reading through the pandemic essay

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Reading Through the Pandemic

A Stanford business scholar discusses the literature that can sustain us in a crisis.

April 23, 2020

In times of global crisis, should we read books filled with optimism and hope or books that look deep into darkness? “All of the above,” says Scotty McLennan. | Illustration by Angie Wang

Scotty McLennan believes great literature is, in many ways, a better way to study business than through case studies, biographies, or history books.

“It helps us get deep into the minds and hearts of people,” says McLennan , who teaches a course at Stanford Graduate School of Business called The Business World: Moral and Spiritual Inquiry Through Literature . “And that’s important during a crisis like COVID-19, because we see the human condition laid bare. We see the character of people and the interaction of all the different forces in society. I think it’s one of the best ways to find help.”

McLennan received both his law degree and his master’s in theology from Harvard in 1975, the same year he was admitted to the Massachusetts Bar and ordained as a Unitarian Universalist minister. He was the dean for religious life at Stanford from 2001 to 2014 and the chaplain at Tufts University from 1984 until 2000. He is currently a lecturer in political economy at Stanford GSB.

Do you think literature offers lessons for people whose personal and professional lives are being upended by the pandemic?

Good literature helps us understand good human relations. It’s valuable through its nuances, its twists and turns, its dilemmas, its paradoxes. It helps us see more than is otherwise seen and focus on what ultimately matters. We’re having to live in a very different way right now, and we’re recognizing the importance of our relationships, the meaning of our work, and how we can come together as a country.

In 2018, you said you were concerned about divisiveness in American culture, and that “we’re not doing a good job of finding common values anymore that we all hold and can be clear about.” Has this pandemic helped or hurt that situation?

It has helped significantly. What ultimately brings people together are positive values such as love and affection and good virtues. And what usually brings those out is a common enemy, which in this case is the virus. United we stand, divided we fall. That’s really clear now. There are some difficult roads ahead, but right now I think can be a unifying time.

Your course uses novels and plays to examine the moral and spiritual aspects of business leadership. What sort of leadership lessons from literature are important to keep in mind during this crisis?

One book I teach in my course is Willa Cather’s O Pioneers! It’s about an entrepreneurial woman in the late 1800s in a hostile environment on the Nebraska prairie. She has a future-oriented way of thinking about how that could become a more rich land that would benefit not only her and the Midwest but the whole country. She exercises substantial leadership to bring people together and does it in the face of resistance from her two brothers, who think a woman can’t really figure this out. But she’s able to envision a future and build a community. She’s good to employees. She’s good across religious and ethnic differences. And she ultimately forgives a guy who kills her brother. She’s a wonderful example of the best of the American spirit and maybe the best of the human spirit.

Any other interesting characters from literature who come to mind as you’ve been watching this crisis unfold?

I love teaching The Great Gatsby , which is set in a very positive, wealthy Jazz Age environment. It’s almost frivolous to think one would teach that during the coronavirus. But as I was preparing to teach it a couple of weeks ago, I realized it was published in 1925 and is set in 1922. That’s just two years after the end of the Spanish flu epidemic, which killed 50 million people worldwide, 30,000 of them in New York City. And although World War I is mentioned, there is nothing in Gatsby about the Spanish flu.

Like it never happened?

Quote Good literature is valuable through its nuances, its twists and turns, its dilemmas, its paradoxes. It helps us see more than is otherwise seen and focus on what ultimately matters. Attribution Scotty McLennan

How can that not even mentioned in the book? A lot of people apparently felt shame coming out of the Spanish flu, about what they didn’t do to step up and help others at the time. And many people just felt so ravaged by what it had done to their families and communities that they just wanted to forget and move on. It’s important to take two lessons from that. One is hope, because there will be a better day when we look back on this whole era. Second is the question of where we go from here. How are we going to be different and act differently with each other? Gatsby turns out to be a better mirror to these times than I thought.

You’re also teaching Tolstoy’s 1886 novella The Death of Ivan Ilyich , which you argue shows how impending death can be a guide and friend.

The whole idea of terminal illness in the book is about how people around Ivan deal with his dying. At a time like this, death is very much present, and when you understand that I think you live a better and fuller life. You appreciate what really matters. What Ivan needs is love and affection, and nobody is giving it to him. Not his family. Not the doctors. The guy who really steps in is a servant named Gerasim.

Have you seen examples of that during the COVID-19 pandemic?

I’m thinking of all of the unsung heroes who are providing our food, and bagging and delivering our groceries, and all of the nurses and health workers and EMTs out there. Gerasim is taking out Ivan’s bedpan every day and dealing with all of his aches and pains, and he’s happy to help and not afraid of death. He doesn’t find his work a burden.

You’ve said that Henrik Ibsen’s play An Enemy of the People illustrates how, at times like this, virtues such as honesty, integrity, and love come to the fore, as well as vices such as slander and arrogance. Any evidence of that during the current crisis?

Certainly, yes. I see it in the compassion and love coming from people who are not being well paid and are at terrible risk. That’s quite striking, as is the professionalism you see in someone like Dr. Anthony Fauci. There’s also the honesty you see coming from our surgeon general and others who state the medical facts as they are. On the other side, there’s mendacity and lying and dishonesty and slander. So clearly we’re seeing some vices.

Any recommended reading for those who just want to forget COVID-19 for a while?

One is The Bonfire of the Vanities . Tom Wolfe does such a great job satirizing everybody, not just Sherman McCoy, but all the people around him. You’ve got everything — greed, adultery, race, and social issues. It’s almost 700 pages, but it’s so funny and engaging. Only Wolfe can do that. Another would be Crazy Rich Asians by Kevin Kwan. The book is ridiculously insightful with a lot of gossip and hilarious character development. It’ll help get your mind off the current reality. A third is George Bernard Shaw’s Major Barbara , a play about a familial battle over wealth and charity. Shaw makes intellectual and moral and spiritual points all the way through. And finally, Jane Austen’s Emma , which is a delightful 19th–century novel of manners and social status with this very privileged but endearing and self-delusional heroine.

Cormac McCarthy’s The Road is one the bleakest post-apocalyptic novels ever written. It’s extraordinary, but it’s relentlessly dark. I was just wondering if a book like that is a little too dark for right now.

There’s a big issue about literature in times of darkness. Do we want literature that’s optimistic and helpful, or do we want literature that’s more realistic and looks at the heart of darkness that’s always there? I think it’s all of the above and not just one or the other. For example, Albert Camus was an existentialist who saw life as meaningless and absurd, and there’s an emptiness that comes through in his novel The Plague . But that book also has a positive dimension in terms of how the best of humanity comes through as people care for each other in surprising ways. The way to deal with the plague is to do it together.

Once this is all over and post-apocalyptic scenarios seem like fiction again, what novels can you recommend that might help us all put this into perspective?

I’ve have to read The Plague again to see if that does the trick, but I recommend any book that helps us see people at their best, that highlight the kind of people who will come out a situation like this without the kind of shame that was present after the Spanish flu. We need to raise up the hero stories of people who’ve done well in the face of this.

Books that echo that famous quote from Mister Rogers about looking for the helpers in the wake of disasters.

Absolutely.

For media inquiries, visit the Newsroom .

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August 24, 2018 Exploring the Origins of Foreign Cultural Values As businesses go global, it pays to understand the beliefs underpinning behaviors that might seem strange.

July 24, 2015 Great Literature for Great Leaders Scotty McLennan explains why studying the classics can give you new perspective in life and work.

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• Published: 07 February 2022

Reading skills intervention during the Covid-19 pandemic

• Ana Sucena 1 , 2 ,
• Ana Filipa Silva 1 , 2 &
• Cátia Marques 1 , 2  

Humanities and Social Sciences Communications volume  9 , Article number:  45 ( 2022 ) Cite this article

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• Language and linguistics

This paper diagnoses the reading skills at the onset of second grade after one (final) trimester of first grade, with online schooling as a result of COVID-19. It also describes and assesses the impact of a Reading Skills Consolidating Program conducted with second graders during the first weeks of the school year. This intervention program focuses on the promotion of letter-sound, phonemic awareness, decoding and spelling. The intervention was implemented with 446-second graders (224 boys and 208 girls), preceded and followed by a reading assessment. Results were analyzed with an intra (pre- and post-test) group design. A paired sample t -test indicated the presence of statistically significant differences between the two assessment moments, with higher values at the post-test. At the pre-test, there was a significantly higher than the normally expected percentage of students with a reading level on or below the 10th percentile along with a significantly worse performance among low Socioeconomic Status (SES) students. The post-test revealed a positive impact of the training program, as indicated by (i) a decrease to about half of the number of students at or below the 10th percentile, (ii) an increase of 20% of students with reading skills at or above the 30th percentile and (iii) the difference decrease in reading skills in a result of SES.

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The global pandemic of SARS-CoV-2 (COVID-19 [coronavirus disease 2019]) has completely changed education in many countries around the world (Reimer et al., 2021 ). Students had face-to-face instruction interrupted during the 2019–2020 school year due to the pandemic (Kuhfeld et al., 2021 ). The majority of schools provided some virtual instruction during the last months of school in 2019 (Lake and Dusseault, 2020 ), and the same scenario reoccurred at the beginning of 2021. Throughout this time, both educators and parents have been actively seeking the best way to continue formal education through remote or virtual learning (Daniel, 2020 ; Hodges et al., 2020 ; Reich et al., 2020 ). Nonetheless, it remains unclear how effective remote or virtual learning is (Viner et al., 2020 ).

Longer-term economic and societal implications of remote or virtual learning seem likely to be severe. Consequently, it will also have a direct impact on both short- and long-term school experiences and trajectories. For example, in short-term, research has shown that COVID-19 school closures will generate substantial learning losses, particularly for the lowest-achieving students (Bacher-Hicks et al., 2020; Chetty et al., 2020; Kuhfeld et al., 2021 ) and this can have long-term implications, since impairments in reading and writing acquisition skills have the potential to seriously limit personal aspirations (Jamshidifarsani et al., 2019 ). Furthermore, research anticipates that virtual learning will emphasize social inequality in student learning due to differences in children’s opportunities to learn at home (Bol, 2020 ), as many working parents were struggling to work and take care of their children at the same time (Harris, 2020 ). Parents identify personal, technical, logistical and financial barriers regarding the challenges of distance learning during the Pandemic (Abuhammad, 2020 ). Parents generally had negative beliefs about the benefits of online learning and preferred traditional learning in early childhood settings (Dong et al., 2020 ). Parents tended to resist online learning for four main reasons: the shortcomings of online learning, young children’s inadequate self-regulation, lack of time and professional knowledge for supporting children’s online learning (Dong et al., 2020 ). Summing up, research reports a close association between parental level of education and the ability to support children’s remote learning during the pandemic (Azubuike et al., 2021 ).

Children from disadvantaged families received much less academic support from their parents and were less likely to have access to necessary physical resources such as a computer or a tablet (Azubuike et al., 2021 ; Andrew et al., 2020 ; Bol, 2020 ). In Portugal, a report from the Court of Auditors (Machado et al., 2021 ) states that four in every five students did not have access to technological equipment and had difficulties with internet access. The Portuguese Ministry of Education acquired 100 thousand pieces of equipment, in March 2020, to be delivered to schools and then distributed to needy students. However, authorization for the acquisition and distribution of technological equipment was late (Machado et al., 2021 ). In January 2021, only 27% of the 100 thousand pieces of equipment had been delivered to the students. The Portuguese government answer did not come on time to strike the inequalities in digital literacy and access to technological equipment that the Pandemic imposed. Additional research based on the borrowing of children’s books from libraries shows that social inequality visibly increased during the lockdown (Jæger and Blaabæk, 2020 ; Reimer et al., 2021 ). Even though reading books to children does not substitute the critical role of formal education in teaching children how to read, the literature shows that children whose parents read to them daily during the pandemic, had less loss compared to those whose parents did not read to them (Bao et al., 2020 ). Consequently, differences in children’s reading activities during the pandemic might accelerate pre-existing social differences in children’s cognitive skills.

Based on these results, it is important to intervene as early as possible in order to help children that have seen their school year affected by the pandemic. If reading disabilities are not early addressed, difficulties tend to generalize to other domains, thus jeopardizing future knowledge acquisition (Raspin et al., 2019 ), exposing students to consecutive experiences of failure, thereby diminishing their motivation to learn (Lyytinen and Erskine, 2016 ). Conversely, when these difficulties are identified early and are accompanied by a prompt and intensive intervention, the likelihood of reversing trajectories is very high (Hall and Burns, 2018 ; Lyytinen, 2008 ).

In this study, we focus on an intervention program specifically designed for training second graders reading skills right from the beginning of the school year, after one (final) trimester of first grade with schools closed during the 2019–2020 school year.

The RSCP—Reading Skills Consolidation Program

This intervention program occurred as part of a broader project, aiming to intervene with kindergarteners, first and second graders. The main goal of the project, like other international ones (e.g., Jamshidifarsani et al., 2019 ; Solheim et al., 2018 ), is early intervention with children training the alphabetic principle through phonemic awareness and letter-sound correspondence (pre-reading skills), as well as the spelling and decoding processes (reading skills), which are the foundations for fluency and reading comprehension. These skills are aligned with the Portuguese guidelines for basic education (DGE, 2015 ).

The RSCP consists of ten activities, to be developed over five sessions, aiming to promote decoding competence. There were two intervention options: option A was aimed exclusively at promoting alphabetical decoding, targeting children with highly fragile skills (at letter-sound level); option B consisted of five sessions for the promotion of alphabetical decoding, later evolving to the developing of orthographic decoding, targeting children, also, with fragile skills (but in this case, with letter-sound knowledge already acquired). The choice of which option to adopt was made by the teacher based on the individual results of the reading assessment conducted before the intervention. One activity example of the intervention in option A is the “letters clothesline”. In this activity, the teacher hangs a set of letters on the clothesline (for example in this order: /p/, /m/, /v/, /j/, /d/ and /r/) and asks one student to throw the dice. Regarding the number the dice shows, another student has to write down a word that starts with the same letter (for example, the dice shows a six, which means, the student has to write a word that starts with the letter /r/). In the next round, another student throws the dice and another student spells a new word. An example of an activity in option B is the “change the syllables”. In this activity, the teacher writes a word in a roll (kitchen paper roll for example) and cut the roll into rings (one per syllable). Using a pen, the teacher hangs the rings in the pen to set a word and asks the student to read. In order to continue the activity, the teacher changes the syllable sequence. The program was implemented by educational and clinical professionals of the broader project, along with the classroom teacher, under the supervision of the coordinator of the project.

This study aims to diagnose the reading skills of children at the beginning of the second grade after the previous entire last trimester in first grade with closed schools, as well as to analyze whether the impact differed according to SES. We further present preliminary results regarding the impact of the RSCP, as a means of remediating (or ameliorating) the negative effects from the previous trimester.

Participants

At the pre-intervention assessment T1 (beginning of the school year - September) 542-second graders were assessed, 256 (47.2%) girls and 286 (52.8%) boys, attending public school (19 schools) in the North Coast of Portugal. From these, 280 (51.7%) students were attending NTEIP Schools Footnote 1 ( Territórios Educativos de Intervenção Não Prioritária [Non Priority Intervention Educational Territories] and 262 (48.3%) TEIP Schools ( Territórios Educativos de Intervenção Prioritária [Priority Intervention Educational Territories]). At the post-intervention T2, 446 students were assessed, 224 (50.2%) boys and 208 (46.6%) girls, in 17 schools. Of these, 200 (44.8%) belong to NTEIP School Groupings and 262 (55.2%) to TEIP School Groupings. A description of the participants per School Grouping is presented in Table 1 .

Instruments

Demographic variables were assessed through a survey built for that purpose (e.g., age, sex, school, SES). The SES was assessed by the type of school (NTEIP/TEIP). Children from NTEIP were considered from average SES and children from TEIP from low SES. Participants were assessed regarding reading skills with the Teste de Rastreio de Leitura -TRL [Screening Test for Reading] (Silva et al., 2020 ). TRL is an early reading ability screening test, developed for Portuguese speaking first graders. The test consists of 30 incomplete sentences (items), which the reader must read and complete by selecting one of four given alternatives using multiple choice. Across the four alternatives, one is the target word and the remaining three are distractors. Distractors are words or pseudowords that are visually and/or phonologically close to the target word. (e.g.,“ Paga o bolo com a: noda, mopa, bota, nota ” [Pay the cake with the: noda/mopa/boot/money - the additional options are pseudowords]; or “ O pai vai à : jola, mola, loja, dota” [The father goes to the: jola, clothespin, store, dota]). From the 30 sentences (items), 20 are orthographically simple words (words with consonant-vowel structure, e.g., boca [mouth]), and 10 are orthographically complex words (words with consonant-vowel-consonant - festa-; consonant- diphthong –bailado-; and consonant-consonant-vowel – florista -). The total score corresponds to the total number of sentences completed correctly by the child in five minutes. The maximum score is 30 points.

Procedures of data collection and data analysis

Authorizations were obtained from the school board and parents/legal guardians. The assessment goals were presented to parents/legal guardians, and the confidentiality of the data processing was guaranteed. Participants were administered the assessment tasks individually before the beginning of the intervention (in the last 2 weeks of September 2020) and after the intervention (5 weeks later). All second graders of 19 schools located on the North Coast of Portugal were selected for the intervention. Students included in the intervention program were not receiving any extra intervention regarding reading and writing abilities. There was a decrease between the number of participants who were evaluated at the beginning of the school year and those who completed the intervention as a result of quarantining measures ( n  = 96, 18%). As a result of COVID-19 outbreaks, entire classes and/or the teacher were confined at home so the post-assessment was not conducted with all participants assessed at pre-test.

Statistical analyses were performed through the Statistical Package for the Social Sciences for Windows, version 26.0. Statistical analyses were used to characterize the participants according to SES. A paired sample t -test to verify the effect of time on reading skills was conducted. Before running this test, we verified the fulfillment of normal distribution. Once fulfillment of normal distribution was not verified, non-parametric tests were conducted. When the results of non-parametric tests showed the same conclusions (rejection of the null hypothesis), the results of the parametric tests were reported.

Time 1—pre-intervention

At the pre-intervention assessment, the mean of accurate answers in the TRL was 12.3 (SD = 10). The distribution of the TRL results per percentile is described in Table 2 . We can observe that 27% of the students had reading skills at or below P10, a percentage that increases to 45% if we set the cut-off point at results equal to or less than P30.

At the beginning of the second-grade average SES children presented significantly better reading results than low SES children t (540) = 2.46 p  = 0.01 (Table 3 ).

In Table 4 the percentile distribution is detailed according to the SES. We can observe a higher percentage of children with results at P10 or below in low SES (31.7% vs. 21.8%); conversely, results above the P30 are lower for low SES in comparison to average SES children (50 vs. 58.9%).

Time 2—post-intervention

Table 5 describes the TRL result before and after the intervention. Since the number of students assessed decreased between pre-test and post-test, from this section forward, we will focus exclusively on the results of the 446 students, evaluated in both assessment moments, and, cumulatively enrolled in all sessions of the intervention. In the pre-intervention, the accuracy in the TRL ranged between 11 and 13 (respectively, low SES and average SES). After the intervention, there was a statistically significant increase, both in average SES t (445) = 17.00 p  < 0.001 and in low SES t (445) = 15.56 p  < 0.001. Post-test indicates the absence of statistical differences between average and low SES t (444)=1.52 p  = 0.13.

The distribution on the TRL by percentile intervals at T1 and T2 is described in Table 6 . Concerning reading skills at or below P10, there was a decrease of more than 10% (from 26% to 13%, respectively at T1 and T2). There was an increase of 20% for results higher than the P30 (from 53.4% to 73.1%, respectively).

Table 7 describes the percentile distribution by low and average SES after the intervention. We verify a decrease in the percentage of students with reading skills at or below P10 between T1 and T2 for both low and average SES children. In the same way, the percentage of children with results above the P30 increased between T1 and T2, both in low and on average SES. In the post-intervention, there was no statistical difference between low and average SES t (444) = 1.52 p  = 0.13.

This study aimed to diagnose the reading skills of second graders at the beginning of the school year after the major lockdown in schools in consequence of the Pandemic, as well as to assess the impact of a reading intervention program—RSCP—with the same group of children. Both the first assessment and the onset of the intervention took place in September 2021, after an entire final trimester in first grade with a learning scenario drastically changed, as the schools were closed and online teaching took place (instead of face to face). RSCP was developed to contribute to a national effort to diminish the negative consequences of the extended school closing, specifically developed for promoting alphabetic and orthographic decoding.

At the beginning of first grade, the average accuracy in the TRL was 12.3 (SD = 10), in line with the reference results expected at the end of first grade ( M  = 11; DP = 6.2, Silva et al., 2020). A closer look at the results, specifically analyzing the distribution of children across the different reading percentiles, reveals a worrying fact: 45% of the second graders started the school year (pre-test) with results under the P30. More dramatically, over one fourth presented a reading level at or below the 10th percentile.

