survey, 72 percent of programs reported providing consultations with disability or mental health counselors on the need for mental health services for families and 22 percent said they had noticed an increase in domestic violence or child abuse during stay-at-home orders.

But Bergeron said, “When you provide parents with the support they need, they will rise to the occasion. There is so much to learn about what it means to have strong, trusting relationships with parents.”

Zakiya Sankara-Jabar was taking nursing classes at Wright State College in Dayton, Ohio, when she started getting phone calls from her young son’s teacher at the on-campus child care center.

Amir was having a tantrum; he threw a toy or was “refusing to transition,” the teacher told her. Sankara-Jabar repeatedly had to leave class to get her son, and ended up having to withdraw from school that semester. The center’s staff suggested maybe Amir, the only Black boy in his class at the time, needed therapy and offered to call in psychology majors to observe him. They eventually asked her not to bring him back.

“It just continued to escalate,” Sankara-Jabar said. She told the teachers, “You guys seem like you don’t expect this. He’s 3.”

Amir’s preschool days are far behind him, but now Ohio has a program that helps preschool teachers solve behavior challenges before they reach the point of removing children from the classroom. from Yale University supports the model, showing that specialized training and support for teachers improves preschoolers’ behavior and reduces the risk of suspension and expulsion. In addition, the study found that the intervention has the same positive benefits on other children in the classroom. The findings are timely as schools prepare for the transition to pre-K and kindergarten this fall for millions of young children who underwent a critical stage of their development during the pandemic. Many have missed out on classroom experiences, and Black and Hispanic families with young children have faced particular hardship and loss.

Even in a typical year, young children entering school can have a hard time separating from parents and adapting to teacher’s expectations. But shows parents reporting their children are experiencing more hyperactivity and other behavior problems compared with levels found in a nationally representative, pre-pandemic survey.

“With disruptions resulting from the pandemic, I worry that schools want to play ‘catch up’ rather quickly and … undermine [children’s] social and emotional learning and mental health,” said Chin Reyes, a developmental scientist at Yale and co-author of “All children experienced stress and disruptions — some significantly more than others. And not just the children, but also the teachers.”

Published in the journal Development and Psychopathology, the research focused on Ohio’s program, in which early-childhood mental health consultants make at least six visits to preschool classrooms to help educators develop positive relationships with children. Fifty-one classrooms were randomly assigned to participate in either the program or a control group.

The results showed that teachers who work with consultants feel a greater sense of control over challenging situations with children, a key finding since “expulsion is largely a teacher decision,” wrote Reyes and co-author Walter Gilliam, a professor of child psychiatry and psychology at Yale.

The “target children” — those who were getting in trouble — showed improvements in social-emotional skills, such as greater independence and ability to self-calm. The same improvements were seen in the children’s peers, adding to Gilliams’s on a similar program in Connecticut.

Racial disparities

The Ohio study builds on Gilliam’s , which found expulsion rates among preschoolers exceeded those of K-12 students, especially for boys and children of color.

Federal data confirmed those trends in 2014, showing Black children made up 18 percent of preschool enrollment but accounted for almost half of those suspended at least once — a cycle that data shows leads to later discipline problems and contributes to what has been described as the “.”

Tunette Powell, a Black mother of three, knew that experience all too well. Also in 2014, an Omaha, Nebraska, child care center repeatedly sent two of her boys home for acts such as throwing a toy and pushing over a chair, when no one was hurt.

Once Powell’s boys entered public school, they were never suspended again. “I put in a lot of work to try to strip that from who they were,” she said. “You don’t want that to become their narrative.”

Gilliam’s work prompted nationwide efforts to prevent expulsions in early learning programs. Twenty-six states now have programs like Ohio’s or have passed legislation limiting the practice, he said. But telling teachers they can’t remove a child without giving them tools to address problem behavior can lead programs to become more selective about which children to enroll in the first place, he said.

“State regulations ban hard expulsions, but not necessarily soft expulsions,” added Reyes. Teachers might frequently ask a parent to pick up a child early or say the child isn’t the “right fit” for the program.

Iris Williams, a Black mother of two in San Antonio, Texas, called it a “workaround.” Her state passed legislation in 2017 banning most out-of-school suspensions in pre-K through 2nd grade. But that didn’t stop Williams from receiving calls at work when her daughter Heaven Ellison, who has ADHD, had problems at school.

“I hate to say they just didn’t want to deal with her, but that’s what I feel like,” Williams said about her daughter’s teachers. “She never got suspended. They would send her home and say, ‘We’re sending her to a safe place.’”

In addition to state laws requiring teachers to seek alternatives to removing children from the classroom, the and the either restrict or discourage suspension and expulsion of young children and recommend programs in which teachers have access to mental health professionals. The recent federal includes $24 billion in child care funding that states can draw on to support children’s mental health.

‘Not a fix-it approach’

In California, Donmonique Daniels has been a teaching assistant at a preschool in Oakland for three years. Recently, a 5-year-old boy in the class, who is about to be adopted, became aggressive toward other children. If a child took a toy away from him, he would retaliate by hitting.

But Daniels works for Kidango, a network of San Francisco Bay Area preschools that in 2018 launched a program in which mental health professionals meet weekly with teachers to discuss common behavior issues. Talking with a consultant and the boy’s adoptive father, the teachers learned that the child “has some separation anxiety due to being swapped around.” And he would become especially agitated if teachers told him he was having a hard day.

Consultation, Daniels said, gives teachers “perspective on how to tap into the way kids need us emotionally.”

The consultants don’t wait until a child is considered a problem to get involved, said Tena Sloan, a vice president with Kidango.

“We are available with support in challenging times and in times that are working,” she said. “That’s why it’s not a fix-it approach.”

At the center where Daniels works, she said teachers are already mentally preparing for the fall, and thinking of how to make the space “as familiar as possible” for new children enrolling. They’ll label chairs and put photos of the children on their “cubbies.”

“The pandemic has definitely changed a lot for the kids,” she said, “and for us.”