Why Parents Are Blind to Serious Pandemic Impacts on Education

The recovery from the negative effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on children has been slow going. Absenteeism remains stubbornly high, academic achievement remains well below pre-COVID baselines, and gaps between high- and low-performers have widened sharply. Experts have been raising the alarm since the very earliest days of the pandemic, but our own research and that of others has found that parent concerns about their children are low. This “parent-expert disconnect” has been blamed in part for the low levels of take-up of COVID-19 recovery interventions, as well as a more general lack of pressure for our education systems to go all-out to correct the harms of the pandemic.

As researchers who have been tracking students’ educational experiences since COVID-19 began, we wanted to understand this phenomenon of the parent-expert disconnect in more detail. Is it real? Are parents really not all that concerned about their children’s recovery post-COVID? And if so, why is there such a disconnect between the data the experts are pointing to and parents’ day-to-day lived experiences?

To answer these questions, we interviewed a carefully chosen sample of 40 caretakers (most of whom are parents, but some of whom are other guardians or relatives)  that we drew from a survey of respondents we’ve been studying throughout the pandemic. We intentionally selected caretakers who had previously reported relatively higher levels of concern, relatively lower levels of concern and included both caretakers of elementary and secondary students. We asked them how their children were doing in school post-COVID, what kinds of concerns they had about their own children, and what their thoughts were about the broader phenomenon of “learning loss” from COVID-19. What we found offers important lessons for supporting pandemic recovery through education policy moving forward.

For starters, our interviews clearly indicate that the parent-expert disconnect is a real phenomenon. We chose 20 of our caretakers from the 18% of respondents who indicated concern on our most recent surveys, but not even all these 20 had serious concerns in our most recent interviews. Only around half of the 20 expressed serious concerns; many of these did note specific difficulties their child encountered during the pandemic — often-overlapping issues related to both academics and social/emotional wellbeing. There are definitely concerned parents out there; but even among those selected for interviews due to higher-than-average concerns in spring 2023 (a small minority group even then), only half remained concerned this fall.

With the disconnect established, we wanted to understand why. We uncovered four related reasons.

First, experts’ concerns about pandemic-related learning loss are based mainly on standardized test scores, but our interview respondents simply don’t pay much attention to their children’s standardized tests. Over and over again, we heard caretakers talking about their children’s grades or the feedback from their children’s teachers, or simply observations of their children struggling (or not) with schoolwork. Yet, almost none of the respondents even mentioned standardized tests at all. The few that did mostly discounted or expressed confusion over their children’s low test scores relative to otherwise healthy grades. We think there are many reasons why caretakers aren’t attending to standardized tests — the scores arrive too late if at all, the test score report results are unclear, they question the validity of the tests (without using the word “validity”). But regardless of the reasons, declines in test scores are not resonating with caretakers, and grades and feedback from teachers are sending the signal to parents that children are seemingly doing just fine.

Related to this point is that caretakers noticed lowered expectations in school during and since the pandemic. Much has been written lately about “grade inflation” ( grades that do not align with mastery of the course content), but many of our caretakers noticed subtle and less subtle ways that expectations had been lowered. Some talked about the rigor of course content that appeared to be made easier. Others observed more flexible or liberal behavioral or attendance policies. We also heard about increased leniency with regard to things like homework deadlines and test re-take policies. This adjustment of expectations undoubtedly results in fewer warning flags from schools and teachers — fewer late assignments, fewer missing homeworks, fewer failing assignment grades, such that caretakers are not receiving concerned messages about their children.

Third, caretakers believe that children are resilient. We often heard about how rapidly their students seemed to recover once they got returned to school in-person. We heard that students “bounced back in two weeks” or that they got “over the pandemic issues” by the end of that first year back. We suspect teachers share this sense of children’s resilience — which is certainly true on average, although it masks the fact that some children were more profoundly harmed.

Last, we did hear from some caretakers about COVID-related concerns, but often these were about “other” groups of children, not their own. We heard from elementary parents that high school children appeared to be harmed more by the pandemic’s impacts — yet, we heard the opposite from high school parents. We heard from private school parents that public school children were more harmed; from affluent parents that poorer children were more harmed; from rural parents that urban children were more harmed; from English-speaking parents that English learners were more harmed. This may explain why our respondents largely believed the learning loss phenomenon was serious and not overblown — caretakers think children have been harmed, even if perhaps they did not believe their own children were seriously impacted.

Given the reality of the disconnect and the urgency for continued efforts to address COVID-related impacts, our study points to some strategies that should be pursued. Most importantly, caretakers need honest data on how their children are doing to accurately evaluate their student’s performance. This means grading needs to reflect what students know and can do, and test results need to be shared with caregivers quickly and in ways that they can understand. And it also means that expectations need to reflect grade-level performance, not a standard that was watered down with compassion due to the pandemic.

Yet, we also think that these results imply that voluntary opt-in approaches to recovery interventions won’t work. What we need instead are concerted efforts, driven by policy and supported with resources, to identify the children most in need and target them with intensive in-school support. Quality curriculum, intensive small-group supports and cultural relevance must be a part of the solution. Fortunately, many state policy agendas are pushing in the right direction on these issues, but more needs to be done — and faster — to support those students who really were most harmed by COVID-19 and the pandemic’s overall impacts.

Morgan Polikoff, Ph.D., is an associate professor of education at USC Rossier School of Education and co-director of USC’s Education Policy Hub, which conducts research on education policy.

Amie Rapaport, Ph.D., is a research scientist at USC’s Dornsife Center for Economic and Social Research.