An inspection of the results according to SES reveals that in the pre-test average SES children had significantly better accuracy compared with low SES children. This result is in line with Portuguese data that reports low SES students are in general characterized as having more reading difficulties and worse reading competencies than their average SES peers (DGE, 2021 ; CIES and ISCTE, 2011 ). These results might suggest that children with disadvantaged backgrounds (TEIP type of schools) have probably received less academic support from their parents and were less likely to have access to necessary physical resources (e.g., computer or tablet) during the lockdown (Andrew et al., 2020 ; Bol, 2020 ). In Portugal, some families from disadvantaged backgrounds received physical resources from the Portuguese Education Ministry (Machado et al., 2021 ) such as computers or tablets in order to help their children in attending online classes. However, some families did not know how to use those resources or did not have the availability to support children with simple chores such as turning on the computer and accessing the class. These results confirm that the pandemic increased the inequality in students’ reading skills (Bol, 2020 ), in line with previous research documenting that during long periods of school interruption such as summer vacations, low SES children had a slower rate of reading ability gain compared to children from high socioeconomic background families (Cooper et al., 1996 ). Results obtained at the beginning of the school year confirm that the Pandemic increased the tendency for a correlation between academic achievement and SES (Bacher-Hicks et al., 2020 ; Chetty et al., 2020 ; Kuhfeld et al., 2021 ), with the children from lower SES having worse academic achievement.

After the intervention (post-test), reading skills significantly increased for all children. Whereas at the pre-test, 46% of the children had reading skills below P30, at the post-test this percentage decreased to 27%. In addition, after the intervention, there were no statistically significant differences between children according to SES. These results are promising once a specific type of reading intervention during the first 5-week period of the second grade seems able to mitigate the effects of the school closures from the previous trimester, particularly when it comes to the factor of SES.

It was alarming to confirm that children from disadvantaged backgrounds were exactly the ones in worse conditions to overcome these difficulties, as indicated by the pre-intervention assessment. On the other hand, results indicate that an early, systematic and intensive intervention focusing on promoting decoding had a positive impact on reading skills in a short time. The authors expect that this program will be adopted on the early intervention for reading acquisition, thus contributing to promoting confident learners, willing to be fluent readers.

In the present study, concerning the urgency of the pandemic situation, it was the authors’ option not to select any children for a non-intervention condition. In future studies, it is important to compare the reading skills between at-risk children subject and non-subject to the RSCP. We hope to have contributed to the first of many studies developing and accessing reading promotion intensive programs, based on scientifically informed strategies. Future studies should also analyze the relationship between parents’ involvement during the lockdown, as well as the number of technological equipment’s available.

At the beginning of the second grade, after a most atypical first grade affected by the sanitary measures to face the Pandemic, with schools closed for the entire last trimester, an alarming result regarding reading skills was found: over one fourth had poor reading skills, with children from low SES family background significantly more affected. As a response to these results, the authors of this paper develop an intervention program to promote decoding skills during the initial 5 weeks of the school period defined by the Portuguese Ministry of Education as a period of consolidation.

The 5 weeks intervention was very positive, resulting in a significant improvement in reading skills, with an increase of 20 percentual points (53 to 23%) regarding reading abilities above P30 and a decrease of more than 10 percentual points at or below P10 (from 26 to 13%). Also, the 5 weeks intervention resulted inequality across SES. Our results highlight the need for educators and policymakers to address additional difficulties, where early intervention should take place with those children affected by the pandemic. Educators and policymakers will need to find ways for mass assessment. During the next school year, educators will need to adopt effective strategies to work with those most affected by the school closures. As for decoding, RSCP may be adopted as a complementary strategy, along with those adopted in the regular classroom syllabus. We expect to contribute to the growing important publication trend that empowers school leaders, policymakers, and researchers on their quest for urgent evidence-informed post–COVID-19 recovery decisions.

Data availability

The data that support the findings of this study are available from the corresponding author upon reasonable request.

The NTEIP/TEIP program is a Portuguese government initiative, currently implemented in schools located in economically and socially disadvantaged territories, marked by poverty and social exclusion, where violence, indiscipline, abandonment and school failure are most evident (TEIP schools). The main goal of the program is to prevent and to reduce early school dropout and the indiscipline (DGE, 2021 ; CIES and ISCTE, 2011 ) and improving school grades of the students in the TEIP schools. This is a positive discrimination program aimed at supporting schools located in socioeconomically disadvantaged areas. The strategy of the TEIP program is based on a decentralizing model, focusing on the territory, with the school as a central element in supporting the resolution of community problems (CIES and ISCTE, 2011 ).

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This work was supported by European Horizon 2020, under OPERAÇÃO NORTE-08- 5266-FSE349 000095.

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Ana Sucena, Ana Filipa Silva & Cátia Marques

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Sucena, A., Silva, A.F. & Marques, C. Reading skills intervention during the Covid-19 pandemic. Humanit Soc Sci Commun 9 , 45 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1057/s41599-022-01059-x

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Op-Ed: When reading to learn, what works best for students — printed books or digital texts?

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As the pandemic drove a sudden, massive and necessary shift to online education last year, students were forced to access much of their school reading assignments digitally. Turning so heavily to screens for school reading was a temporary fix — and should remain that way.

A wealth of research comparing print and digital reading points to the same conclusion — print matters. For most students, print is the most effective way to learn and to retain that knowledge long-term.

When measuring reading comprehension, researchers typically ask people to read passages and then answer questions or write short essays. Regardless of the age of the students, reliably similar patterns occur.

When the text is longer than about 500 words, readers generally perform better on comprehension tests with print passages. The superiority of print especially shines through when experimenters go beyond questions having superficial answers to those whose responses require inferences , details about the text , or remembering when and where in a story an event took place.

Part of the explanation for discrepancies between print and digital test scores involves the physical properties of paper. We often use the place in the book (at the beginning, halfway through) or location on a page as a memory marker. But equally important is a reader’s mental perspective. People tend to put more effort into reading print than reading digitally.

Op-Ed: Distance learning? Even my students will tell you that’s not the future

Magic happens in a physical classroom, not through online platforms popularized during the coronavirus quarantine.

May 26, 2020

We can learn a lot about the importance of print by asking students themselves. Overwhelmingly, college students report they concentrate, learn or remember best with paper, according to my research and studies conducted by colleagues.

For instance, students say that when reading hard copy, “everything sinks in more” and can be pictured “more vividly.” When reading digitally, they admit they get distracted by things like online social media or YouTube.

However, not all students relish reading in print. Several of the more than 400 I surveyed commented that digital texts seemed shorter than the print versions (when they’re actually the same length) or declared that digital is more entertaining and print can be boring. They said things like digital screens “keep me awake” or “print can tire you out really fast” no matter how interesting the book.

Such attitudes support research that finds when students are allowed to choose how much time to spend reading a passage, many speed more quickly through the digital version — and do worse on the comprehension test.

Reading digitally only started becoming a norm about a decade ago, thanks to advancements in technology and consumer products such as e-readers and tablet computers. Meanwhile, another seismic shift was beginning to happen in education. Academic courses, and then whole degree programs, became available online at universities before such technology-driven offerings percolated down through the lower grades.

As academic e-books made their way onto the market, students and faculty alike saw these more affordable digital versions as a way to combat the high cost of print textbooks . Open educational resources — teaching and learning materials available free (almost always online) — also became another popular option.

In 2012, the U.S. Department of Education and the Federal Communications Commission unveiled a plan for all K-12 schools to transition from print to digital textbooks by 2017 . The rationale? Improve education, but also cost savings. The big three textbook publishers (Pearson, McGraw-Hill Education, and Houghton Mifflin Harcourt) were quick to develop digital initiatives for K-12 materials. The pace accelerated in higher education as well, most recently with inclusive-access models , where publishers provide reduced-price digital texts to all course enrollees.

Regrettably, both the textbook industry and school decision-makers rushed to embrace digital reading platforms without assessing potential educational implications. Yet below the radar, teachers and students have often recognized the educational mismatch.

A recent survey by the research group Bay View Analytics found that 43% of college faculty believe students learn better with print materials — the same message students have been sending, when we bother to ask. Yes, cost issues need to be addressed, and yes, digital has a vital place in contemporary education. But so does print.

There’s a pressing need to rethink the balance between print and digital learning tools. When choosing educational materials, educators — and parents — have to consider many factors, including subject matter, cost, and convenience. However, it’s also important to remember that research findings usually tip the scales toward print as a more effective learning tool.

What can parents and educators do? For starters, explore students’ perceptions about which reading medium helps them concentrate and learn more easily. Conduct a short survey and discuss the results with students in class or at home. Make sure everyone who has a stake in students’ education — teachers, librarians, administrators and parents — thinks about the consequences of their choices.

The pandemic drove society to educational triage, not just by pivoting to digital materials but also by reducing curricular rigor . As schools continue to reopen and rethink their educational goals, research about learning should be used to help find the right balance between screens and print in the digital age.

Naomi S. Baron is professor emerita of linguistics at American University and author of “How We Read Now: Strategic Choices for Print, Screen, and Audio.”

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The Impact of COVID-19 Confinement on Reading Behavior

Mahmoud a. alomari.

1 Department of Rehabilitation Sciences, Jordan University of Science and Technology, Irbid, Jordan

Omar F. Khabour

2 Department of Medical Laboratory Sciences, Jordan University of Science and Technology, Irbid, Jordan

Karem H. Alzoubi

3 Department of Pharmacy Practice and Pharmacotherapeutics, University of Sharjah, Sharjah, UAE.

4 Department of Clinical Pharmacy, Jordan University of Science and Technology, Irbid, Jordan.

Aseel Aburub

5 Department of Physiotherapy, Isra University, Amman, Jordan

6 School of Health and Rehabilitation Sciences, Keele University, Newcastle Under Lyme, UK

Associated Data

The data supporting the findings of the article is available upon request via e-mail to the corresponding [K.H.A] author.

Background:

The COVID-19 pandemic was detrimental to lifestyle and behavior. In this investigation, changes in reading habits during the pandemic were examined.

The study is cross-sectional and survey-based. 1844 individuals completed an online survey about sociodemographic and reading habits during COVID-19. Multinomial logistic regression was used to examine the relationship between the study variables.

Most of the participants were active readers (71.5%-83.2%). Fewer (13.8-18.0%) reported a decrease in reading, while about half reported a no change, and 1/3 rd reported an increase. Changes in reading habits were related to age, education, job type, and income.

Conclusion:

About half of the participants during the pandemic reported a change in reading habits. Interventions to further enhance reading among people during the pandemic might help ameliorate the negative impacts of the pandemic.

1. INTRODUCTION

The SARS-CoV-2 that causes COVID-19 disease emerged in 2019, and in March 2020, the World Health Organization declared COVID-19 a pandemic [ 1 ], affecting most of the globe. As of January 2022, the virus has claimed over 330,000,000 cases and 5.560 million fatalities worldwide. All population segments are susceptible to COVID-19; however, the elderly with diseases seem most affected [ 2 ], and COVID-19 can be transmitted mainly by close contact with infected people or through contaminated objects [ 3 ].

After the World Health Organization declaration, many countries have resorted to different control strategies to intercept or slow the virus’s spread. These strategies included quarantine, curfew and lockdown, social distancing, sheltering at home, and complete isolation [ 4 ]. The pandemic and subsequent quarantine regulations might have affected people’s daily routines, lifestyles, and mental health [ 5 ]. Recently, it was shown that quarantine and staying at home during the COVID-19 pandemic increased anxiety, depression, stress, self-harm [ 6 - 8 ], and suicide attempts [ 9 ]. During the pandemic, reading literature was among the activities that remained available. Previous studies have suggested that limited outdoor activities during COVID-19-induced confinement were associated with increased alternative activities, namely reading [ 10 - 12 ]. During the COVID-19 pandemic, people started working from home, lost jobs, or turned to furlough [ 13 ]. These sudden changes may have spared more time for hobbies, leisure, and self-development, in which reading takes a major role.

Reading is the process of looking at a series of letters/symbols to acquire scientific, religious, entertainment, and general information. It is the cornerstone of self-enhancement and human development [ 14 , 15 ]. It is associated with health and therapeutic benefits, including enhancing deep relaxation, self-esteem, inner calm, better sleep, and lowering stress and depression levels [ 16 , 17 ]. It has been used for personality adjustment [ 18 - 20 ]. Factors that affect reading include mode of reading (electronic vs . hardcopy material) [ 21 ], gender [ 22 , 23 ], age [ 24 , 25 ], motivations [ 26 ], education qualifications and levels [ 25 ], and environment [ 27 , 28 ].

Reading is one of the most common leisure activities in confinement [ 10 - 12 ]. For example, reading was ranked the number one preferred leisure time activity in long-duration space trips [ 10 ]. Additionally, books were the highest-ranked personal items that astronauts packed on long missions [ 10 - 12 ]. Furthermore, reading was one of the most practiced activities during leisure time in the Antarctic and submarine missions [ 12 ]. Moreover, prisoners have reported that reading helped them to improve peace of mind, enhance knowledge, strengthen character, and decrease the rate of recidivism [ 10 - 12 ].

During the COVID-19 pandemic, people were confined to homes and unable to attend to normal daily activities due to confinement regulations. Reading, including magazines, books, newspapers, or novels, might help reduce loneliness and improve mental health and well-being during “staying at home” [ 29 - 31 ]. On the other hand, libraries were closed during the pandemic, which might lead people to order book deliveries or to depend on electronic/audiobooks and magazines. Several famous publishers gave free access to electronic books to encourage people to cope with confinement during the pandemic [ 32 ]. However, it is not clear how quarantine and lifestyle changes affected the literary reading experience. In a study conducted in Algeria, about two-thirds of participants noticed changes in reading habits, and about 15% devoted 3 hours daily to reading books [ 30 ]. The current study aims to explore the changes in reading habits during COVID-19 confinement. We hypothesize that confinement during COVID-19 can favorably alter reading habits, allowing people to increase reading time. In addition, changes in reading habits during the pandemic are related to demographic factors. This study is essential to understand how confinement might change people’s behavior, specifically reading habits, and the sociodemographic factors (such as education, age, income, and employment) leading to these changes. Subsequently, the results can be used to develop interventions/strategies to enhance reading during the pandemic.

2.1. Design and Participants

The data for the current study was obtained from the “Behavior, Knowledge, Stress and Quality of Life during COVID-19-induced Confinement (BKSQ-COVID19) project”, a cross-sectional study to examine changes in reading habits. An online survey was distributed among Jordanian adults during the second quartile of 2020. A snowball convenience sampling approach was used to anonymously recruit participants using social media platforms and applications, including Facebook groups, Instagram, WhatsApp groups, LinkedIn, Twitter, and institutional emails. Details about the study were provided, and electronic consent was obtained before the participants could access the survey. Institutional Review Board (IRB-JUST) approved the conduction of the study.

2.2. Questionnaire

Due to the uniqueness of the pandemic and applied confinement measures, no standard survey was proper to suit the study’s objectives. Thus, the research team developed a questionnaire based on similar studies [ 33 ]. Validation of content and face validation were done. At First, feedback was provided by a group of experts on the survey items. Their comments were implemented into the study survey. After that, pilot testing was carried out using the modified version of the study questionnaire, where participants (n=50) provided their opinion regarding the clarity and comprehensibility of the survey items. The responses from the pilot study were not included in the final data analysis. For all items of the study questionnaire, the test-retest reliability coefficient was ensured to be >0.65.

The study instrument collected information about the demographics of the participants (age, education, marital status, etc .), their views on Covid-19, and how the pandemic affected their reading habits. Additionally, the participants were asked to indicate the types of confinement procedures they experienced during the pandemic. The survey asked the participants four questions about the engagement level in reading specialized, general knowledge, story/novels, and holy books and material to determine the participants’ reading habits. The questions were: “What changes have you experienced in the following reading types due to the spread of COVID-19?”. Four choices were available, “increase,” “decrease,” “no change,” and “never practiced in this behavior.”

2.3. Data Analysis

The data were analyzed and presented as mean±SD, frequency, and percentages, using the SPSS (version 21) for statistical analysis. Multinomial logistic regression examined the relationship between age, gender, income, education, and job type with the reading indices. Reading indices include “Specialized books/journals,” “Holy books,” “General knowledge,” and “Stories/novels.” The Chi-square test was implemented to examine the differences in the participant responses to the reading questions, and the p-value was set at 0.05. Additionally, cross-tabulation was implemented to determine the association of the different demographic parameters (age, gender, income, education, and job type) with the responses of the participants to the survey items. Subsequently, cell percentages with adjusted standardized (AdRs) greater than ±1.96 were considered significantly different from the rest of the cells. The responses used in the statistical analysis were “increase,” “decrease,” and “no-changes.”

3.1. Participants

The demographics of the study participants are shown in Table ​ Table 1 . 1 . The study instrument was filled by 1844 adult (18-72 years old) subjects. Most participants were female, held a university degree, and were employed. As in Table ​ Table 2 , 2 , several confinement procedures were applied by the government, including self-quarantine, social distancing, school closing, and banning social gatherings (93.7-99%).

Demographics of the study sample (n=1844).

Reported confinements during COVID-19 (n=1844).

3.2. Prevalence of Reading Habits

Table ​ Table 3 3 depicts that the majority of the participants reported that they were involved in reading habits. The results showed that 77.6%, 83.2%, 78.5%, and 71.5% of subjects reported reading specialized, holy, general knowledge, and story materials, respectively.

Prevalence of various reading types.

3.3. Changes in Reading Habits

Data analysis shows differences ( p <0.001) in the responses to the reading habits question items, “increase,” “decrease,” versus “no-change.” Fig. ( ​ ( 1 ) 1 ) shows that ~50% (range: 47.7%-53.7%) of the participants reported a “no-change,” while a third reported an “increase” (range: 30.1-34.6) in reading habits.

Prevalence of changes in reading habits (%).

3.4. Factors Contributing to the Changes in Reading Habits

Table ​ Table 4 4 shows a multinomial regression of age, education, income, and job relationship with reading habits during the COVID-19 pandemic. Subsequent cross-tabulation showed that reading specialty material was related to age (ꭓ 2 =12.3; p=0.01). Additional sub-analysis revealed that younger individuals reported the least (53.7%; AdRs=-3.2) “no-changes” and greatest (61.8%; AdRs=2.0) “increase” while the middle-aged (30-49 years old) experienced the greatest (34.6%; AdRs=2.8) “no-change” and least (25.5%; AdRs=-2.5). An association was also found between reading specialty material and education (ꭓ 2 =19.8; p=0.003), with high school diploma holders experiencing the greatest (25.3%; AdRs=3.8) “decrease” while graduate diploma holders experiencing the least (12.7%; AdRs=-2.4) “decrease.” The cross-tabulation revealed a relationship (ꭓ 2 =20.4.; p =0.0001) between reading specialty material with income. Additional comparisons showed that lower income was associated with the greatest (21.6%; AdRs=3.4) “decrease” and least (12.4%; AdRs=-2.3) “no-change” while higher income was associated with the least (4.1%; AdRs=-2.5) “decrease” and greatest (10.7%; AdRs=-2.5) “increase” and middle income associated with greatest (79.8%; AdRs=2.2) “no-change” in reading specialty material. The cross-tabulation test showed that reading specialty material was related to job type (ꭓ 2 =31.4; p=0.01). Posthoc comparisons demonstrated that holding a job in education was associated with the greatest (29.6%; AdRs=2.0) “decrease” and a job in health was associated least (10.0%; AdRs=-2.6) with “decrease” and greatest “increase” (19.8%; AdRs=2.8). Additionally, a job in crafting was associated with the least (1.4%; AdRs=-2.3) “no-change,” while a job in engineering was associated with the greatest (7.7%; AdRs=3.3) “no-change” and least (3.5%; AdRs=-2.2) “increase.”

Multinomial regression between confounding factors and types of reading.

Reading holy books was related to participants’ education level (ꭓ 2 =15.1; p=0.02). Further posthoc revealed that holding a high school diploma was associated with the greatest (24.5%; AdRs=2.0) “decrease” and least (17.0%; AdRs=-2.2) “no-change” while holding a graduate degree was related to the greatest (18.7%; AdRs=2.6) “no-change.” A relationship between reading holy books was found with income (ꭓ 2 =10.2; p=0.04), with individuals in the low-income category experiencing the greatest (21.0%; AdRs=2.4) “decrease” and least (13.2%; AdRs=-2.4) “no-change.” A relationship between reading holy books was found with job type (ꭓ 2 =29.3; p=0.02). Further post hoc tests showed that individuals holding a job in education experienced the greatest (33.7%; AdRs=-3.2) “decrease” and least (21.9%; AdRs=-2.2) “no-change.” Additionally, holding an engineering job was associated with most (13.2%; AdRs=-2.4) “no-change” as well as least (2.2%; AdRs=-2.1) “decrease” and (3.7%; AdRs=-2.0) “increase” in reading holy books.

