Rising From The Ashes Of Covid-19: Three Optimistic STEM Education Trends

March marks a full year since Covid-19 sent schools and communities into lockdown, marooning kids at home, forcing schools online (for those who could access it), and turning parents into full-time circus acrobats, juggling work, home, childcare, homeschooling, and unrelenting stress and uncertainty. 

Since then, a national uprising to address racial injustice, larger and more powerful than any in the past decades, rippled across the country. An incumbent president was voted out of office for the first time since 1992, and a mob stampeded the U.S. Capitol. 

It’s been a year.

This week, my organization, 100Kin10, released its annual Trends Report, looking back at what has changed since schools first shuttered and looking ahead to better understand what changes might be coming.

Here’s the exclusive sneak peek at three surprisingly optimistic trends. 

The pandemic is further revealing structural inequities in education that systematically harm students of color at disproportionate rates: computer and internet access was divided sharply along race and class lines, allowing wealthier and majority-white schools to quickly overcome the remote-learning hurdles of 2020, while underfunded and majority-BIPOC schools struggled to maintain a steady education for their students; Black and Latinx students were more likely than white students to have started the year remotely.

In 2021, we expect to see increased focus, funding, and fortitude in addressing these inequities. We’re seeing more organizations focus on racial justice in STEM, investigating pedagogy, curriculum, textbooks, assessments, grading, and more through a racial-equity lens and being willing not only to examine but to change practice. At the same time, we see a growing subset of leading organizations in STEM working to better understand and address systemic inequities that persist despite past efforts.

This moment of rapid change may have opened the dams, creating space to reconsider long-held assumptions. 

• Grading: Across the country, many teachers have expressed questions about the cost/benefit of traditional grading. We heard teachers debating whether eliminating grading takes the pressure off students, and whether grading and standardized tests might not only stem from but perpetuate racial bias.
• Attendance: In the BC (before-Covid) days, there may have been points for participation, but your seat time was measured by whether you showed up. In our Covid-19 world, it is becoming increasingly clear to teachers — as students have joined class but are obviously somewhere else, either literally or metaphorically — that attendance might be a necessary but insufficient indicator of learning, and it’s engagement, not presence, that should “count” as attendance.
• Schedules: As any highschooler (or parent) can tell you, teenagers do not like waking up early, and one unexpected benefit of Covid-19 is that schools can start later, lining up better with kids’ circadian rhythms. Researchers studying this unintended benefit think this may have mental and physical health benefits for students, leading more teachers and school administrators to reconsider early school start times.  

Teachers have been going nonstop since March. Even veteran teachers said this was the hardest year they’ve ever experienced. That exhaustion is likely to lead to a wave of early retirements, exacerbating teacher shortages that long preceded the pandemic.

But we’ve seen teachers elevated to local heroes. And we’re hearing from large and small, local and national teacher preparation progams that interest in teaching is up and teacher recruitment is on the rise. Across our network of leading STEM teacher preparers, more people are choosing teaching now than did 2-3 years ago.

With more teachers coming into the pipeline in 2021, perhaps we’re seeing the beginnings of a fundamental shift in how our nation respects and values teachers, with all the changes in workplace conditions, pay, and other supports that teachers’ role as essential workers demands. Such a shift would give meaning to the enormous suffering of the past year, as millions of teachers, respected and supported to thrive, would provide tens of millions of students the opportunities they need to flourish.