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Schooling, stress, and resilience in the Covid-19 crisis

“Hard, real hard. Jobs are scarce to none. … ‘Cause we can’t go to work and with the kids they can’t go to school, babysitters are not really taking no jobs… . There is just a lot of stuff.”
— Black man with elementary school children interviewed by the American Voices Project

The Covid-19 pandemic abruptly halted in-person schooling and sent parents scrambling to manage their children’s education from home. In this report, we use immersive interviews from the American Voices Project to hear directly from families who had to cope with the uncertainties of the new era. These interviews reinforce—and extend—existing survey-based findings on pandemic schooling.

Key findings:
  • Schooling during the pandemic exacerbated many of the pre-pandemic disparities in the U.S. educational system. School shutdowns imposed particular trauma and stress on families of color, low-income families, and high-need students.
     
  • Schooling during the pandemic was stress-inducing. Parents described online learning as a frustrating experience, fretted about the quality of remote school, and worried about the emotional impact on their children.
     
  • Schooling during the pandemic was fraught with hard decisions. At the start of the 2020 school year, some parents had a choice of whether to send their children to school in person. They often felt torn between safety concerns and the knowledge that their children clearly wanted to go back.
     
  • Schooling during the pandemic was burdensome. Having kids at home created an immense burden for mothers, both those in and out of the workforce. Mothers interviewed reported intensive involvement in their kids’ schooling during the pandemic.

READ THE REPORT

The “Monitoring the Crisis” series is cosponsored by the Stanford Center on Poverty and Inequality, the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta, and the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston. The American Voices Project gratefully acknowledges support from the Annie E. Casey Foundation; the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation; the Center for Research on Child Wellbeing at Princeton University; the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative; the David and Lucile Packard Foundation; the Federal Reserve Banks of Atlanta, Boston, Cleveland, Dallas, New York, Philadelphia, Richmond, and San Francisco; the Ford Foundation; The James Irvine Foundation; the JPB Foundation; the National Science Foundation; the Pritzker Family Foundation; and the Russell Sage Foundation. The Stanford Center on Poverty and Inequality is a program of the Institute for Research in the Social Sciences.

The views expressed here are the authors’ and not necessarily those of the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta, Federal Reserve Bank of Boston, Federal Reserve System, Stanford Center on Poverty and Inequality, or the organizations that supported this research. Any remaining errors are the authors’ responsibility.


Copyright © 2021 stanfordcpi, All rights reserved.


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