Reading newspapers was associated with age (ꭓ 2 =12.6; p=0.01). Subsequent posthoc analysis showed that younger individuals exhibited the greatest (61.3%; AdRs=-3.0) “increase” and least (53.2%; AdRs=2.3) “no-change,” while the elderly experienced the greatest (12.8%; AdRs=2.9) “no-change” and least (7.8%; AdRs=-2.3) “increase” in reading newspapers. A relationship (ꭓ 2 =34.4; p=0.0001) was also found between reading newspapers and education. Subgroup comparisons revealed that individuals with a high school degree experienced the greatest (30.3%; AdRs=5.4) “increase” and least (16.2%; AdRs=-2.0) “no-change” and (15.3%; AdRs=-2.2) “increase.” Additionally, holding a graduate degree was associated with the least (10.4%; AdRs=-3.2) “decrease” and greatest (19.6%; AdRs=2.2) “increase” in newspaper reading. Reading newspapers was also associated with (ꭓ 2 =13.4; p=0.009) income. The subsequent posthoc analysis revealed that low income was associated with the greatest (19.7%; AdRs=2.3) “decrease” and least (12.6%; AdRs=-2.3) “no-change.” Additionally, individuals with middle income reported the greatest (79.7%; AdRs=-2.3) “no-change,” while those with higher income experienced the greatest (4.0%; AdRs=-2.3) “increase” in newspaper readings.

Reading stories was associated (ꭓ 2 =49.3; p =0.0001) with age. The younger individuals reported the least (50.9%; AdRs=-6.2) “no change” and the greatest (72.2%; AdRs=6.2) “increase.” Additionally, the middle-aged reported the greatest (36.4%; AdRs=4.4) “no-change” and least (23.3%; AdRs=-3.9) “increase” while the elderly experienced the greatest (12.7%; AdRs=3.4) “no-change” and least (4.5%; AdRs=-4.2) “increase” in reading stories. Furthermore, reading novels was related (ꭓ 2 =33.7; p =0.0001) to education. Additional group comparisons showed that individuals with high school diplomas reported the greatest (28.7%; AdRs=4.6) “decrease” and least (15.4%; AdRs=-2.0) “no-change” while holding a two-year degree was associated with the least (36.4%; AdRs=-2.1) “decrease.” Additionally, individuals with a graduate degree reported the greatest (21.1%; AdRs=3.3) “no-change” and least (13.6%; AdRs=-2.5) “increase” while holding a bachelor’s degree was associated with the greatest (57.1%; AdRs=2.4) “increase” in reading stories. Changes in reading stories were also associated with (ꭓ 2 =27.7; p =0.03) job type with holding a job in engineering was associated with the least (2.1%; AdRs=-2.2) “decrease” and greatest (7.4%; AdRs=3.3) “increase.”

4. DISCUSSION

COVID-19 has compelled governments around the globe to impose a variety of confinement measures [ 4 ] that are usually associated with an evident increase in stress and crucial lifestyle changes [ 6 - 8 ]. However, the effect of COVID-19-induced confinement on reading habits is not well investigated. Therefore, the current study examined the changes in reading habits during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Due to the pandemic, the confinement measures were self-quarantine, physical distancing, banning group events, school closing, and lockdowns. According to the results, most participants were also active readers (71.5%-83.2%). Less (13.8-18.0%) percent reported a decrease in reading, about half reported a no change, and 1/3 rd reported an increase. Importantly, changes in the reading specialty material were related to age, education, job type, and income, while education, income, and job type were associated with changes in reading holy books. Furthermore, changes in reading newspapers were related to age, education, and income, while changes in reading stories were associated with age, education, and job type. The results agreed with a study conducted in Algeria which reported changes in reading habits in most participants attributed to COVID-19 pandemic confinement measures [ 30 ]. In that study, about 15% of participants read more than 3 hours daily [ 30 ].

Confinements are rarely experienced in situations such as imprisonment, Antarctic camps, and space trips. Consistent with studies examining the effect of confinement on reading habits [ 10 - 12 ], all reading types increased among the majority while some decreased during the COVID-19 lockdown period. Previous reports showed increased reading time [ 10 - 12 ] during confinement, including imprisonment, the South Pole, and airspace trips. Tamilmani (2014) explained that books are the voices of people living in confinement, especially in quiet environments [ 34 ].

Fortunately, the current study findings are advantageous for mental health. Several studies have reported increased mental health distress during the COVID-19 lockdown period [ 6 - 8 ]. Previous data have indicated that people who read more during confinement experienced fewer mental health disorders, including depression, anxiety, and stress [ 17 ]. Accordingly, people are recommended to fulfill free time during confinement by embracing rewarding hobbies and enjoyable activities, such as reading. Additionally, strategies should be implemented to encourage people to read during long-term confinement for self-development and diverting confinement-induced stress [ 10 - 12 ]. Alternatively, the advantages of reading extend beyond leisure and psychological benefits. Reading was suggested among the solutions to deal with sleeping problems by the European CBT‐I Academy [ 16 ]. Additionally, reading is essential for training the imagination, exercising the brain, expanding knowledge, enhancing literacy, and improving learning outcomes [ 35 ]. Studies have shown that reading can improve social skills [ 36 ], health [ 37 ], and overall quality of life [ 38 ].

This is the first study that addresses factors associated with reading habits during COVID-19-induced confinement. Consistent with previous literature in ordinary circumstances [ 21 ], changes in reading in the current study were related to demographics ( i.e ., age and gender) and socioeconomic status ( i.e ., education and income). For example, reading newspapers correlated with gender and education and, to a greater extent, age [ 39 ]. Additionally, Chokron et al . (2000) reported that cultural factors, including perception about the importance of reading, implementing extra-curriculum reading from childhood, and reading advisements in the media, were detrimental to reading under normal circumstances [ 40 ]. Similarly, McGeown et al . (2015) identified gender and age as the main factors that affect reading habits [ 22 ]. Moreover, Raghunandan et al . (1996) clustered factors affecting reading into four groups: ecological (the various environments; emotional (the social and psychological factors); physical (vision, hearing, age, gender, and other health factors), and educational factors [ 23 ]. Additionally, in a recent systematic review, the internet (speed, downloading limit, and having accounts on social media), environment (home environment,) and motivation were reported as the main factors affecting reading [ 26 ].

The current study is a novel study that explored reading habits during the COVID-19 confinement period. The results might help make plans and implement strategies to further enhance reading. For example, knowing the most desired reading material might help to produce more suitable books/articles. Subsequently, accommodate different population segments, including genders, age groups, and education and income levels. However, more studies are needed to understand the importance of reading for health, particularly mental and psychological health, during disease and long-term confinement.

This study is not without limitations. These limitations include; the study design was cross-sectional, the number and scope of the reading questions were sparse, and it did not assess the effect of reading on mental and psychological status. Therefore, future longitudinal and interventional studies are warranted to survey in more detail the people’s favorite reading topics and types ( i.e ., e-books, hard copy books, audiobooks, etc .). Additionally, more studies are warranted to explore the health, particularly mental and psychological, benefits of reading during long-term disease-induced confinement. Another possible limitation is the possibility of selection bias, where it is possible that more educated than the general population have responded to the survey. However, the educational levels in the current study sample were comparable to the nationwide statistics shown by the Jordan Department of Statistics. Thus, it is unlikely that more educated people only responded to this survey. Finally, online surveys can suffer from multiple enrollments in the same subject. However, such a possibility is also not likely as most study subjects will only be willing to complete the data survey only once.

Most participants reported either a “no-change” or an “increase” in reading habits. Additionally, the data show that age, education, income, and job type predict reading habit changes. These results suggest that the COVID-19-induced confinement might impose a no-change or positive change in reading. However, studies and interventions are warranted to further understand changes in reading and to design and implement strategies to encourage reading during long-term disease-induced confinement.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Declared none.

LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS

Ethics approval and consent to participate.

The study was approved by the institutional review board at the Jordan University of Science and Technology, Irbid-Jordan (224/2020).

HUMAN AND ANIMAL RIGHTS

No animals were used in this research. All human research procedures followed were per the ethical standards of the committee responsible for human experimentation (institutional and national) and with the Helsinki Declaration of 1975, revised in 2013.

CONSENT FOR PUBLICATION

Informed consent has been obtained from the study participants.

AVAILABILITY OF DATA AND MATERIALS

Standards of reporting.

COREQ guidelines were followed.

The study was funded by the Deanship of Research at Jordan University of Science and Technology, Irbid-Jordan (grant #: 245/2020).

CONFLICT OF INTEREST

The authors declare no conflict of interest, financial or otherwise.

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Read these 12 moving essays about life during coronavirus

Artists, novelists, critics, and essayists are writing the first draft of history.

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The world is grappling with an invisible, deadly enemy, trying to understand how to live with the threat posed by a virus . For some writers, the only way forward is to put pen to paper, trying to conceptualize and document what it feels like to continue living as countries are under lockdown and regular life seems to have ground to a halt.

So as the coronavirus pandemic has stretched around the world, it’s sparked a crop of diary entries and essays that describe how life has changed. Novelists, critics, artists, and journalists have put words to the feelings many are experiencing. The result is a first draft of how we’ll someday remember this time, filled with uncertainty and pain and fear as well as small moments of hope and humanity.

At the New York Review of Books, Ali Bhutto writes that in Karachi, Pakistan, the government-imposed curfew due to the virus is “eerily reminiscent of past military clampdowns”:

Beneath the quiet calm lies a sense that society has been unhinged and that the usual rules no longer apply. Small groups of pedestrians look on from the shadows, like an audience watching a spectacle slowly unfolding. People pause on street corners and in the shade of trees, under the watchful gaze of the paramilitary forces and the police.

His essay concludes with the sobering note that “in the minds of many, Covid-19 is just another life-threatening hazard in a city that stumbles from one crisis to another.”

Writing from Chattanooga, novelist Jamie Quatro documents the mixed ways her neighbors have been responding to the threat, and the frustration of conflicting direction, or no direction at all, from local, state, and federal leaders:

Whiplash, trying to keep up with who’s ordering what. We’re already experiencing enough chaos without this back-and-forth. Why didn’t the federal government issue a nationwide shelter-in-place at the get-go, the way other countries did? What happens when one state’s shelter-in-place ends, while others continue? Do states still under quarantine close their borders? We are still one nation, not fifty individual countries. Right?

Award-winning photojournalist Alessio Mamo, quarantined with his partner Marta in Sicily after she tested positive for the virus, accompanies his photographs in the Guardian of their confinement with a reflection on being confined :

The doctors asked me to take a second test, but again I tested negative. Perhaps I’m immune? The days dragged on in my apartment, in black and white, like my photos. Sometimes we tried to smile, imagining that I was asymptomatic, because I was the virus. Our smiles seemed to bring good news. My mother left hospital, but I won’t be able to see her for weeks. Marta started breathing well again, and so did I. I would have liked to photograph my country in the midst of this emergency, the battles that the doctors wage on the frontline, the hospitals pushed to their limits, Italy on its knees fighting an invisible enemy. That enemy, a day in March, knocked on my door instead.

In the New York Times Magazine, deputy editor Jessica Lustig writes with devastating clarity about her family’s life in Brooklyn while her husband battled the virus, weeks before most people began taking the threat seriously:

At the door of the clinic, we stand looking out at two older women chatting outside the doorway, oblivious. Do I wave them away? Call out that they should get far away, go home, wash their hands, stay inside? Instead we just stand there, awkwardly, until they move on. Only then do we step outside to begin the long three-block walk home. I point out the early magnolia, the forsythia. T says he is cold. The untrimmed hairs on his neck, under his beard, are white. The few people walking past us on the sidewalk don’t know that we are visitors from the future. A vision, a premonition, a walking visitation. This will be them: Either T, in the mask, or — if they’re lucky — me, tending to him.

Essayist Leslie Jamison writes in the New York Review of Books about being shut away alone in her New York City apartment with her 2-year-old daughter since she became sick:

The virus. Its sinewy, intimate name. What does it feel like in my body today? Shivering under blankets. A hot itch behind the eyes. Three sweatshirts in the middle of the day. My daughter trying to pull another blanket over my body with her tiny arms. An ache in the muscles that somehow makes it hard to lie still. This loss of taste has become a kind of sensory quarantine. It’s as if the quarantine keeps inching closer and closer to my insides. First I lost the touch of other bodies; then I lost the air; now I’ve lost the taste of bananas. Nothing about any of these losses is particularly unique. I’ve made a schedule so I won’t go insane with the toddler. Five days ago, I wrote Walk/Adventure! on it, next to a cut-out illustration of a tiger—as if we’d see tigers on our walks. It was good to keep possibility alive.

At Literary Hub, novelist Heidi Pitlor writes about the elastic nature of time during her family’s quarantine in Massachusetts:

During a shutdown, the things that mark our days—commuting to work, sending our kids to school, having a drink with friends—vanish and time takes on a flat, seamless quality. Without some self-imposed structure, it’s easy to feel a little untethered. A friend recently posted on Facebook: “For those who have lost track, today is Blursday the fortyteenth of Maprilay.” ... Giving shape to time is especially important now, when the future is so shapeless. We do not know whether the virus will continue to rage for weeks or months or, lord help us, on and off for years. We do not know when we will feel safe again. And so many of us, minus those who are gifted at compartmentalization or denial, remain largely captive to fear. We may stay this way if we do not create at least the illusion of movement in our lives, our long days spent with ourselves or partners or families.

Novelist Lauren Groff writes at the New York Review of Books about trying to escape the prison of her fears while sequestered at home in Gainesville, Florida:

Some people have imaginations sparked only by what they can see; I blame this blinkered empiricism for the parks overwhelmed with people, the bars, until a few nights ago, thickly thronged. My imagination is the opposite. I fear everything invisible to me. From the enclosure of my house, I am afraid of the suffering that isn’t present before me, the people running out of money and food or drowning in the fluid in their lungs, the deaths of health-care workers now growing ill while performing their duties. I fear the federal government, which the right wing has so—intentionally—weakened that not only is it insufficient to help its people, it is actively standing in help’s way. I fear we won’t sufficiently punish the right. I fear leaving the house and spreading the disease. I fear what this time of fear is doing to my children, their imaginations, and their souls.

At ArtForum , Berlin-based critic and writer Kristian Vistrup Madsen reflects on martinis, melancholia, and Finnish artist Jaakko Pallasvuo’s 2018 graphic novel Retreat , in which three young people exile themselves in the woods:

In melancholia, the shape of what is ending, and its temporality, is sprawling and incomprehensible. The ambivalence makes it hard to bear. The world of Retreat is rendered in lush pink and purple watercolors, which dissolve into wild and messy abstractions. In apocalypse, the divisions established in genesis bleed back out. My own Corona-retreat is similarly soft, color-field like, each day a blurred succession of quarantinis, YouTube–yoga, and televized press conferences. As restrictions mount, so does abstraction. For now, I’m still rooting for love to save the world.

At the Paris Review , Matt Levin writes about reading Virginia Woolf’s novel The Waves during quarantine:

A retreat, a quarantine, a sickness—they simultaneously distort and clarify, curtail and expand. It is an ideal state in which to read literature with a reputation for difficulty and inaccessibility, those hermetic books shorn of the handholds of conventional plot or characterization or description. A novel like Virginia Woolf’s The Waves is perfect for the state of interiority induced by quarantine—a story of three men and three women, meeting after the death of a mutual friend, told entirely in the overlapping internal monologues of the six, interspersed only with sections of pure, achingly beautiful descriptions of the natural world, a day’s procession and recession of light and waves. The novel is, in my mind’s eye, a perfectly spherical object. It is translucent and shimmering and infinitely fragile, prone to shatter at the slightest disturbance. It is not a book that can be read in snatches on the subway—it demands total absorption. Though it revels in a stark emotional nakedness, the book remains aloof, remote in its own deep self-absorption.

In an essay for the Financial Times, novelist Arundhati Roy writes with anger about Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s anemic response to the threat, but also offers a glimmer of hope for the future:

Historically, pandemics have forced humans to break with the past and imagine their world anew. This one is no different. It is a portal, a gateway between one world and the next. We can choose to walk through it, dragging the carcasses of our prejudice and hatred, our avarice, our data banks and dead ideas, our dead rivers and smoky skies behind us. Or we can walk through lightly, with little luggage, ready to imagine another world. And ready to fight for it.

From Boston, Nora Caplan-Bricker writes in The Point about the strange contraction of space under quarantine, in which a friend in Beirut is as close as the one around the corner in the same city:

It’s a nice illusion—nice to feel like we’re in it together, even if my real world has shrunk to one person, my husband, who sits with his laptop in the other room. It’s nice in the same way as reading those essays that reframe social distancing as solidarity. “We must begin to see the negative space as clearly as the positive, to know what we don’t do is also brilliant and full of love,” the poet Anne Boyer wrote on March 10th, the day that Massachusetts declared a state of emergency. If you squint, you could almost make sense of this quarantine as an effort to flatten, along with the curve, the distinctions we make between our bonds with others. Right now, I care for my neighbor in the same way I demonstrate love for my mother: in all instances, I stay away. And in moments this month, I have loved strangers with an intensity that is new to me. On March 14th, the Saturday night after the end of life as we knew it, I went out with my dog and found the street silent: no lines for restaurants, no children on bicycles, no couples strolling with little cups of ice cream. It had taken the combined will of thousands of people to deliver such a sudden and complete emptiness. I felt so grateful, and so bereft.

And on his own website, musician and artist David Byrne writes about rediscovering the value of working for collective good , saying that “what is happening now is an opportunity to learn how to change our behavior”:

In emergencies, citizens can suddenly cooperate and collaborate. Change can happen. We’re going to need to work together as the effects of climate change ramp up. In order for capitalism to survive in any form, we will have to be a little more socialist. Here is an opportunity for us to see things differently — to see that we really are all connected — and adjust our behavior accordingly. Are we willing to do this? Is this moment an opportunity to see how truly interdependent we all are? To live in a world that is different and better than the one we live in now? We might be too far down the road to test every asymptomatic person, but a change in our mindsets, in how we view our neighbors, could lay the groundwork for the collective action we’ll need to deal with other global crises. The time to see how connected we all are is now.

The portrait these writers paint of a world under quarantine is multifaceted. Our worlds have contracted to the confines of our homes, and yet in some ways we’re more connected than ever to one another. We feel fear and boredom, anger and gratitude, frustration and strange peace. Uncertainty drives us to find metaphors and images that will let us wrap our minds around what is happening.

Yet there’s no single “what” that is happening. Everyone is contending with the pandemic and its effects from different places and in different ways. Reading others’ experiences — even the most frightening ones — can help alleviate the loneliness and dread, a little, and remind us that what we’re going through is both unique and shared by all.

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A Year After Coronavirus: An Inclusive ‘New Normal’

Six months into a new decade, 2020 has already been earmarked as ‘the worst’ year in the 21st century. The novel coronavirus has given rise to a global pandemic that has destabilized most institutional settings. While we live in times when humankind possesses the most advanced science and technology, a virus invisible to the naked eye has massively disrupted economies, healthcare, and education systems worldwide. This should serve as a reminder that as we keep making progress in science and research, humanity will continue to face challenges in the future, and it is upon us to prioritize those issues that are most relevant in the 21st century.

Even amidst the pandemic, Space X, an American aerospace manufacturer, managed to become the first private company to send humans to space. While this is a tremendous achievement and prepares humanity for a sustainable future, I feel there is a need to introspect the challenges that we are already facing. On the one hand, we seem to be preparing beyond the 21st century. On the other hand, heightened nationalism, increasing violence against marginalized communities and multidimensional inequalities across all sectors continue to act as barriers to growth for most individuals across the globe. COVID-19 has reinforced these multifaceted economic, social and cultural inequalities wherein those in situations of vulnerability have found it increasingly difficult to get quality medical attention, access to quality education, and have witnessed increased domestic violence while being confined to their homes. 

Given the coronavirus’s current situation, some households have also had time to introspect on gender roles and stereotypes. For instance, women are expected to carry out unpaid care work like cooking, cleaning, and looking after the family. There is no valid reason to believe that women ought to carry out these activities, and men have no role in contributing to household chores. With men having shared household chores during the lockdown period, it gives hope that they will realize the burden that women have been bearing for past decades and will continue sharing responsibilities. However, it would be naïve to believe that gender discrimination could be tackled so easily, and men would give up on their decades' old habits within a couple of months. Thus, during and after the pandemic, there is an urgent need to sensitize households on the importance of gender equality and social cohesion.

Moving forward, developing quality healthcare systems that are affordable and accessible to all should be the primary objective for all governments. This can be done by increasing expenditure towards health and education and simultaneously reducing expenditure on defence equipment where the latter mainly gives rise to an idea that countries need to be prepared for violence. There is substantial evidence that increased investment in health and education is beneficial in the long-term and can potentially build the basic foundation of a country. 

If it can be established that usage of nuclear weapons, violence and war are not solutions to any problem, governments (like, for example, Costa Rica) could move towards disarmament of weapons and do their part in building a more peaceful planet that is sustainable for the future. This would further promote global citizenship wherein nationality, race, gender, caste, and other categories, are just mere variables and they do not become identities of individuals that restrict their thought process. The aim should be to build responsible citizens who play an active role in their society and work collectively in helping develop a planet that is well-governed, inclusive, and environmentally sustainable.

 ‘A year after Coronavirus’ is still an unknown, so I think that our immediate focus should be to tackle the complex problems that have emerged from the pandemic so that we make the year after coronavirus one which highlights recovery and acts as a pathway to fresh beginnings. While there is little to gain from such a fatal cause, it is vital that we also use it to make the ‘new normal’ in favour of the environment and ensure that no one is left behind.   

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Learning Well: Beyond the Pandemic

What impact will the pandemic have on early literacy? 

Karen D'Souza

August 18, 2021.

The pandemic has touched many students with heightened stress, disruptions and remote learning hurdles, but experts say it may have the greatest impact on the youngest learners, those in the formative years of learning to read.

Creating a language-rich environment on Zoom has been hard for teachers, and that may impact reluctant readers, who may not spend enough time reading at home.

“If you had a childhood where a bedtime story was not a normal part of life, you might not see the value of it,” said Seena Hawley, who runs the Berkeley Baby Book Project, an affiliate of Dolly Parton’s Imagination Library, which gives children a book a month from babyhood to age 5. “There are also some parents who aren’t great readers themselves, so they may be intimidated by reading to children.”

Hawley will never forget encountering one such reluctant reader, a boisterous 8-year-old named Reggie who actively disliked reading.

“I think it had always been painful for him. He was on his guard,” said Hawley, 61, who taught elementary school in San Jose for 12 years. “He had never known the sheer pleasure of being read to, so he was very skeptical. He expected it to be no fun, all work and no reward.”

Assessing the impact of the pandemic on children who may not have sharpened their reading skills as well as expected is crucial, many experts say, as students return to school. That’s because early literacy, the development of skills needed to transition from learning to read to reading to learn, is foundational to later academic success. Studies suggest that many children have lost momentum on such fundamental skills. The university-based research organization PACE found that reading fluency in second and third graders fell about 30% behind the usual benchmark in a study comparing data from fall 2020 with fall 2019.

“Reading is kind of a gateway to the development of academic skills across all disciplines,” said Ben Domingue, an assistant professor in the Graduate School of Education at Stanford University and lead author on the PACE study . “It’s a key that opens all of the doors. If a kid can’t read effectively by third grade or so, they’re unlikely to be able to access content in their other courses.”

According to the report , time is a critical factor. Children who haven’t mastered reading by the time they enter third and fourth grade, when word problems are numerous, and reading comprehension is critical, might be set up to fail.

“Children who fall behind developing reading skills can quickly find themselves struggling to keep up throughout their coursework,” according to the report, “and there is thus concern that inadequacies in reading instruction during the pandemic might have cascading effects for years to come.”

Some educators, however, point out that reading gaps existed long before the pandemic. Don Austin, superintendent at Palo Alto Unified, used the school closures to rethink the district’s approach to early literacy in general and phonics in particular.

“I am not sure we were doing a fantastic job of addressing early literacy pre-pandemic,” Austin said. “It was worse over Zoom. … We have learned a lot about how students read and why some groups historically lag. We used the closures as a time to critically examine our practices and outcomes. The outcomes don’t lie. Students who are not at grade level entering fourth grade are at a huge disadvantage.”

That’s one reason some educators believe that earlier is better when it comes to sowing the seeds of literacy. Parents can set the stage for establishing reading as a pleasurable pursuit, educators say. Research shows a correlation between the mere presence of books in the home and academic prowess.

“Most of the literacy programs start too late, way too late,” Hawley said. “Getting a 7- or 9-year-old to suddenly love books is not a quick or sure-fire endeavor. Encountering those children in the classroom is one of the things that set me on the path I’m on now.”

Joy is the magic ingredient, as far as Hawley is concerned. With Reggie, she set aside time to read aloud to the boy one-on-one, with no strings attached. It wasn’t until the third time she read to him, without any pressure to sound words out himself, that he slowly began to come around.

“That time I read Roald Dahl’s ‘The Twits,’ which he loved, and he finally dropped his guard,” she said. “I remember that he sat back, and he smiled, and I knew I had him. That’s when we were off and running. After a good time with one book, it’s easier to get buy-in for another.”

The importance of individualized learning plans for all children is another key, experts say. During the pandemic, some children may have made more reading progress at home than they would have at school, while others faced far more hurdles. Now more than ever, it’s best if the strategy fits the child.

“One thing we could take away from this year is that we need lots of different pathways to reach students who respond differently to various instructional models,” said Rebecca Silverman, an associate professor in the Stanford Graduate School of Education.

Teachers should try to meet the children where they are instead of using a one-size-fits-all approach, experts say. Making children fill out a reading log, research shows , might make some kids think of reading as a bore instead of a joy. Other children need that kind of structure and incentives to keep them engaged. You have to tailor the approach to the student.

“The goal is that using extrinsic rewards to generate motivation will lead children to become interested in reading and want to do it on their own regardless of whether they are rewarded,” Silverman said. “For other children, logging books can feel like bean-counting and become a chore. Subjecting all kids to them regardless of the kind of reader or writer they are could turn some kids off.”

The PACE research also shows that the pandemic deepened inequities in literacy rates. Students at lower-achieving schools fell further behind, potentially widening the pre-existing achievement gap between rich and poor. If the disparities persist, some worry this setback will continue to hold some behind.

“In particular, we’re seeing kids in lower-achieving school districts are learning how to read at a slower rate than in years past,” Domingue said. “They’re learning at a slower rate than their peers at higher-achieving districts.”

While this trend is worrisome, teachers and parents should focus on cultivating tenacity in children instead of dwelling on learning loss that was beyond their control, some experts say. Resilience may be just as critical a skill as reading comprehension, they say.

That’s “especially important during current times in addressing any learning, motivation and social-emotional challenges occasioned by the pandemic,” said Robert Brooks, a clinical psychologist at Harvard Medical School. “These instincts include such critical attributes as optimism, intrinsic motivation, compassion, empathy, problem-solving and critical thinking.”

Grit is at the core of all aspects of a child’s life, experts say, from maintaining a sense of motivation despite the challenges of pandemic life to feeling a sense of hope for the future.

Spreading a feeling of optimism is a key reason Hawley is so determined to bring books into every household. Some years ago, she gave up teaching to run the Berkeley Baby Book project and drive a school bus on the side. She also keeps a box of books stashed in the bus for students to take home.

“My rule is, if you like it, you can keep it,” she said. “I was meeting kids on my bus routes who started life in homes without books, while books are falling off shelves all over up in the hills and wealthy areas. That pissed me off. I got fired up to do something about it.”

One book at a time.

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Lynda Daniele 3 years ago 3 years ago

This post was truly worthwhile to read. I wanted to say thank you for the key points you have pointed out as they are enlightening.

Jim 3 years ago 3 years ago

We will be assessing the damage caused by the union precipitated school shutdowns for decades.

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The pandemic has had devastating impacts on learning. What will it take to help students catch up?

Subscribe to the brown center on education policy newsletter, megan kuhfeld , megan kuhfeld senior research scientist - nwea @megankuhfeld jim soland , jim soland assistant professor, school of education and human development - university of virginia, affiliated research fellow - nwea @jsoland karyn lewis , and karyn lewis director, center for school and student progress - nwea @karynlew emily morton emily morton research scientist - nwea @emily_r_morton.

March 3, 2022

As we reach the two-year mark of the initial wave of pandemic-induced school shutdowns, academic normalcy remains out of reach for many students, educators, and parents. In addition to surging COVID-19 cases at the end of 2021, schools have faced severe staff shortages , high rates of absenteeism and quarantines , and rolling school closures . Furthermore, students and educators continue to struggle with mental health challenges , higher rates of violence and misbehavior , and concerns about lost instructional time .

As we outline in our new research study released in January, the cumulative impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on students’ academic achievement has been large. We tracked changes in math and reading test scores across the first two years of the pandemic using data from 5.4 million U.S. students in grades 3-8. We focused on test scores from immediately before the pandemic (fall 2019), following the initial onset (fall 2020), and more than one year into pandemic disruptions (fall 2021).

Average fall 2021 math test scores in grades 3-8 were 0.20-0.27 standard deviations (SDs) lower relative to same-grade peers in fall 2019, while reading test scores were 0.09-0.18 SDs lower. This is a sizable drop. For context, the math drops are significantly larger than estimated impacts from other large-scale school disruptions, such as after Hurricane Katrina—math scores dropped 0.17 SDs in one year for New Orleans evacuees .

Even more concerning, test-score gaps between students in low-poverty and high-poverty elementary schools grew by approximately 20% in math (corresponding to 0.20 SDs) and 15% in reading (0.13 SDs), primarily during the 2020-21 school year. Further, achievement tended to drop more between fall 2020 and 2021 than between fall 2019 and 2020 (both overall and differentially by school poverty), indicating that disruptions to learning have continued to negatively impact students well past the initial hits following the spring 2020 school closures.

These numbers are alarming and potentially demoralizing, especially given the heroic efforts of students to learn and educators to teach in incredibly trying times. From our perspective, these test-score drops in no way indicate that these students represent a “ lost generation ” or that we should give up hope. Most of us have never lived through a pandemic, and there is so much we don’t know about students’ capacity for resiliency in these circumstances and what a timeline for recovery will look like. Nor are we suggesting that teachers are somehow at fault given the achievement drops that occurred between 2020 and 2021; rather, educators had difficult jobs before the pandemic, and now are contending with huge new challenges, many outside their control.

Clearly, however, there’s work to do. School districts and states are currently making important decisions about which interventions and strategies to implement to mitigate the learning declines during the last two years. Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief (ESSER) investments from the American Rescue Plan provided nearly $200 billion to public schools to spend on COVID-19-related needs. Of that sum, $22 billion is dedicated specifically to addressing learning loss using “evidence-based interventions” focused on the “ disproportionate impact of COVID-19 on underrepresented student subgroups. ” Reviews of district and state spending plans (see Future Ed , EduRecoveryHub , and RAND’s American School District Panel for more details) indicate that districts are spending their ESSER dollars designated for academic recovery on a wide variety of strategies, with summer learning, tutoring, after-school programs, and extended school-day and school-year initiatives rising to the top.

Comparing the negative impacts from learning disruptions to the positive impacts from interventions

To help contextualize the magnitude of the impacts of COVID-19, we situate test-score drops during the pandemic relative to the test-score gains associated with common interventions being employed by districts as part of pandemic recovery efforts. If we assume that such interventions will continue to be as successful in a COVID-19 school environment, can we expect that these strategies will be effective enough to help students catch up? To answer this question, we draw from recent reviews of research on high-dosage tutoring , summer learning programs , reductions in class size , and extending the school day (specifically for literacy instruction) . We report effect sizes for each intervention specific to a grade span and subject wherever possible (e.g., tutoring has been found to have larger effects in elementary math than in reading).

Figure 1 shows the standardized drops in math test scores between students testing in fall 2019 and fall 2021 (separately by elementary and middle school grades) relative to the average effect size of various educational interventions. The average effect size for math tutoring matches or exceeds the average COVID-19 score drop in math. Research on tutoring indicates that it often works best in younger grades, and when provided by a teacher rather than, say, a parent. Further, some of the tutoring programs that produce the biggest effects can be quite intensive (and likely expensive), including having full-time tutors supporting all students (not just those needing remediation) in one-on-one settings during the school day. Meanwhile, the average effect of reducing class size is negative but not significant, with high variability in the impact across different studies. Summer programs in math have been found to be effective (average effect size of .10 SDs), though these programs in isolation likely would not eliminate the COVID-19 test-score drops.

Figure 1: Math COVID-19 test-score drops compared to the effect sizes of various educational interventions

Source: COVID-19 score drops are pulled from Kuhfeld et al. (2022) Table 5; reduction-in-class-size results are from pg. 10 of Figles et al. (2018) Table 2; summer program results are pulled from Lynch et al (2021) Table 2; and tutoring estimates are pulled from Nictow et al (2020) Table 3B. Ninety-five percent confidence intervals are shown with vertical lines on each bar.

Notes: Kuhfeld et al. and Nictow et al. reported effect sizes separately by grade span; Figles et al. and Lynch et al. report an overall effect size across elementary and middle grades. We were unable to find a rigorous study that reported effect sizes for extending the school day/year on math performance. Nictow et al. and Kraft & Falken (2021) also note large variations in tutoring effects depending on the type of tutor, with larger effects for teacher and paraprofessional tutoring programs than for nonprofessional and parent tutoring. Class-size reductions included in the Figles meta-analysis ranged from a minimum of one to minimum of eight students per class.

Figure 2 displays a similar comparison using effect sizes from reading interventions. The average effect of tutoring programs on reading achievement is larger than the effects found for the other interventions, though summer reading programs and class size reduction both produced average effect sizes in the ballpark of the COVID-19 reading score drops.

Figure 2: Reading COVID-19 test-score drops compared to the effect sizes of various educational interventions

Source: COVID-19 score drops are pulled from Kuhfeld et al. (2022) Table 5; extended-school-day results are from Figlio et al. (2018) Table 2; reduction-in-class-size results are from pg. 10 of Figles et al. (2018) ; summer program results are pulled from Kim & Quinn (2013) Table 3; and tutoring estimates are pulled from Nictow et al (2020) Table 3B. Ninety-five percent confidence intervals are shown with vertical lines on each bar.

Notes: While Kuhfeld et al. and Nictow et al. reported effect sizes separately by grade span, Figlio et al. and Kim & Quinn report an overall effect size across elementary and middle grades. Class-size reductions included in the Figles meta-analysis ranged from a minimum of one to minimum of eight students per class.

There are some limitations of drawing on research conducted prior to the pandemic to understand our ability to address the COVID-19 test-score drops. First, these studies were conducted under conditions that are very different from what schools currently face, and it is an open question whether the effectiveness of these interventions during the pandemic will be as consistent as they were before the pandemic. Second, we have little evidence and guidance about the efficacy of these interventions at the unprecedented scale that they are now being considered. For example, many school districts are expanding summer learning programs, but school districts have struggled to find staff interested in teaching summer school to meet the increased demand. Finally, given the widening test-score gaps between low- and high-poverty schools, it’s uncertain whether these interventions can actually combat the range of new challenges educators are facing in order to narrow these gaps. That is, students could catch up overall, yet the pandemic might still have lasting, negative effects on educational equality in this country.

Given that the current initiatives are unlikely to be implemented consistently across (and sometimes within) districts, timely feedback on the effects of initiatives and any needed adjustments will be crucial to districts’ success. The Road to COVID Recovery project and the National Student Support Accelerator are two such large-scale evaluation studies that aim to produce this type of evidence while providing resources for districts to track and evaluate their own programming. Additionally, a growing number of resources have been produced with recommendations on how to best implement recovery programs, including scaling up tutoring , summer learning programs , and expanded learning time .

Ultimately, there is much work to be done, and the challenges for students, educators, and parents are considerable. But this may be a moment when decades of educational reform, intervention, and research pay off. Relying on what we have learned could show the way forward.

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COVID-19: Pandemic Reading

Sari Altschuler is associate professor of English, associate director of the Humanities Center, and founding director of Health, Humanities, and Society at Northeastern University. She is author of The Medical Imagination: Literature and Health in the Early United States (2018) and coeditor of Keywords for Health Humanities with Jonathan Metzl and Priscilla Wald (under contract with NYU Press).

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Sari Altschuler , Priscilla Wald; COVID-19: Pandemic Reading. American Literature 1 December 2020; 92 (4): 681–688. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/00029831-8780887

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In 1832, a global cholera pandemic reached US shores. Like COVID-19, cholera was a wholly new disease in the United States (although considerably deadlier), and it was, like the novel coronavirus, a poorly understood one that disproportionately affected immigrants and African Americans. 1 The cholera pandemic began immediately following Nat Turner’s rebellion, which had triggered a wave of punitive laws against Black Americans. The early 1830s was, in other words, a time of brutal devastation for the African American community, particularly in the South. How, we might wonder, when faced with horrific violence, systemic injustice, and a descending global pandemic, could an enslaved fifteen-year-old Frederick Douglass do anything but despair? Crucially, he did not. Instead, Douglass’s understanding of Nat Turner’s murder, the racist legal retribution that followed, and the horrors wrought by cholera appear in the context of his awakening to the word abolition . Having heard the word whispered angrily by slaveholders, Douglass ( 1855 : 165) turned futilely to a dictionary before gleaning from a newspaper, the Baltimore American , an understanding of the talismanic term born of the political and health crises of his time: “The insurrection of Nathaniel Turner had been quelled,” he writes, “but the alarm and terror had not subsided. The cholera was on its way, and the thought was present, that God was angry with the white people because of their slaveholding wickedness, and, therefore, his judgments were abroad in the land. It was impossible for me not to hope much from the abolition movement, when I saw it supported by the Almighty, and armed with DEATH!” Nearly two centuries later, we find ourselves in strangely similar times. As a viral pandemic and an epidemic of racial violence collide, we, too, face undeniably world-changing events, rife with uncertainty. How are we to read this moment?

Both of this forum’s editors have in the past identified and sought new ways of narrating, thinking, and reading in the face of health crises, whether by calling for new stories to be told or by calling attention to the analytical and epistemological creativity that has historically emerged during times of crisis. 2 This pandemic, however, was unprecedented in our personal experiences, and as our vision began to adjust to the dark realization of the uncertainty we were living through, we sought illumination from the insights of the scholarly work in which we are engaged. We imagined this forum as a place where scholars in the field of American literary and cultural studies could begin to engage in new ways of thinking and reading inspired by the COVID-19 pandemic.

One characteristic of crises like pandemics, however, is that they often result in seismic, difficult-to-foresee shifts in many areas of culture and society. The essays in this forum were already in production when the brutal police murder of George Perry Floyd Jr., a Black man who was cooperating and handcuffed, ignited massive protests throughout the United States and beyond. Before even the copyediting of the essays within was complete, our sense of crisis had shifted dramatically. What seemed in mid-April to be a single pandemic (COVID-19) had evolved into two: a viral pandemic that manifests and exacerbates structural inequality and a pandemic of institutionalized racial violence. The media is referring to Floyd’s murder as “a tipping point,” but it is far from the first such incident—indeed, it is horrifyingly typical. However, the brutality of the act captured on video by a sixteen-year-old young woman with a cell phone against the backdrop of a pandemic that, once again, disproportionately affects communities of color finally made the inequities and injustices that have plagued the United States since before its inception impossible to continue to tolerate for what polls tell us are a majority of Americans. As if we needed heavier handed symbolism about the entangled nature of these epidemics and the twinned nature of their devastation, Floyd’s autopsy revealed antibodies for COVID-19; the knee of a policeman accomplished what the asphyxiating virus might have but did not (Budryk 2020 ).

The analyses we are now hearing in the mainstream media are not new. Indeed, similar analyses inspired curricular changes during the culture wars, bringing the long-suppressed voices of authors and actors into classrooms across America, and, with them, insight into the structural violence of racial capitalism. But insights are only the beginning of change, and change is slow, notoriously precarious, and impelled, most often, by crises. As Jennifer C. James notes in her contribution to this symposium, “In national trauma, national mythologies become that broken thing: what we believed was true about ourselves as an entity is revealed as fraudulent.” The insight is a revelation, of course, only for those sufficiently privileged not to have to confront the fiction of the mythologies every day. The revelation does not “characterize[] the way African Americans tend to respond to national trauma,” James continues, as her “we” shifts. “Rather, our deepest fears about this country—what we in fact know about this country—are not ruptured or remade in these moments and are instead confirmed .”

American literature and other cultural forms have, of course, been used to uphold national mythology—the stories we tell ourselves about how and why the world works as it does—but they also reveal mythology’s fissures, its contestations, its brokenness. Literary and cultural forms expand and examine national mythology’s modes of representation, extrapolate from them, tease them apart, position their contradictions explosively side-by-side, and speculatively imagine otherwise. For these reasons, the narrative, representational, and speculative aspects of literature and culture are uniquely useful for considering the experience of a pandemic and the lessons that might be gained.

The essays in this symposium follow literary and cultural routes to chronicle a journey into the precarious experience of a pandemic, the uncertainties it has generated, and the insights it has begun to produce. We begin with James’s contribution, which traces the arc of the symposium through her discussion of the temporality of what she calls “racial dread,” in which uncertainty and anticipation suspend—or collapse—time in ways that make it impossible to look away from the structural violence that is visible in its everyday form to those who can never afford to look away. In the uncertainty of now, we must ask ourselves whether we will seize the memory flashing up, as in Walter Benjamin’s famous formulation, in a moment of danger or collectively succumb to the temptation of a privileged “return to normal.” For Kelly L. Bezio, the memory of past migrations and mobilities, constrained or forced, is uncannily reproduced in laborers who, finding themselves classified as “essential workers,” are drawn disproportionately from historically marginalized populations and for whom the “imprisonment” of sheltering at home is a luxury they cannot afford. Kirsten Ostherr calls for representational as well as medical interventions into the pandemic, since techniques of visualization designed to educate the public about an invisible threat reproduce racist and xenophobic conventions from past outbreaks “with direct and deadly consequences.” A literary version of the makandal—an amulet with curative and toxic properties—opens the possibility of such representational intervention for Elizabeth Maddock Dillon and Kate Simpkins, who draw on the genealogy of the amulet in the revolutionary figure of François Makandal to show how it exemplifies the materiality of signification, hence the transformative power of words.

In its capacity to recombine familiar elements, the makandal mimics, and exposes, the metamorphic power of a deadly communicable disease. Kari Nixon shows how the transformation that turns a person into an asymptomatic—or “healthy”—carrier embodies a fundamental dilemma of public health, particularly in the United States, when protecting the community’s health entails invasion of privacy and enforced constraint. At issue is the calculus of social being with its precarious balance between the human desire for sociality and the unequal dangers we pose to each other. She suggests that an understanding of the way different groups negotiate that balance might be a first step in bridging the profound political chasms of our moment. Jane F. Thrailkill similarly asks us to think from within a much-discussed category of the pandemic to which everyone will belong if they live long enough—old age—in order to imagine the fundamental precarity of existence. Doing so, she muses, might begin to elucidate how other categories of difference translate into differential precarities.

For Bryan Waterman and Robert Peckham, that precarity surfaces in the temporal collapse that characterizes plagues. Like James, Waterman considers the sense of temporal recursion occasioned by “plague time,” which is, for him, a radical break that is continuous with other plagues but disconnected from the temporality of non-plague life. We emerge from plague time like ghosts, haunting a world we once thought we knew. Peckham, by contrast, shows how the imbrication of the temporalities of pandemic and protest in Hong Kong elucidates the strategies through which China threatens to turn Hong Kong’s future into its past.

The question of how to respond to pandemic uncertainty is the subject of the final three essays. Although the pandemic disrupted the efforts of a graduate class at Emory University to reimagine their research for public audiences when it halted their collaboration with a local theater, it ultimately offered opportunities for creative thinking. The experience showed the students—Sophia Leonard, Víctor Velázquez Antonio, and Makenzie Renee Fitzgerald—and their professor, Benjamin Reiss, the important role public humanities can play in such a crisis. For his part, Michael Bérubé embraces uncertainty, turning to Octavia Butler’s Parable novels to find in her postapocalyptic speculative fiction what he calls “an extraordinary, brutal account of social disintegration and racialized violence that nevertheless refuses to abjure the audacity of hope.” From the smoldering ashes of environmental devastation, hopeful audacity is the creative spark that turns the effort to survive into a visionary project of world-building. In the forum’s final essay, Rachel Adams begins from how crises such as a pandemic make visible the “fragile webs of interdependency that bind us unevenly to one another,” to meditate on the care networks that sustain us and the need—and opportunity—to rewrite our narratives of care in ways that embrace rather than disavow our dependencies and interdependencies.

The uncertainty bred by crises teaches us that the problem with our tried-and-true interpretive practices is that they too frequently strive, with some smugness, to explain everything. Writing from within the crisis, neither we, nor our authors, have this luxury. We could wait for the crisis to pass—when we would presumably know the end of this story—but something would be lost. The old bravado might return. In that postpandemic time, we will probably strive to tidy the narrative, even though in doing so we risk foreclosing the possibility of the unexpected in the past, present, and future. The pandemic and the protests have revealed to us both things we knew to expect (racism, pandemic disease, police brutality) and also things we did not, especially how inadequate our reading strategies were at preparing many of us for such eventualities and the shape they would take.

Here we find some solidarity with pandemic readers past. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, for example, begins her essay on reparative reading with a conversation she and her activist-scholar friend Cindy Patton had in the 1980s, as the two grappled with how to narrate and understand HIV/AIDS midpandemic. They weighed the “sinister rumors about the virus’s origins,” as well as various aspects of structural violence that shaped and were fomented by the health crisis: “that the lives of Africans and African Americans are worthless in the eyes of the United States; that [certain populations] are held cheap where they aren’t actively hated . . . that people in power look calmly on the likelihood of catastrophic environmental and population changes” (Sedgwick 2002: 123)—a list that remains depressingly unchanged today. Patton finds herself dissatisfied with the scholarly impulse to demonstrate such truths again and again. Even if we could show, once and for all, that these things are definitively true, she asks, “what would we know then that we don’t already know?” (123). Sedgwick admits there is a certain pessimism in the question—and it’s one we feel now, too—but, more urgently, Patton’s question presses us to consider what we should do when our ways of reading and knowing no longer feel adequate—when the only thing that feels effective is to be out in the streets. Those insufficiencies, Sedgwick’s framing suggests, are especially evident in crises and no time more so than in a pandemic.

For Sedgwick, literary and cultural analysis still has something to contribute, and her answer is reparative reading, although we are disinclined to prescribe Sedgwick’s vision as the remedy for our readers. We are still too early, too much inside it, to offer such proclamations, nor is it within our critical inclinations or styles to do so. Instead, we invoke Sedgwick here as a fellow-traveler in pandemic time, as a critic who likewise recognized the analytical creativity that crisis makes not only possible but necessary. If our critical modes have gotten us into habits that now seem too limited, unhelpful, or even damaging, what would it look like to seek other ways of narrating and knowing and to make more room for what we cannot anticipate?

This openness both to narrative and epistemological humility and also to generative analytical creativity is not a luxury but a necessity as we write, just three months after COVID-19 was declared a global pandemic. By the time you are first able to read this forum, it will be well into 2020. We feel our own paranoid tendencies rising: you will already know so much more than we do now—about COVID-19, about the state of racial justice and reparation in America, about the 2020 presidential election. How many years we will have lived in those days and months. It prompts us to ask: how ought we to read in the middle of our entangled epidemics, and what kinds of reading and knowledge-making are useful now ? Thus, we begin this forum with a note on humility—informational, narrative, epistemological; rarely are we able to see so clearly how much we do not yet know, do not yet understand, and have yet to learn, and how much we need to make different sense of what we already know.

Are we finally ready to learn the lessons Douglass offered us almost two centuries ago? As he broadened his reading from the dictionary to the newspaper, Douglass moved from insufficient theoretical definitions to a more vital and dynamic understanding of language as it unfolded through historical circumstance and lived experience. This new framing expanded his reading both of what was happening and of what was possible. We end here as we began, by drawing attention to how the epidemic framing of systemic violence and a global pandemic helped Douglass see a fuller potential in the word abolition . Are we—especially white Americans—ready to follow Douglass, not only to imagine new ways of reading but also to find new ways of acting on the many meanings of words central to our national narratives like abolition and reparation ?

For the classic analysis of cholera in the United States, see Charles E. Rosenberg’s The Cholera Years ([1962] 2009 ). As Rosenberg explains, in 1832, Black and immigrant communities were hit hardest by the pandemic (59). In Philadelphia, almost two times as many African Americans fell ill, “probably,” Rosenberg writes, noting the nineteenth century’s structural racism, “a reliable, if informal, index to the poverty in which the North’s free Negroes lived. Whether he was free or slave, [white] Americans believed, the Negro’s innate character invited cholera” (6). Black Americans were, thus, disproportionately punished for “failing to comply with sanitary regulations” and seen as available test subjects during the pandemic (60).

For these calls, see Priscilla Wald’s Contagious ( 2008 ) and Sari Altschuler’s The Medical Imagination ( 2018 ).

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The Pandemic Will Worsen Our Reading Problem. Another Outcome Is Possible

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Corrected : A previous version of this essay misstated the name of Emily Freitag’s organization.

The data on the foundational literacy skills of the class of 2032—the children who were in kindergarten during the shutdown and 1st graders during this bumpy and inequitable 2020-21 school year—are terrifying. According to one commonly used reading assessment , the DIBELS benchmark measures, the percentage of students falling into the “well-below benchmark” category that predicts future reading failure grew from 26 percent in December 2019 to 43 percent in December 2020. All demographic subgroups were affected, but Black and Hispanic students were particularly impacted. There is no precedent for this kind of decline in the last 20 years of using these reading measures.

The foundational learning in early years makes future learning possible and builds confidence in students’ ability to learn. Delayed and disrupted schooling in K-2 creates gaps that compound over time. The patterns of education outcomes that followed past school closures caused by outbreaks or natural disasters suggest that we will see these heart-wrenching results continue in the class of 2032’s schooling data, income, and lifetime outcomes.

If these historical patterns hold true, we can expect everything from 3rd grade state test scores to Algebra 1 completion to high school graduation will show similarly stark and inequitable declines. Postsecondary completion, lifetime earnings, incarceration rates, and lifetime expectancy will correlate. The children of the class of 2032 will feel the effects. Our country will be able to measure the impact in contracted GDP.

However, another outcome is possible. While data predict these trends, no child is condemned to this path. We know there are teachers who help children beat these odds every year. If this can be done for some children, it can be done for all children. One hundred percent of the class of 2032 could learn to read with command and fluency. We might not be able to do it by the end of their 3rd grade year, but we can do it by the end of 5th grade. It is well within our collective capability to give every student in the class of 2032 and every class that follows command of reading.

We know more about how children learn to read than we do about any other content area. We know that learning to read starts by hearing and manipulating sounds. We know students then connect symbols to those sounds, unlocking a code we use to interpret and communicate in print. The English-language code is not simple—there are 44 unique sounds—but we know the best order in which to teach children those sounds. Teaching a child to read is both complex and doable.

The real challenge is how to engineer effective literacy instruction at scale. Every school system has individual teachers who are famous for helping every single child learn to read, and some schools consistently produce more readers than others. But very few schools and no school systems can deliver a guarantee.

The components of a functional early-literacy system are clear: high-quality, systematic curriculum; trained teachers; targeted assessments; effective data meetings; and sufficient time on task. There are also clear processes to assess, group, and instruct students, as well as monitor their progress. What we don’t yet know is how to help schools combine the component parts and move through the steps with sufficient precision to produce reliable results for every child, in every classroom.

If school leaders set the intention to ensure 100 percent of the class of 2032 achieves mastery of foundational reading skills, the path would require at least three things:

• Leaders must track results with discipline, accountability, and the expectation that success is possible. This involves looking at school- and systemwide data every quarter, identifying by name the students who need support, conveying a clear message to teams that 100 percent of students are expected to get to proficiency, and continuously trying new approaches and improving the offerings until every student is successful.
• Leaders must ensure every school has the key components of a cohesive literacy instructional program. Teachers, leaders, and support staff need to be trained on the science of reading. Every school needs a strong, evidence-based foundational reading curriculum as the basis for instruction. The curriculum must be supported by effective screeners and diagnostic assessments to indicate which students are falling behind and pinpoint where students are in the progression of foundational skills. Educators need sufficient time in the day for instruction and collaborative planning. And each school needs someone who knows how to make sure these pieces work together effectively.
• Leaders must obsess over concrete progress. Progress comes when every teacher, caretaker, and staff member who engages with a student’s reading instruction can identify the exact letters, sounds, and sound-spelling patterns that child is working on in a given two-week interval. Anything more general will not power the progress students need. Getting everyone on the same page with this level of specificity will take concentrated and consistent leadership. Every school needs a leader who is focused on little else than literacy instruction, and every school system needs to allocate real focus and attention across the system.

Supporting every student to be able to read with proficiency is hard, but we can do hard things. In the past century, we eradicated smallpox and doubled the human lifespan ; in the last year, we developed and scaled vaccines for a novel virus. Educators are a profoundly capable group. We can eradicate illiteracy.

The stakes are high, and the alarm bells are ringing. If we cannot support our young learners during this critical time, we will all lose out. If we commit to get 100 percent of the class of 2032 to read on grade level by the end of 5th grade, we will find a way. And we will see the benefits to our country and communities for generations to come.

A version of this article appeared in the July 14, 2021 edition of Education Week as What It Would Take to Eradicate Illiteracy

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How to Write About Coronavirus in a College Essay

Students can share how they navigated life during the coronavirus pandemic in a full-length essay or an optional supplement.

Writing About COVID-19 in College Essays

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Experts say students should be honest and not limit themselves to merely their experiences with the pandemic.

The global impact of COVID-19, the disease caused by the novel coronavirus, means colleges and prospective students alike are in for an admissions cycle like no other. Both face unprecedented challenges and questions as they grapple with their respective futures amid the ongoing fallout of the pandemic.

Colleges must examine applicants without the aid of standardized test scores for many – a factor that prompted many schools to go test-optional for now . Even grades, a significant component of a college application, may be hard to interpret with some high schools adopting pass-fail classes last spring due to the pandemic. Major college admissions factors are suddenly skewed.

"I can't help but think other (admissions) factors are going to matter more," says Ethan Sawyer, founder of the College Essay Guy, a website that offers free and paid essay-writing resources.

College essays and letters of recommendation , Sawyer says, are likely to carry more weight than ever in this admissions cycle. And many essays will likely focus on how the pandemic shaped students' lives throughout an often tumultuous 2020.

But before writing a college essay focused on the coronavirus, students should explore whether it's the best topic for them.

Writing About COVID-19 for a College Application

Much of daily life has been colored by the coronavirus. Virtual learning is the norm at many colleges and high schools, many extracurriculars have vanished and social lives have stalled for students complying with measures to stop the spread of COVID-19.

"For some young people, the pandemic took away what they envisioned as their senior year," says Robert Alexander, dean of admissions, financial aid and enrollment management at the University of Rochester in New York. "Maybe that's a spot on a varsity athletic team or the lead role in the fall play. And it's OK for them to mourn what should have been and what they feel like they lost, but more important is how are they making the most of the opportunities they do have?"

That question, Alexander says, is what colleges want answered if students choose to address COVID-19 in their college essay.

But the question of whether a student should write about the coronavirus is tricky. The answer depends largely on the student.

"In general, I don't think students should write about COVID-19 in their main personal statement for their application," Robin Miller, master college admissions counselor at IvyWise, a college counseling company, wrote in an email.

"Certainly, there may be exceptions to this based on a student's individual experience, but since the personal essay is the main place in the application where the student can really allow their voice to be heard and share insight into who they are as an individual, there are likely many other topics they can choose to write about that are more distinctive and unique than COVID-19," Miller says.

Opinions among admissions experts vary on whether to write about the likely popular topic of the pandemic.

"If your essay communicates something positive, unique, and compelling about you in an interesting and eloquent way, go for it," Carolyn Pippen, principal college admissions counselor at IvyWise, wrote in an email. She adds that students shouldn't be dissuaded from writing about a topic merely because it's common, noting that "topics are bound to repeat, no matter how hard we try to avoid it."

Above all, she urges honesty.

"If your experience within the context of the pandemic has been truly unique, then write about that experience, and the standing out will take care of itself," Pippen says. "If your experience has been generally the same as most other students in your context, then trying to find a unique angle can easily cross the line into exploiting a tragedy, or at least appearing as though you have."

But focusing entirely on the pandemic can limit a student to a single story and narrow who they are in an application, Sawyer says. "There are so many wonderful possibilities for what you can say about yourself outside of your experience within the pandemic."

He notes that passions, strengths, career interests and personal identity are among the multitude of essay topic options available to applicants and encourages them to probe their values to help determine the topic that matters most to them – and write about it.

That doesn't mean the pandemic experience has to be ignored if applicants feel the need to write about it.

Writing About Coronavirus in Main and Supplemental Essays

Students can choose to write a full-length college essay on the coronavirus or summarize their experience in a shorter form.

To help students explain how the pandemic affected them, The Common App has added an optional section to address this topic. Applicants have 250 words to describe their pandemic experience and the personal and academic impact of COVID-19.

"That's not a trick question, and there's no right or wrong answer," Alexander says. Colleges want to know, he adds, how students navigated the pandemic, how they prioritized their time, what responsibilities they took on and what they learned along the way.

If students can distill all of the above information into 250 words, there's likely no need to write about it in a full-length college essay, experts say. And applicants whose lives were not heavily altered by the pandemic may even choose to skip the optional COVID-19 question.

"This space is best used to discuss hardship and/or significant challenges that the student and/or the student's family experienced as a result of COVID-19 and how they have responded to those difficulties," Miller notes. Using the section to acknowledge a lack of impact, she adds, "could be perceived as trite and lacking insight, despite the good intentions of the applicant."

To guard against this lack of awareness, Sawyer encourages students to tap someone they trust to review their writing , whether it's the 250-word Common App response or the full-length essay.

Experts tend to agree that the short-form approach to this as an essay topic works better, but there are exceptions. And if a student does have a coronavirus story that he or she feels must be told, Alexander encourages the writer to be authentic in the essay.

"My advice for an essay about COVID-19 is the same as my advice about an essay for any topic – and that is, don't write what you think we want to read or hear," Alexander says. "Write what really changed you and that story that now is yours and yours alone to tell."

Sawyer urges students to ask themselves, "What's the sentence that only I can write?" He also encourages students to remember that the pandemic is only a chapter of their lives and not the whole book.

Miller, who cautions against writing a full-length essay on the coronavirus, says that if students choose to do so they should have a conversation with their high school counselor about whether that's the right move. And if students choose to proceed with COVID-19 as a topic, she says they need to be clear, detailed and insightful about what they learned and how they adapted along the way.

"Approaching the essay in this manner will provide important balance while demonstrating personal growth and vulnerability," Miller says.

Pippen encourages students to remember that they are in an unprecedented time for college admissions.

"It is important to keep in mind with all of these (admission) factors that no colleges have ever had to consider them this way in the selection process, if at all," Pippen says. "They have had very little time to calibrate their evaluations of different application components within their offices, let alone across institutions. This means that colleges will all be handling the admissions process a little bit differently, and their approaches may even evolve over the course of the admissions cycle."

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I Thought We’d Learned Nothing From the Pandemic. I Wasn’t Seeing the Full Picture

M y first home had a back door that opened to a concrete patio with a giant crack down the middle. When my sister and I played, I made sure to stay on the same side of the divide as her, just in case. The 1988 film The Land Before Time was one of the first movies I ever saw, and the image of the earth splintering into pieces planted its roots in my brain. I believed that, even in my own backyard, I could easily become the tiny Triceratops separated from her family, on the other side of the chasm, as everything crumbled into chaos.

Some 30 years later, I marvel at the eerie, unexpected ways that cartoonish nightmare came to life – not just for me and my family, but for all of us. The landscape was already covered in fissures well before COVID-19 made its way across the planet, but the pandemic applied pressure, and the cracks broke wide open, separating us from each other physically and ideologically. Under the weight of the crisis, we scattered and landed on such different patches of earth we could barely see each other’s faces, even when we squinted. We disagreed viciously with each other, about how to respond, but also about what was true.

Recently, someone asked me if we’ve learned anything from the pandemic, and my first thought was a flat no. Nothing. There was a time when I thought it would be the very thing to draw us together and catapult us – as a capital “S” Society – into a kinder future. It’s surreal to remember those early days when people rallied together, sewing masks for health care workers during critical shortages and gathering on balconies in cities from Dallas to New York City to clap and sing songs like “Yellow Submarine.” It felt like a giant lightning bolt shot across the sky, and for one breath, we all saw something that had been hidden in the dark – the inherent vulnerability in being human or maybe our inescapable connectedness .

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Read More: The Family Time the Pandemic Stole

But it turns out, it was just a flash. The goodwill vanished as quickly as it appeared. A couple of years later, people feel lied to, abandoned, and all on their own. I’ve felt my own curiosity shrinking, my willingness to reach out waning , my ability to keep my hands open dwindling. I look out across the landscape and see selfishness and rage, burnt earth and so many dead bodies. Game over. We lost. And if we’ve already lost, why try?

Still, the question kept nagging me. I wondered, am I seeing the full picture? What happens when we focus not on the collective society but at one face, one story at a time? I’m not asking for a bow to minimize the suffering – a pretty flourish to put on top and make the whole thing “worth it.” Yuck. That’s not what we need. But I wondered about deep, quiet growth. The kind we feel in our bodies, relationships, homes, places of work, neighborhoods.

Like a walkie-talkie message sent to my allies on the ground, I posted a call on my Instagram. What do you see? What do you hear? What feels possible? Is there life out here? Sprouting up among the rubble? I heard human voices calling back – reports of life, personal and specific. I heard one story at a time – stories of grief and distrust, fury and disappointment. Also gratitude. Discovery. Determination.

Among the most prevalent were the stories of self-revelation. Almost as if machines were given the chance to live as humans, people described blossoming into fuller selves. They listened to their bodies’ cues, recognized their desires and comforts, tuned into their gut instincts, and honored the intuition they hadn’t realized belonged to them. Alex, a writer and fellow disabled parent, found the freedom to explore a fuller version of herself in the privacy the pandemic provided. “The way I dress, the way I love, and the way I carry myself have both shrunk and expanded,” she shared. “I don’t love myself very well with an audience.” Without the daily ritual of trying to pass as “normal” in public, Tamar, a queer mom in the Netherlands, realized she’s autistic. “I think the pandemic helped me to recognize the mask,” she wrote. “Not that unmasking is easy now. But at least I know it’s there.” In a time of widespread suffering that none of us could solve on our own, many tended to our internal wounds and misalignments, large and small, and found clarity.

Read More: A Tool for Staying Grounded in This Era of Constant Uncertainty

I wonder if this flourishing of self-awareness is at least partially responsible for the life alterations people pursued. The pandemic broke open our personal notions of work and pushed us to reevaluate things like time and money. Lucy, a disabled writer in the U.K., made the hard decision to leave her job as a journalist covering Westminster to write freelance about her beloved disability community. “This work feels important in a way nothing else has ever felt,” she wrote. “I don’t think I’d have realized this was what I should be doing without the pandemic.” And she wasn’t alone – many people changed jobs , moved, learned new skills and hobbies, became politically engaged.

Perhaps more than any other shifts, people described a significant reassessment of their relationships. They set boundaries, said no, had challenging conversations. They also reconnected, fell in love, and learned to trust. Jeanne, a quilter in Indiana, got to know relatives she wouldn’t have connected with if lockdowns hadn’t prompted weekly family Zooms. “We are all over the map as regards to our belief systems,” she emphasized, “but it is possible to love people you don’t see eye to eye with on every issue.” Anna, an anti-violence advocate in Maine, learned she could trust her new marriage: “Life was not a honeymoon. But we still chose to turn to each other with kindness and curiosity.” So many bonds forged and broken, strengthened and strained.

Instead of relying on default relationships or institutional structures, widespread recalibrations allowed for going off script and fortifying smaller communities. Mara from Idyllwild, Calif., described the tangible plan for care enacted in her town. “We started a mutual-aid group at the beginning of the pandemic,” she wrote, “and it grew so quickly before we knew it we were feeding 400 of the 4000 residents.” She didn’t pretend the conditions were ideal. In fact, she expressed immense frustration with our collective response to the pandemic. Even so, the local group rallied and continues to offer assistance to their community with help from donations and volunteers (many of whom were originally on the receiving end of support). “I’ve learned that people thrive when they feel their connection to others,” she wrote. Clare, a teacher from the U.K., voiced similar conviction as she described a giant scarf she’s woven out of ribbons, each representing a single person. The scarf is “a collection of stories, moments and wisdom we are sharing with each other,” she wrote. It now stretches well over 1,000 feet.

A few hours into reading the comments, I lay back on my bed, phone held against my chest. The room was quiet, but my internal world was lighting up with firefly flickers. What felt different? Surely part of it was receiving personal accounts of deep-rooted growth. And also, there was something to the mere act of asking and listening. Maybe it connected me to humans before battle cries. Maybe it was the chance to be in conversation with others who were also trying to understand – what is happening to us? Underneath it all, an undeniable thread remained; I saw people peering into the mess and narrating their findings onto the shared frequency. Every comment was like a flare into the sky. I’m here! And if the sky is full of flares, we aren’t alone.

I recognized my own pandemic discoveries – some minor, others massive. Like washing off thick eyeliner and mascara every night is more effort than it’s worth; I can transform the mundane into the magical with a bedsheet, a movie projector, and twinkle lights; my paralyzed body can mother an infant in ways I’d never seen modeled for me. I remembered disappointing, bewildering conversations within my own family of origin and our imperfect attempts to remain close while also seeing things so differently. I realized that every time I get the weekly invite to my virtual “Find the Mumsies” call, with a tiny group of moms living hundreds of miles apart, I’m being welcomed into a pocket of unexpected community. Even though we’ve never been in one room all together, I’ve felt an uncommon kind of solace in their now-familiar faces.

Hope is a slippery thing. I desperately want to hold onto it, but everywhere I look there are real, weighty reasons to despair. The pandemic marks a stretch on the timeline that tangles with a teetering democracy, a deteriorating planet , the loss of human rights that once felt unshakable . When the world is falling apart Land Before Time style, it can feel trite, sniffing out the beauty – useless, firing off flares to anyone looking for signs of life. But, while I’m under no delusions that if we just keep trudging forward we’ll find our own oasis of waterfalls and grassy meadows glistening in the sunshine beneath a heavenly chorus, I wonder if trivializing small acts of beauty, connection, and hope actually cuts us off from resources essential to our survival. The group of abandoned dinosaurs were keeping each other alive and making each other laugh well before they made it to their fantasy ending.

Read More: How Ice Cream Became My Own Personal Act of Resistance

After the monarch butterfly went on the endangered-species list, my friend and fellow writer Hannah Soyer sent me wildflower seeds to plant in my yard. A simple act of big hope – that I will actually plant them, that they will grow, that a monarch butterfly will receive nourishment from whatever blossoms are able to push their way through the dirt. There are so many ways that could fail. But maybe the outcome wasn’t exactly the point. Maybe hope is the dogged insistence – the stubborn defiance – to continue cultivating moments of beauty regardless. There is value in the planting apart from the harvest.

I can’t point out a single collective lesson from the pandemic. It’s hard to see any great “we.” Still, I see the faces in my moms’ group, making pancakes for their kids and popping on between strings of meetings while we try to figure out how to raise these small people in this chaotic world. I think of my friends on Instagram tending to the selves they discovered when no one was watching and the scarf of ribbons stretching the length of more than three football fields. I remember my family of three, holding hands on the way up the ramp to the library. These bits of growth and rings of support might not be loud or right on the surface, but that’s not the same thing as nothing. If we only cared about the bottom-line defeats or sweeping successes of the big picture, we’d never plant flowers at all.

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How pandemics seep into literature, arts & culture.

The art and life of Mark di Suvero

Influenza victims crowd into an emergency hospital near Fort Riley, Kansas in 1918.

In October of 1918, a delirious Katherine Anne Porter experienced what she termed “the beatific vision.” Close to death from the novel influenza virus that would kill 50–100 million people, Porter felt transported to a paradisal landscape, one free of the pain and fear that had overtaken her body. To the surprise of all, she survived her illness, and later transformed the experience into her powerful novella “Pale Horse, Pale Rider.” That story is one of the few literary works directly about the pandemic that killed more people in the United States than the country lost in all the twentieth- and twenty-first-century wars, combined. The experience, Porter said, “simply divided my life … and after I was in some strange way altered … it took me a long time to go out and live in the world again.”

COVID -19 promises to alter us all in strange ways. It’s a paradigm-shifting event that divides lives and cultures into a before and after. We will emerge changed, though how those changes will manifest is far from certain. The sensory details of this outbreak—the masks, the faces of doctors and nurses creased with worry and fatigue, the closure signs, the antiseptic smells, the empty streets, the stacks of coffins—will weave their way into our minds and bodies, triggering us back to this moment years in the future. For me, the experience has also held an uncanny familiarity. I have spent the last five years writing a book about how the sensory and affective climate of the 1918-1919 influenza pandemic infuses interwar literature, often in ways we have not recognized. My new awareness of the traces of that pandemic shifts my perception of this one, as if the sights and sounds from a century ago have re-emerged, becoming timely in ways I both feared and never wanted.

Comparisons between the influenza pandemic and COVID -19 have been widespread as we scramble for some map of how this outbreak might unfold. Through a medical lens, we ask which virus is worse. Do they spread in similar ways? How did public life change both then and now? Are there lessons that might be drawn or mistakes that might be avoided? Some differences between the two outbreaks are already clear: the 1918-19 pandemic killed healthy young adults at astonishing rates, and influenza seemed like a familiar rather than a new threat, despite the unique virulence of the strain, which meant it was even easier to dismiss—at least at first. And the timing mattered: the influenza pandemic came on the heels of the deadliest war the world had yet to see, an overlap that meant the pandemic received far less attention, despite killing so many more people. The second mass-death event in five years, the pandemic arrived when the world was already overrun with corpses and grief.

Yet the literature that arose from the influenza pandemic speaks to our current moment in profound ways, offering connections in precisely the realms where art excels: in emotional landscapes, in the ways a past moment reverberates into the present, in the ineffable conversation between the body’s experiences and our perception of the world.

Right now, every few days brings another reality into focus; what seemed far-fetched yesterday arrives tomorrow. The past is always another country, but the speed at which knowledge becomes outdated, naivete turns to realization, and basic truths change is dizzying during a pandemic. In “Pale Horse, Pale Rider,” Porter wove her own paradigm-altering experience into a broader meditation on the vertigo induced by such shifts. She encodes these swings in a play of styles, moving between a hallucinatory, dreamlike language to convey the virus’s invasion of bodies and a more straightforward, realist style to convey the war. Part of the challenge for the characters is to read correctly the story they are in; saturated in a war story that is terrible but familiar, this narrative is what seems real. They know their roles (male soldier, female civilian), the threat (artillery warfare), the enemies and the allies, and they know how this story ends (death for the soldier). Caught up in this paradigm, they miss that reality has changed, that the enemy is now invisible, that women face equal threats, that the home front is as dangerous as the front lines. There are consequences for misreading: as they worry over the threat to the soldier’s body in war, they circulate through restaurants, theaters, hospitals, and workplaces. Even after one of them falls ill, they touch and kiss and share cigarettes, believing themselves in the outdated story as a new delirium takes over the narrative and their lives. Porter captures the emotional and physical jolts of a constantly shifting reality, and the inherent risks in failing to adjust quickly enough to a new paradigm.

One’s reality doesn’t simply shift in a pandemic; it becomes radically uncertain—indeed, uncertainty is the reality. The unpredictability of the COVID -19 virus and all we don’t know about it means we have no idea where we are in the story or even what story we are in. Is this the first wave of something even deadlier to come? Have we reached the top of the curve? What’s the scope of the tragedy? Is the economy the real story? What do we think we know now that may prove fatally wrong? The narrative uncertainty causes many of us to turn to genre fiction and predictable movies (even if they are about disaster)—they allow us to pull down another story like a shade and sit in a place where we already know the ending. The modernist literature I spend my days teaching and studying typically grants the opposite, capturing the fragmentation and plotlessness of a postwar/postpandemic world. T. S. Eliot, who along with his wife caught the flu during the pandemic, felt weighed down by what he termed the “domestic influenza” of his health and home life, and his worries that his mind had been affected by his illness. The Waste Land —a poem about so many things and one that channels the larger zeitgeist of his moment—turns this uncertainty into a climate, with its fogs, its corpse-haunted domestic landscape, its pervasive sense of living death, and its delirious language.

The uncertainty rises, too, from the invisibility of the enemy. The consciousness is tuned to a threat that might be everywhere but cannot be seen. A world of surfaces and people become suspect, the body porous and vulnerable. W. B. Yeats captures this sense of menace in “The Second Coming,” a poem composed in the weeks after he watched his pregnant wife come close to death in the pandemic. The 1918 virus routinely drowned people in their beds as their lungs filled with fluids, and it caused sudden bleeding from the nose, mouth, and ears. The poem’s sense of chaos and horror comes, of course, from many causes, including war, revolution, and Ireland’s political violence, but the poem also speaks to the terror of an agentless, hidden threat, one that drowns innocence and lets loose mere anarchy and a blood-dimmed tide.

The invisibility of the threat in turn produces what we might term contagion guilt, a haunting fear that one might pass a deadly infection to another. Routes of transmission are known generally but rarely specifically; one fears but does not know the precise means of transfer. In William Maxwell’s elegiac novel They Came Like Swallows , which recalls his own pregnant mother’s death in the influenza pandemic, the characters are haunted by all the what-ifs: what if they had taken their boy out of school earlier? What if they had chosen the next train car rather than the first one? What if they had not entered the room that day? Such guilt can live in the mind as a low-lying presence, unresolved and unresolvable. And this guilt comes, too, in its anticipatory form—what if that touch, that visit, that missed hand wash harms a loved one or a stranger? Porter’s central character in “Pale Horse, Pale Rider” dreams of a nightmarish invisible bow that shoots arrows at her beloved, who dies again and again despite her attempted interventions.

As we are witnessing every day, a toxic brew of uncertainty and fear also flows into well-worn channels of scapegoating and cruelty, turning an invisible viral enemy into an illusory but visible foe. The xenophobia woven into a “Chinese virus” or even the “Spanish flu” sets up whole groups for denunciation. Factual medical descriptions of contagion, disease, and contamination morph into poisonous discriminatory metaphors of moral uncleanness and danger. The early-twentieth-century horror writer H. P. Lovecraft channeled into his postwar/postpandemic writing his prejudicial and homophobic beliefs that immigrant hordes and deviants were tainting pure Aryan blood lines. After the influenza pandemic had swept through his home state of Rhode Island, Lovecraft populated his stories with proto-zombie figures rising from the dead in the midst of pandemics or wars, bent on further destruction. Lovecraft transforms a miasmic blend of diseased atmospheres and deep-seated prejudices into monsters that can be seen and killed with impunity, a move that suggests the dangerous ways anthropomorphizing the threat may mask vicious discriminatory impulses.

And yet what pulses through all these works—and through our current moment—is the body itself. Virginia Woolf, who knew so much about illness and whose heart was damaged by her encounter with the 1918 virus, observes in her essay “On Being Ill” how illness and the body are left out of our art and conscious experiences. We deny how in truth, “all day, all night the body intervenes.” In the midst of acute illness, the world both narrows and broadens into the body’s suffering, an experience hidden in part because of the profound isolation it so often produces. As Woolf writes, “those great wars which [the body] wages by itself…in the solitude of the bedroom against the assault of fever” go unrecorded. The post-1918 pandemic works encode these internal battles, sometimes directly and sometimes in fragments and echoes. They capture the way a virus may shatter the body’s internal perceptions, the way fever and pain and fear of death turn reality into delirium. Porter depicts this mode by having the virus seem to infect the very prose, the cascading viral chaos reflected through the broken syntax and the invading dreamscapes, the disruption echoing “the terrible compelling pain running through her veins like heavy fire.” The Waste Land and “The Second Coming,” read through the lens of a body’s internal delirium, record hallucinatory realities, fragmented perception, the burning pain of fever and ache.

And finally, there comes the aftermath, both for our bodies and for our culture. How do such experiences live on in the cells, in the memory, in the streets? The continued sense of living death, of an experience that marks us with its shadow, echoes even after a pandemic passes. Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway , so often read as a novel capturing the aftermath of war—which it most certainly does—also records in its title character the physical and mental exhaustion that lingers after an illness. Like Woolf, Clarissa Dalloway has heart damage from her encounter with influenza, and as she moves through the streets of London and at home, she sees her world through her sense of bodily vulnerability, her very heartbeat and its lags pulsing through the memories of her illness. The sights and sounds and smells of the sickroom float back through her consciousness, shifting the ways she perceives the London day. Whether in illness or in observation, our own bodies are busy now. They are recording our pandemic, setting in place the reverberations that will echo into our future.

Elizabeth Outka is a professor of literature at the University of Richmond. Her latest book, Viral Modernism: The Influenza Pandemic and Interwar Literature is out from Columbia University. 

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New research finds that pandemic learning loss impacted whole communities, regardless of student race or income.

Analysis of prior decade shows that learning loss will become permanent if schools and parents do not expand learning time this summer and next year

(May 11, 2023) – Today, The Education Recovery Scorecard , a collaboration with researchers at the Center for Education Policy Research at Harvard University (CEPR) and Stanford University’s Educational Opportunity Project, released 12 new state reports and a research brief to provide the most comprehensive picture yet of how the pandemic affected student learning. Building on their previous work, their findings reveal how school closures and local conditions exacerbated inequality between communities — and how little time school leaders have to help students catch up.

The research team reviewed data from 8,000 communities in 40 states and Washington, D.C., including 2022 NAEP scores and Spring 2022 assessments, COVID death rates, voting rates and trust in government, patterns of social activity and survey data from Facebook/Meta on family activities and mental health during the pandemic.

They found that where children lived during the pandemic mattered more to their academic progress than their family background, income, or internet speed.  Moreover, after studying instances where test scores rose or fell in the decade before the pandemic, the researchers found that the impacts lingered for years. 

“Children have resumed learning, but largely at the same pace as before the pandemic. There’s no hurrying up teaching fractions or the Pythagorean theorem,” said CEPR faculty director Thomas Kane. “The hardest hit communities—like Richmond, VA, St. Louis, MO, and New Haven, CT, where students fell behind by more than 1.5 years in math—would have to teach 150 percent of a typical year’s worth of material for three years in a row—just to catch up. That is simply not going to happen without a major increase in instructional time.  Any district that lost more than a year of learning should be required to revisit their recovery plans and add instructional time—summer school, extended school year, tutoring, etc.—so that students are made whole. ”

“It’s not readily visible to parents when their children have fallen behind earlier cohorts, but the data from 7,800 school districts show clearly that this is the case,” said Sean Reardon, Professor of Poverty and Inequality, Stanford Graduate School of Education. “The educational impacts of the pandemic were not only historically large, but were disproportionately visited on communities with many low-income and minority students. Our research shows that schools were far from the only cause of decreased learning—the pandemic affected children through many ways – but they are the institution best suited to remedy the unequal impacts of the pandemic.”

The new research includes:

• A research brief that offers insights into why students in some communities fared worse than others.
• An update to the Education Recovery Scorecard, including data from 12 additional states whose 2022 scores were not available in October. The project now includes a district-level view of the pandemic’s effects in 40 states (plus DC).
• A new interactive map  that highlights examples of inequity between neighboring school districts.

Among the key findings:

• Within the typical school district, the declines in test scores were similar for all groups of students, rich and poor, white, Black, Hispanic. And the extent to which schools were closed appears to have had the same effect on all students in a community, regardless of income or race.
• Test scores declined more in places where the COVID death rate was higher, in communities where adults reported feeling more depression and anxiety during the pandemic, and where daily routines of families were most significantly restricted. This is true even in places where schools closed only very briefly at the start of the pandemic.
• Test score declines were smaller in communities with high voting rates and high Census response rates—indicators of what sociologists call “institutional trust.” Moreover, remote learning was less harmful in such places. Living in a community where more people trusted the government appears to have been an asset to children during the pandemic.
• The average U.S. public school student in grades 3-8 lost the equivalent of a half year of learning in math and a quarter of a year in reading.

The researchers also looked at data from the decade prior to the pandemic to see how students bounced back after significant learning loss due to disruption in their schooling. The evidence shows that schools do not naturally bounce back: Affected students recovered 20-30% of the lost ground in the first year, but then made no further recovery in the subsequent 3-4 years.  

“Schools were not the sole cause of achievement losses,” Kane said. “Nor will they be the sole solution. As enticing as it might be to get back to normal, doing so will just leave the devastating increase in inequality caused by the pandemic in place.   We must create learning opportunities for students outside of the normal school calendar, by adding academic content to summer camps and after-school programs and adding an optional 13th year of schooling.”

The Education Recovery Scorecard is supported by funds from Citadel founder and CEO Kenneth C. Griffin , Carnegie Corporation of New York, and the Walton Family Foundation.

About the Center for Education Policy Research at Harvard University The Center for Education Policy Research at Harvard University, based at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, seeks to transform education through quality research and evidence. CEPR and its partners believe all students will learn and thrive when education leaders make decisions using facts and findings, rather than untested assumptions. Learn more at cepr.harvard.edu.

Contact: Jeff Frantz, [email protected] , 614-204-7438 (mobile)

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Holding on to hope is hard, even with the pandemic’s end in sight – wisdom from poets through the ages

Professor of English, Rutgers University - Newark

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Rachel Hadas does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

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As we begin to glimpse what might be the beginning of the end of the pandemic, what does hope mean? It’s hard not to sense the presence of hope, but how do we think of it?

Hope is fragile but tough, fugitive but tenacious, even adhesive. It sticks: Hope “ stayed behind/in her impregnable home beneath the lip/of the jar ,” wrote the ancient Greek poet Hesiod in his poem “Works and Days.” While the evils released from the jar by Pandora fly out into the world, hope remains.

Written in the 19th century, poet Emily Dickinson’s version of hope is “the thing with feathers” that “perches in the soul” and perseveres; it sings “and never stops at all.” Dickinson invites us to imagine Hope frail as a bird, fluttering. It doesn’t fly away – but that verb “perches,” suggesting that it always might.

That Dickinson’s hope “sings the tune without the words” might suggest that hope provides a general, even generic response rather than a specific remedy tailored to the occasion. Nevertheless, even in the sorest storms, hope is available.

Which isn’t to say that hope is always consoling. When we turn to hope, have recourse to hope or even hope against hope, it isn’t at moments of triumph or complacency. Rather, we need hope at moments when things feel precarious.

Once we recognize this simple principle, the intuitive truth that hope is a companion of anxiety turns up everywhere.

‘Intrinsically intertwined’

In 2018, the Rubin Museum in New York City mounted a participatory art installation entitled “ A Monument for the Anxious and Hopeful .” Artist Candy Chang and writer James A. Reeves asked “ visitors to anonymously write their anxieties and hopes on vellum cards and display them on a 30’ x 15’ wall for others to see .”

Tracy A. Dennis-Tiwary , a psychology and neuroscience scholar, notes that over 50,000 cards were submitted . The cards, writes Dennis-Tiwary, “reflected … immense optimism and fear. … It was not obvious unless you looked closely, but the juxtaposition of the two card types revealed a pattern: the anxieties and hopes were often the same. … The monument showed how anxiety and hope go hand in hand.”

Chang and Reeves write that “Anxiety and hope are defined by a moment that has yet to arrive.” Put another way, writes Dennis-Tiwary, “when we imagine and prepare for the uncertain future, anxiety and hope are intrinsically intertwined, forever transforming from one to another.”

Leaving despair behind

The Athenian dramatist Euripides was a peerless psychologist with a particular interest in the stresses of decision-making. His play, “ Iphigenia among the Taurians ,” is less a tragedy than a melodrama or romance, with a happy ending against the odds.

In the following passage, the resourceful Iphigenia – a priestess whose job it is to sacrifice foreigners who land on the shores of her captor’s island – is devising a complicated strategy to free at least one of her prisoners and thereby send a message to her family back home. She’s unaware, at this point in the drama, that one of the captives whom she’s supposed to sacrifice is her own brother Orestes. She has thought of a clever scheme, but the hope engendered by it, the very possibility of its success, also makes her anxious. Here’s my translation:

“People in trouble do not have a prayer of calm once they have left behind despair and turned toward hope.”

As with the plot of any exciting movie, we’re rooting for the good guys, and our hope is balanced by uneasiness. Suspense!

Iphigenia’s next words to Orestes are also acute:

“So this is what I fear: that you, once you have sailed away from here, will forget about me, will ignore my heart’s desire.”

Will the lucky winners, the survivors, forget about those who, having perhaps enabled them to escape, have been left behind?

This is Iphigenia’s entirely reasonable worry. Even the hoped-for and possible success of her scheme may have a downside. As Chang, Reeves and Dennis-Tiwary all point out, hope and anxiety are so closely intertwined that they may turn out to be different sides of the same coin.

‘Green shoots of hope’

Only two months after the Jan. 6 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol, and less than two months after President Joe Biden’s inauguration, hope is palpable; so is anxiety.

A year into the pandemic, spring is about to arrive. A recent New Yorker article notes that “ here in the city there are green shoots … who can’t imagine that happier days may soon be here again ?” The word hope isn’t mentioned, but a hopeful aura pervades the passage.

Yet nothing is certain. Trump and Trumpism glower in the wings and also in the political arena. New viral variants abound. There may be a light at the end of the tunnel, no doubt – but how long will that tunnel be? Hope requires patience.

In a famous passage in Plato’s “Republic ,” Socrates evokes the limitations of human vision by using the allegory of an underground cave whose inhabitants have never seen the daylight. The passage never mentions hope, but it does mention the reluctance of the prisoners, whose lives have been spent underground, to be dragged into the light, which dazzles their eyes.

Hope doesn’t go away, but it morphs and mutates. Have we become habituated to despair?

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Leaving CNN Was How I Found My Voice

By Brooke Baldwin

“I want to punch you in the face.”

Yes, those words actually came out of my mouth. Like, out loud. A couple months ago. I’m slightly embarrassed to admit I was talking to my loving partner, Peter. He had just flown across the country and was set to wake up with me at four-something in the morning so that he could accompany me to my appearance on Good Morning America. I was going back on national TV for the first time since I’d signed off from my CNN show. I would be talking about the debut of my new Netflix show, The Trust . This was a big deal. In many ways, it felt like a rebirth. But that night before, I hadn’t been in a celebratory mood.

I was pissed off. I felt violent. I felt like I was going to explode. I am now in the process of understanding why, and this deep knowing has enabled me to change everything in my life.

I am not an angry person. Or maybe I am. There I go, silencing myself again.

When I signed off from CNN Newsroom on April 16, 2021, I couldn’t tell the whole truth. I wasn’t allowed to—and probably still am not. But I’m now on the other side of a profound life moment, of my unraveling.

This story really begins during my senior year of college, when my mother and I drove up to a strange house about a half hour from where I grew up in Atlanta. I was 21. Outside the house was my father’s silver Porsche. Inside the house was my father, with a woman who was not my mother. I reached for the car door to run into the house, to do or say I don’t know what. With my leg dragging out the passenger door, I screamed at my mother to stop the car and let me out. Instead she sped away, the passenger door slamming shut. Just recently, a friend told me my mom saved me that day: Had I gotten out of that car, I would have spent the rest of my life trying to unsee what I’d seen.

For years I watched my mother keep her mouth shut. I held on to that secret and said nothing about, or to, my father. This would be just the beginning of carrying bigger secrets and allowing myself to be muzzled —or rather, as I’m now learning, muzzling myself.

Ironic (or not) that I chose a career in TV journalism, which saw me wear a microphone to amplify the voiceless for a living. Problem was, I didn’t use my own. I see it all so clearly now: I rarely spoke up for myself.

CNN was always the dream. For 10 years it put me in millions of living rooms, allowing me to cover everything from the White House to school shootings to the pandemic. I became known for giving you the news, straight up, with dignity and compassion. And—after the 10 years I spent climbing the ranks of local news to get to the big leagues—I was good at it.

I was living my dream and saying yes to everything. YES to oil spills. YES to elections. Coal mine disasters. Hurricanes. Escaped inmates. Gun legislation. Yes to everything, yes to everyone.

I never said no. There would have always been someone hungrier and more telegenic if I had.

Behind the scenes, my yes-girl behavior was starting to snowball. CNN moved me from Atlanta to New York, but my producing team stayed behind; we would work long-distance. I could feel my tether to my executive producer begin to fray.

It wasn’t always like this. In fact, those first few years working together were pretty great. We bounced ideas off each other. We got excited about similar news stories. I adored his wife and kids—and he always knew whom I was dating. Our relationship was almost as sibling-like as it was collegial.

But after my move, our working relationship started to take a drastic turn. My producer made me feel as though I couldn’t do heavy-hitting interviews without him. Or, maybe, I allowed him to make it feel like I couldn’t do heavy-hitting interviews without him. The word gaslighting has become so cliché, but that’s what it felt like. Manipulation. Bullying.

Anyone who’s ever tried long-distance in any kind of relationship, romantic or professional, knows it wears on you. My producer was read-in on the news at all times—it was his job. When you work at any cable news network, email comes in fast and furiously. Sometimes that meant I would accidentally miss his emails. And I started to notice that if I didn’t respond to those emails right away, he would go dark.

Even worse, sometimes he would go dark during my live broadcasts. In front of hundreds of thousands of people. There would be days when I’d get on set, clip on my microphone, and slip my earpiece into my right ear. No “hello.” No check-in. Instead, I’d be greeted by someone less seasoned.

With live TV, there should always be a palpable sense of “I’ve got you” —which goes both ways between anchor and executive producer. I had to learn how to rely on myself and others to move through the show without him.

Sometimes he needed to communicate urgently with me—for instance, if he had gotten word there’d be a press conference and wanted me to know I’d need to ad-lib coming out of it. But depending on his mood, he might refuse to actually speak into my ear, instead writing me notes on the teleprompter during commercial breaks.

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By Maureen Ryan

I got into a bad habit. I never picked up the phone and said something—like really said something. Not to him. And I didn’t report up the chain of command. I was the good girl. Good girls smile, are grateful for our jobs, and keep our mouths shut. We definitely don’t speak up.

Everything changed for me the day in 2015 when Donald Trump came down that escalator. In the years that followed, I was not only pushed out of alignment with what news had become and how I was being told to cover it; I was also changed. I got curious about the legions of women who, as a direct result of that election, finally decided to speak up.

In 2018, I started researching my book, Huddle , about the collective power of women. I spent weekends during one of the most insane news cycles of our lifetime interviewing Black women judges in Texas; a queer chef from San Francisco; military badasses turned congresswomen—athletes, teachers, activists, mothers. Women who knew real marginalization and discrimination. I’m a privileged white woman, and yet that’s when I started to find my voice.

“No, I don’t want to cover that today.”

“No, I’d like to interview her instead of him.”

“No, I will not be spoken to like that.”

Despite my own narrative that I “needed” my producer, I knew I needed to figure it out without him. And I knew that I could.

In November 2019, I finally walked into my boss’s office. I told Jeff Zucker, the former president of CNN, that I wanted my producer off my team. I didn’t want him to be punished—just moved to another anchor to start anew. A male colleague had made a similar request with success. My request? Denied.

Little did I know, this was the beginning of the end for me.

A few weeks later, I got called back into the boss’s office with my then agent, who’d prepared me with something like, “Brooke, your boss is furious at you. What have you done?!” I’d had a lovely relationship with Jeff up until this point. I’d even danced with him at my wedding. Now I found myself standing in his office dumbfounded, but prepared to defend myself and my integrity.

I couldn’t help but wonder: Why was I even sitting there? Why did I suddenly feel like the third wheel with my executive producer and my boss? Had I inadvertently kicked a hornet’s nest? All because I had gone over my producer’s head to the big boss? It didn’t make sense. I wasn’t accusing this guy of any kind of misconduct. Just as I’d told Jeff, our working relationship had run out of track.

Instead of addressing me right away, my boss engaged in the longest five-minute conversation of my life—not with me, but with my agent. The topic: whether Anderson Cooper, another of her clients, was happy with the view out of his new office.

I stood there waiting to hear my fate.

What the fucking fuck.

Textbook power move. I just stood there. Paralyzed. In fear? In shame?

Then Jeff turned to me and threatened, “I could give your show to someone in Washington tomorrow. ” [ Long pause ] “But I won’t…because I believe you’re the best broadcaster on this network.” He told me that I needed my executive producer and that he would not remove him.

Whiplash. Instability. Another classic play. I’d lost. Some months later, the pandemic hit. I got a severe case of COVID early, and my sickness became national news. I was getting alerts about myself. Thousands of viewers reached out to me and showed me so much love. But what they didn’t know was that, in addition to my health, I was fighting for my own self-respect.

To summarize the next year: With very little explanation (read: some excuse about “not enough available control rooms” to produce my show), my boss yanked me off the air for the two months leading up to and including Election Day 2020. When people understandably started asking why I was “taking vacation” during such a crucial time, I responded to a random, buried comment on Instagram: “Not my choice.”

My three little words made news around the globe. So I got slapped again. When I got my show back, Jeff cut it in half. This time I kept my mouth shut. “Be grateful,” Jeff had once told me over lunch a year or two before, while we were in contract negotiations. “Don’t be like Megyn Kelly. Don’t you dare get bored.”

Why didn’t I leave earlier? For one thing, that little girl deep inside of me would have been disappointed. She and I, we lived in small-town West Virginia. We dated the wrong guys. We put off having kids. The hustling. We can’t quit now. We worked too hard for this. This was our dream.

CNN beat me to it. In January 2021, the morning Trump was impeached for a second time, my cell phone rang. It wasn’t my boss —rather, it was my agent.

Jeff wanted me out. No explanation. Just out. From that moment on, after I’d spent 13 years at CNN, Jeff never spoke to me again. Neither did my former executive producer, who ended up getting moved to another show for COVID-protocol reasons and then eventually promoted. (When I emailed them to let them know I’d be publishing this piece, offering each of them a chance to comment on or dispute my recollections, Jeff’s publicist responded by saying that “he wishes you all the best.” My old producer never responded.)

After 10 years: crickets. And the worst part? I had to lie to my team, my friends and family, and my viewers.

My lawyer and publicist worked hard to negotiate my exit, fighting to allow me to announce my own news on my own show. In February, I got to do exactly that. My end date was mutually agreed upon—coincidentally coming less than two weeks after I would be publishing my first book. Eventually, I did an interview with the Ms. magazine podcast during which I called out gender inequality at CNN. Another phone call from my agent. Another “Jeff is going nuclear.” This time he was apparently threatening to yank me off the air. My response: “But he’s already yanking me off the air!” My then agent: “He is threatening to yank you even sooner.” He didn’t.

Through my final days at CNN, I was so allergic to the idea of that man that instead of risking running into him on the way to the bathroom, I contemplated peeing in a Gatorade bottle in my office.

Everything was upside down.

On my last day at the network, after I said my goodbyes, I slipped out the literal side door of the building, and of my dream.

On my way out, the only CNN face I saw was a security guard’s. Masked, hands trembling, Anthony stood there clutching a shoebox. He’d bought me a pair of Air Jordans as a goodbye. I hugged him and wept.

No cheesy plaque. No Champagne. No send-off party.

Just quiet.

Life is unfair. People are shitty. Bosses are bullies. This is not news. In the hierarchy of giving a shit, I didn’t think my story, my thousand little cuts, amounted to much.

It’s taken me nearly three years to remove the blinders, feel the anger, welcome the fear, and recognize that in all my yesses, in all my silence, in all my enabling, the person who betrayed me the most was me.

I wanted to obey. I wanted to please. I wanted to be the good girl. I was afraid they’d let me go—joke’s on me.

It starts in childhood. We want approval—from our parents, then our lovers, then our bosses. I wanted the people who had certain control over me to want me so that I could get what I wanted.

It’s a transaction and it’s a gamble, and the house always wins.

A former colleague of mine in her 20s knew what I was going through at work. She confessed to me years later that she was aghast and afraid: If it could happen to me, how would it not happen to her?

Which brings me back to wanting to punch my man in the face. Why was I so angry?

Because all of the truths were flooding into my mind the night before GMA. The muzzling. The charade. My childhood. My accountability.

I didn’t hit Peter, of course. Instead, he threw his arms around me, showing me how to feel seen and safe—and I wept. I wept for my mother. I wept for the versions of a woman I’d been throughout my life. I wept for the woman I was finally becoming.

So this is my confession. I’m calling myself out. And it feels powerful.

As for my family? My mother eventually left my father. She has found love with a man, a kind of love she had never known. And I don’t speak to my father, who is remarried. I wish him well.

Part of my own unraveling meant I became a believer in divorce. Including my divorce, so to speak, from CNN. Like my marriage ending, it was painful. I miss being a vessel for information and clarity and news—the good and the bad. I miss my audience. But I’m experiencing a rebirth. As with a forest fire, you can burn out the debris and foster new growth.

And it turns out that once you find your voice, you can’t unfind it. You can still say yes, as long as it’s using that voice.

Yes to hosting a social-experiment show on Netflix.

Yes to becoming a filmmaker, my own storyteller.

Yes to getting divorced.

Yes to starting the fuck over.

Yes to finding new love.

Yes to chopping your hair.

Remove your armor.

Burn the boats.

Unraveling. A funny word. I always took it to mean “coming apart,” but it also can mean “getting to the truth.”

Now I realize it’s both.

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This Former NIH Chief Went Public With His Prostate Cancer To Help Others

You're reading the Consider This newsletter, which unpacks one major news story each day. Subscribe here to get it delivered to your inbox, and listen to more from the Consider This podcast .

Former National Health Institute Director Francis S. Collins. Graeme Jennings - Pool/Getty Images hide caption

Former National Health Institute Director Francis S. Collins.

1. The doctor becomes the patient.

Prior to leading the NIH, he was a leading geneticist:

• Collins and his team at the University of Michigan d iscovered the genes associated with a number of diseases, like cystic fibrosis and Huntington's disease .
• He also led the Human Genome Project – pivotal to understanding the makeup of the entire human genetic code.
• Collins played a key role in the nation's response to the COVID-19 pandemic and helped the U.S. navigate an unprecedented global health crisis.
• After stepping down from his post at the NIH in 2021, he continued scientific work at his lab at the National Human Genome Research Institute.

Shots - Health News

As he steps down as the head of nih, he has a warning about future pandemics.

Now at 74, Collins' life looks very different. After helping the world navigate a health crisis, his attention has shifted to battling his own . "It's one thing to be imagining what somebody is experiencing as you're giving them news that might be really serious and maybe even life threatening. It's another to be the person in that spot," Collins told NPR's Scott Detrow in a recent interview. Recently, the doctor went public with his diagnosis of an aggressive form of prostate cancer.

2. Serving the public in a different way.

"I served medical research. Now it's serving me. And I don't want to waste time," Collins said. Collins first opened up about his diagnosis in an article published in The Washington Post . During his career as a physician-scientist, he worked with patients dealing with serious medical diagnoses, advising them on treatments and how to move forward with their life as best as possible. Now he's in that position himself, and hopes being open about his illness can help others. He understands that prostate cancer is an uncomfortable subject for many men . "We need to get over that," Collins said bluntly. "Particularly men who have reached the point of age 50 or so really need to think about what they can do to take care of themselves with the kind of screening that I had." Collins said that early detection is key; routine health screenings were part of what helped him catch his cancer early . "This kind of surveillance, even though a lot of people put it off, this can be lifesaving. And if there's some little part of my story that gets somebody interested and doing that for themselves, then it's worth being out there in the public."

The Coronavirus Crisis

In the '24th mile' of a marathon, fauci and collins reflect on their pandemic year, 3. feeling gratitude..

Staring down a cancer diagnosis is scary for anyone – including medical professionals. But Collins said he's thankful the cancer was caught early. He's currently a part of a clinical trial at NIH, "I'm hoping that whatever is learned about me can be widely shared and can teach people about other ways to deal with this disease." In addition to medical support, Collins is also grateful for the emotional support he's received. It's difficult for many people to know exactly what to say when someone in their life has received a cancer diagnosis. These are the words that have helped him : "I think what some of the people are reaching out to me with is a great example to say, you know, I'm really supportive of you. I know you're going through a tough time. I just want you to know I love you... that's a whole lot better than my thoughts and prayers are with you, which is sort of the old way of saying it. These are very genuine statements of affection that I have very much cherished."

For sponsor-free episodes of Consider This, sign up for Consider This+ via Apple Podcasts or at plus.npr.org . Email us at [email protected] .

This episode was produced by Megan Lim and Brianna Scott. It was edited by Adam Raney and Jeanette Woods. Our executive producer is Sami Yenigun.

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The Crackdown on Student Protesters

Columbia university is at the center of a growing showdown over the war in gaza and the limits of free speech..

This transcript was created using speech recognition software. While it has been reviewed by human transcribers, it may contain errors. Please review the episode audio before quoting from this transcript and email [email protected] with any questions.

[TRAIN SCREECHING]

Well, you can hear the helicopter circling. This is Asthaa Chaturvedi. I’m a producer with “The Daily.” Just walked out of the 116 Street Station. It’s the main station for Columbia’s Morningside Heights campus. And it’s day seven of the Gaza solidarity encampment, where a hundred students were arrested last Thursday.

So on one side of Broadway, you see camera crews. You see NYPD officers all lined up. There’s barricades, steel barricades, caution tape. This is normally a completely open campus. And I’m able to — all members of the public, you’re able to walk through.

[NON-ENGLISH SPEECH]

Looks like international media is here.

Have your IDs out. Have your IDs out.

Students lining up to swipe in to get access to the University. ID required for entry.

Swipe your ID, please.

Hi, how are you, officer? We’re journalists with “The New York Times.”

You’re not going to get in, all right? I’m sorry.

Hi. Can I help please?

Yeah, it’s total lockdown here at Columbia.

Please have your IDs out ready to swipe.

From “The New York Times,” I’m Michael Barbaro. This is “The Daily.” Today, the story of how Columbia University has become the epicenter of a growing showdown between student protesters, college administrators, and Congress over the war in Gaza and the limits of free speech. I spoke with my colleague, Nick Fandos.

[UPBEAT MUSIC]

It’s Thursday, April 25.

Nick, if we rewind the clock a few months, we end up at a moment where students at several of the country’s best known universities are protesting Israel’s response to the October 7 attacks, its approach to a war in Gaza. At times, those protests are happening peacefully, at times with rhetoric that is inflammatory. And the result is that the leaders of those universities land before Congress. But the president of Columbia University, which is the subject we’re going to be talking about today, is not one of the leaders who shows up for that testimony.

That’s right. So the House Education Committee has been watching all these protests on campus. And the Republican Chairwoman decides, I’m going to open an investigation, look at how these administrations are handling it, because it doesn’t look good from where I sit. And the House last winter invites the leaders of several of these elite schools, Harvard, Penn, MIT, and Columbia, to come and testify in Washington on Capitol Hill before Congress.

Now, the President of Columbia has what turns out to be a very well-timed, pre-planned trip to go overseas and speak at an international climate conference. So Minouche Shafik isn’t going to be there. So instead, the presidents of Harvard, and Penn, and MIT show up. And it turned out to be a disaster for these universities.

They were asked very pointed questions about the kind of speech taking place on their campuses, and they gave really convoluted academic answers back that just baffled the committee. But there was one question that really embodied the kind of disconnect between the Committee — And it wasn’t just Republicans, Republicans and Democrats on the Committee — and these college presidents. And that’s when they were asked a hypothetical.

Does calling for the genocide of Jews violate Penn’s rules or code of conduct? Yes or no?

If the speech turns into conduct, it can be harassment.

And two of the presidents, Claudine Gay of Harvard and Elizabeth Magill of the University of Pennsylvania, they’re unwilling to say in this really kind of intense back and forth that this speech would constitute a violation of their rules.

It can be, depending on the context.

What’s the context?

Targeted at an individual. Is it pervasive?

It’s targeted at Jewish students, Jewish individuals. Do you understand your testimony is dehumanizing them?

And it sets off a firestorm.

It does not depend on the context. The answer is yes. And this is why you should resign. These are unacceptable answers across the board.

Members of Congress start calling for their resignations. Alumni are really, really ticked off. Trustees of the University start to wonder, I don’t know that these leaders really have got this under control. And eventually, both of them lose their jobs in a really high profile way.

Right. And as you’ve hinted at, for somewhat peculiar scheduling reasons, Columbia’s President escapes this disaster of a hearing in what has to be regarded as the best timing in the history of the American Academy.

Yeah, exactly. And Columbia is watching all this play out. And I think their first response was relief that she was not in that chair, but also a recognition that, sooner or later, their turn was going to come back around and they were going to have to sit before Congress.

Why were they so certain that they would probably end up before Congress and that this wasn’t a case of completely dodging a bullet?

Well, they remain under investigation by the committee. But also, as the winter wears on, all the same intense protests just continue unabated. So in many ways, Columbia’s like these other campuses. But in some ways, it’s even more intense. This is a university that has both one of the largest Jewish student populations of any of its peers. But it also has a large Arab and Muslim student population, a big Middle Eastern studies program. It has a dual degree program in Tel Aviv.

And it’s a university on top of all that that has a real history of activism dating back to the 1960s. So when students are recruited or choose to come to Columbia, they’re actively opting into a campus that prides itself on being an activist community. It’s in the middle of New York City. It’s a global place. They consider the city and the world, really, like a classroom to Columbia.

In other words, if any campus was going to be a hotbed of protest and debate over this conflict, it was going to be Columbia University.

Exactly. And when this spring rolls around, the stars finally align. And the same congressional committee issues another invitation to Minouche Shafik, Columbia’s President, to come and testify. And this time, she has no excuse to say no.

But presumably, she is well aware of exactly what testifying before this committee entails and is highly prepared.

Columbia knew this moment was coming. They spent months preparing for this hearing. They brought in outside consultants, crisis communicators, experts on anti-Semitism. The weekend before the hearing, she actually travels down to Washington to hole up in a war room, where she starts preparing her testimony with mock questioners and testy exchanges to prep her for this. And she’s very clear on what she wants to try to do.

Where her counterparts had gone before the committee a few months before and looked aloof, she wanted to project humility and competence, to say, I know that there’s an issue on my campus right now with some of these protests veering off into anti-Semitic incidents. But I’m getting that under control. I’m taking steps in good faith to make sure that we restore order to this campus, while allowing people to express themselves freely as well.

So then the day of her actual testimony arrives. And just walk us through how it goes.

The Committee on Education and Workforce will come to order. I note that —

So Wednesday morning rolls around. And President Shafik sits at the witness stand with two of her trustees and the head of Columbia’s new anti-Semitism task force.

Columbia stands guilty of gross negligence at best and at worst has become a platform for those supporting terrorism and violence against the Jewish people.

And right off the bat, they’re put through a pretty humbling litany of some of the worst hits of what’s been happening on campus.

For example, just four days after the harrowing October 7 attack, a former Columbia undergraduate beat an Israeli student with a stick.

The Republican Chairwoman of the Committee, Virginia Foxx, starts reminding her that there was a student who was actually hit with a stick on campus. There was another gathering more recently glorifying Hamas and other terrorist organizations, and the kind of chants that have become an everyday chorus on campus, which many Jewish students see as threatening. But when the questioning starts, President Shafik is ready. One of the first ones she gets is the one that tripped up her colleagues.

Does calling for the genocide of Jews violate Columbia’s code of conduct, Mr. Greenwald?

And she answers unequivocally.

Dr. Shafik?

Yes, it does.

And, Professor —

That would be a violation of Columbia’s rules. They would be punished.

As President of Columbia, what is it like when you hear chants like, by any means necessary or Intifada Revolution?

I find those chants incredibly distressing. And I wish profoundly that people would not use them on our campus.

And in some of the most interesting exchanges of the hearing, President Shafik actually opens Columbia’s disciplinary books.

We have already suspended 15 students from Columbia. We have six on disciplinary probation. These are more disciplinary actions that have been taken probably in the last decade at Columbia. And —

She talks about the number of students that have been suspended, but also the number of faculty that she’s had removed from the classroom that are being investigated for comments that either violate some of Columbia’s rules or make students uncomfortable. One case in particular really underscores this.

And that’s of a Middle Eastern studies professor named Joseph Massad. He wrote an essay not long after Hamas invaded Israel and killed 1,200 people, according to the Israeli government, where he described that attack with adjectives like awesome. Now, he said they’ve been misinterpreted, but a lot of people have taken offense to those comments.

Ms. Stefanik, you’re recognized for five minutes.

Thank you, Chairwoman. I want to follow up on my colleague, Rep Walberg’s question regarding Professor Joseph Massad. So let me be clear, President —

And so Representative Elise Stefanik, the same Republican who had tripped up Claudine Gay of Harvard and others in the last hearing, really starts digging in to President Shafik about these things at Columbia.

He is still Chair on the website. So has he been terminated as Chair?

Congresswoman, I —

And Shafik’s answers are maybe a little surprising.

— before getting back to you. I can confirm —

I know you confirmed that he was under investigation.

Yes, I can confirm that. But I —

Did you confirm he was still the Chair?

He says that Columbia is taking his case seriously. In fact, he’s under investigation right now.

Well, let me ask you this.

I need to check.

Will you make the commitment to remove him as Chair?

And when Stefanik presses her to commit to removing him from a campus leadership position —

I think that would be — I think — I would — yes. Let me come back with yes. But I think I — I just want to confirm his current status before I write —

We’ll take that as a yes, that you will confirm that he will no longer be chair.

Shafik seems to pause and think and then agree to it on the spot, almost like she is making administrative decisions with or in front of Congress.

Now, we did some reporting after the fact. And it turns out the Professor didn’t even realize he was under investigation. So he’s learning about this from the hearing too. So what this all adds up to, I think, is a performance so in line with what the lawmakers themselves wanted to hear, that at certain points, these Republicans didn’t quite know what to do with it. They were like the dog that caught the car.

Columbia beats Harvard and UPenn.

One of them, a Republican from Florida, I think at one point even marvelled, well, you beat Harvard and Penn.

Y’all all have done something that they weren’t able to do. You’ve been able to condemn anti-Semitism without using the phrase, it depends on the context. But the —

So Columbia’s president has passed this test before this committee.

Yeah, this big moment that tripped up her predecessors and cost them their jobs, it seems like she has cleared that hurdle and dispatched with the Congressional committee that could have been one of the biggest threats to her presidency.

Without objection, there being no further business, the committee stands adjourned. [BANGS GAVEL]

But back on campus, some of the students and faculty who had been watching the hearing came away with a very different set of conclusions. They saw a president who was so eager to please Republicans in Congress that she was willing to sell out some of the University’s students and faculty and trample on cherished ideas like academic freedom and freedom of expression that have been a bedrock of American higher education for a really long time.

And there was no clearer embodiment of that than what had happened that morning just as President Shafik was going to testify before Congress. A group of students before dawn set up tents in the middle of Columbia’s campus and declared themselves a pro-Palestinian encampment in open defiance of the very rules that Dr. Shafik had put in place to try and get these protests under control.

So these students in real-time are beginning to test some of the things that Columbia’s president has just said before Congress.

Exactly. And so instead of going to celebrate her successful appearance before Congress, Shafik walks out of the hearing room and gets in a black SUV to go right back to that war room, where she’s immediately confronted with a major dilemma. It basically boils down to this, she had just gone before Congress and told them, I’m going to get tough on these protests. And here they were. So either she gets tough and risks inflaming tension on campus or she holds back and does nothing and her words before Congress immediately look hollow.

And what does she decide?

So for the next 24 hours, she tries to negotiate off ramps. She consults with her Deans and the New York Police Department. And it all builds towards an incredibly consequential decision. And that is, for the first time in decades, to call the New York City Police Department onto campus in riot gear and break this thing up, suspend the students involved, and then arrest them.

To essentially eliminate this encampment.

Eliminate the encampment and send a message, this is not going to be tolerated. But in trying to quell the unrest, Shafik actually feeds it. She ends up leaving student protesters and the faculty who support them feeling betrayed and pushes a campus that was already on edge into a full blown crisis.

[SLOW TEMPO MUSIC]

After the break, what all of this has looked like to a student on Columbia’s campus. We’ll be right back.

[PHONE RINGS]

Is this Isabella?

Yes, this is she.

Hi, Isabella. It’s Michael Barbaro from “The Daily.”

Hi. Nice to meet you.

Earlier this week, we called Isabella Ramírez, the Editor in Chief of Columbia’s undergraduate newspaper, “The Columbia Daily Spectator,” which has been closely tracking both the protests and the University’s response to them since October 7.

So, I mean, in your mind, how do we get to this point? I wonder if you can just briefly describe the key moments that bring us to where we are right now.

Sure. Since October 7, there has certainly been constant escalation in terms of tension on campus. And there have been a variety of moves that I believe have distanced the student body, the faculty, from the University and its administration, specifically the suspension of Columbia’s chapters of Students for Justice in Palestine and Jewish Voice for Peace. And that became a huge moment in what was characterized as suppression of pro-Palestinian activism on campus, effectively rendering those groups, quote, unquote, unauthorized.

What was the college’s explanation for that?

They had cited in that suspension a policy which states that a demonstration must be approved within a certain window, and that there must be an advance notice, and that there’s a process for getting an authorized demonstration. But the primary point was this policy that they were referring to, which we later reported, was changed before the suspension.

So it felt a little ad hoc to people?

Yes, it certainly came as a surprise, especially at “Spectator.” We’re nerds of the University in the sense that we are familiar with faculty and University governance. But even to us, we had no idea where this policy was coming from. And this suspension was really the first time that it entered most students’ sphere.

Columbia’s campus is so known for its activism. And so in my time of being a reporter, of being an editor, I’ve overseen several protests. And I’ve never seen Columbia penalize a group for, quote, unquote, not authorizing a protest. So that was certainly, in our minds, unprecedented.

And I believe part of the justification there was, well, this is a different time. And I think that is a reasonable thing to say. But I think a lot of students, they felt it was particularly one-sided, that it was targeting a specific type of speech or a specific type of viewpoint. Although, the University, of course, in its explicit policies, did not outline, and was actually very explicit about not targeting specific viewpoints —

So just to be super clear, it felt to students — and it sounds like, journalistically, it felt to you — that the University was coming down in a uniquely one-sided way against students who were supporting Palestinian rights and may have expressed some frustrations with Israel in that moment.

Yes. Certainly —

Isabella says that this was just the beginning of a really tense period between student protesters and the University. After those two student groups were suspended, campus protests continued. Students made a variety of demands. They asked that the University divest from businesses that profit from Israel’s military operations in Gaza. But instead of making any progress, the protests are met with further crackdown by the University.

And so as Isabella and her colleagues at the college newspaper see it, there’s this overall chilling effect that occurs. Some students become fearful that if they participate in any demonstrations, they’re going to face disciplinary action. So fast forward now to April, when these student protesters learned that President Shafik is headed to Washington for her congressional testimony. It’s at this moment that they set out to build their encampment.

I think there was obviously a lot of intention in timing those two things. I think it’s inherently a critique on a political pressure and this congressional pressure that we saw build up against, of course, Claudine Gay at Harvard and Magill at UPenn. So I think a lot of students and faculty have been frustrated at this idea that there are not only powers at the University that are dictating what’s happening, but there are perhaps external powers that are also guiding the way here in terms of what the University feels like it must do or has to do.

And I think that timing was super crucial. Having the encampment happen on the Wednesday morning of the hearing was an incredible, in some senses, interesting strategy to direct eyes to different places.

All eyes were going to be on Shafik in DC. But now a lot of eyes are on New York. The encampment is set up in the middle of the night slash morning, prior to the hearing. And so what effectively happens is they caught Shafik when she wasn’t on campus, when a lot of senior administration had their resources dedicated to supporting Shafik in DC.

And you have all of those people not necessarily out of commission, but with their focus elsewhere. So the encampment is met with very little resistance at the beginning. There were public safety officers floating around and watching. But at the very beginning hours, I think there was a sense of, we did it.

[CHANTING]: Disclose! Divest! We will not stop! We will not rest. Disclose! Divest! We will not stop!

It would be quite surprising to anybody and an administrator to now suddenly see dozens of tents on this lawn in a way that I think very purposely puts an imagery of, we’re here to stay. As the morning evolved and congressional hearings continued —

Minouche Shafik, open your eyes! Use of force, genocide!

Then we started seeing University delegates that were coming to the encampment saying, you may face disciplinary action for continuing to be here. I think that started around almost — like 9:00 or 10:00 AM, they started handing out these code of conduct violation notices.

Hell no! Hell no! Hell no!

Then there started to be more public safety action and presence. So they started barricading the entrances. The day progressed, there was more threat of discipline. The students became informed that if they continue to stay, they will face potential academic sanctions, potential suspension.

The more they try to silence us, the louder we will be! The more they —

I think a lot of people were like, OK, you’re threatening us with suspension. But so what?

This is about these systems that Minouche Shafik, that the Board of Trustees, that Columbia University is complicit in.

What are you going to do to try to get us out of here? And that was, obviously, promptly answered.

This is the New York State Police Department.

We will not stop!

You are attempting participate in an unauthorized encampment. You will be arrested and charged with trespassing.

My phone blew up, obviously, from the reporters, from the editors, of saying, oh my god, the NYPD is on our campus. And as soon as I saw that, I came out. And I saw a huge crowd of students and affiliates on campus watching the lawns. And as I circled around that crowd, I saw the last end of the New York Police Department pulling away protesters and clearing out the last of the encampment.

[CHANTING]: We love you! We will get justice for you! We see you! We love you! We will get justice for you! We see you! We love you! We will get justice for you! We see you! We love you! We will get justice for you!

It was something truly unimaginable, over 100 students slash other individuals are arrested from our campus, forcefully removed. And although they were suspended, there was a feeling of traumatic event that has just happened to these students, but also this sense of like, OK, the worst of the worst that could have happened to us just happened.

And for those students who maybe couldn’t go back to — into campus, now all of their peers, who were supporters or are in solidarity, are — in some sense, it’s further emboldened. They’re now not just sitting on the lawns for a pro-Palestinian cause, but also for the students, who have endured quite a lot.

So the crackdown, sought by the president and enforced by the NYPD, ends up, you’re saying, becoming a galvanizing force for a broader group of Columbia students than were originally drawn to the idea of ever showing up on the center of campus and protesting?

Yeah, I can certainly speak to the fact that I’ve seen my own peers, friends, or even acquaintances, who weren’t necessarily previously very involved in activism and organizing efforts, suddenly finding themselves involved.

Can I — I just have a question for you, which is all journalism, student journalism or not student journalism, is a first draft of history. And I wonder if we think of this as a historic moment for Columbia, how you imagine it’s going to be remembered.

Yeah, there is no doubt in my mind that this will be a historic moment for Colombia.

I think that this will be remembered as a moment in which the fractures were laid bare. Really, we got to see some of the disunity of the community in ways that I have never really seen it before. And what we’ll be looking to is, where do we go from here? How does Colombia repair? How do we heal from all of this? so That is the big question in terms of what will happen.

Nick, Isabella Ramírez just walked us through what this has all looked like from the perspective of a Columbia student. And from what she could tell, the crackdown ordered by President Shafik did not quell much of anything. It seemed, instead, to really intensify everything on campus. I’m curious what this has looked like for Shafik.

It’s not just the students who are upset. You have faculty, including professors, who are not necessarily sympathetic to the protesters’ view of the war, who are really outraged about what Shafik has done here. They feel that she’s crossed a boundary that hasn’t been crossed on Columbia’s campus in a really long time.

And so you start to hear things by the end of last week like censure, no confidence votes, questions from her own professors about whether or not she can stay in power. So this creates a whole new front for her. And on top of it all, as this is going on, the encampment itself starts to reform tent-by-tent —

— almost in the same place that it was. And Shafik decides that the most important thing she could do is to try and take the temperature down, which means letting the encampment stand. Or in other words, leaning in the other direction. This time, we’re going to let the protesters have their say for a little while longer.

The problem with that is that, over the weekend, a series of images start to emerge from on campus and just off of it of some really troubling anti-Semitic episodes. In one case, a guy holds up a poster in the middle of campus and points it towards a group of Jewish students who are counter protesting. And it says, I’m paraphrasing here, Hamas’ next targets.

I saw an image of that. What it seemed to evoke was the message that Hamas should murder those Jewish students. That’s the way the Jewish students interpreted it.

It’s a pretty straightforward and jarring statement. At the same time, just outside of Columbia’s closed gates —

Stop killing children!

— protestors are showing up from across New York City. It’s hard to tell who’s affiliated with Columbia, who’s not.

Go back to Poland! Go back to Poland!

There’s a video that goes viral of one of them shouting at Jewish students, go back to Poland, go back to Europe.

In other words, a clear message, you’re not welcome here.

Right. In fact, go back to the places where the Holocaust was committed.

Exactly. And this is not representative of the vast majority of the protesters in the encampment, who mostly had been peaceful. They would later hold a Seder, actually, with some of the pro-Palestinian Jewish protesters in their ranks. But those videos are reaching members of Congress, the very same Republicans that Shafik had testified in front of just a few days before. And now they’re looking and saying, you have lost control of your campus, you’ve turned back on your word to us, and you need to resign.

They call for her outright resignation over this.

That’s right. Republicans in New York and across the country began to call for her to step down from her position as president of Columbia.

So Shafik’s dilemma here is pretty extraordinary. She has set up this dynamic where pleasing these members of Congress would probably mean calling in the NYPD all over again to sweep out this encampment, which would mean further alienating and inflaming students and faculty, who are still very upset over the first crackdown. And now both ends of this spectrum, lawmakers in Washington, folks on the Columbia campus, are saying she can’t lead the University over this situation before she’s even made any fateful decision about what to do with this second encampment. Not a good situation.

No. She’s besieged on all sides. For a while, the only thing that she can come up with to offer is for classes to go hybrid for the remainder of the semester.

So students who aren’t feeling safe in this protest environment don’t necessarily have to go to class.

Right. And I think if we zoom out for a second, it’s worth bearing in mind that she tried to choose a different path here than her counterparts at Harvard or Penn. And after all of this, she’s kind of ended up in the exact same thicket, with people calling for her job with the White House, the Mayor of New York City, and others. These are Democrats. Maybe not calling on her to resign quite yet, but saying, I don’t know what’s going on your campus. This does not look good.

That reality, that taking a different tack that was supposed to be full of learnings and lessons from the stumbles of her peers, the fact that didn’t really work suggests that there’s something really intractable going on here. And I wonder how you’re thinking about this intractable situation that’s now arrived on these college campuses.

Well, I don’t think it’s just limited to college campuses. We have seen intense feelings about this conflict play out in Hollywood. We’ve seen them in our politics in all kinds of interesting ways.

In our media.

We’ve seen it in the media. But college campuses, at least in their most idealized form, are something special. They’re a place where students get to go for four years to think in big ways about moral questions, and political questions, and ideas that help shape the world they’re going to spend the rest of their lives in.

And so when you have a question that feels as urgent as this war does for a lot of people, I think it reverberates in an incredibly intense way on those campuses. And there’s something like — I don’t know if it’s quite a contradiction of terms, but there’s a collision of different values at stake. So universities thrive on the ability of students to follow their minds and their voices where they go, to maybe even experiment a little bit and find those things.

But there are also communities that rely on people being able to trust each other and being able to carry out their classes and their academic endeavors as a collective so they can learn from one another. So in this case, that’s all getting scrambled. Students who feel strongly about the Palestinian cause feel like the point is disruption, that something so big, and immediate, and urgent is happening that they need to get in the faces of their professors, and their administrators, and their fellow students.

Right. And set up an encampment in the middle of campus, no matter what the rules say.

Right. And from the administration’s perspective, they say, well, yeah, you can say that and you can think that. And that’s an important process. But maybe there’s some bad apples in your ranks. Or though you may have good intentions, you’re saying things that you don’t realize the implications of. And they’re making this environment unsafe for others. Or they’re grinding our classes to a halt and we’re not able to function as a University.

So the only way we’re going to be able to move forward is if you will respect our rules and we’ll respect your point of view. The problem is that’s just not happening. Something is not connecting with those two points of view. And as if that’s not hard enough, you then have Congress and the political system with its own agenda coming in and putting its thumb on a scale of an already very difficult situation.

Right. And at this very moment, what we know is that the forces that you just outlined have created a dilemma, an uncertainty of how to proceed, not just for President Shafik and the students and faculty at Columbia, but for a growing number of colleges and universities across the country. And by that, I mean, this thing that seemed to start at Columbia is literally spreading.

Absolutely. We’re talking on a Wednesday afternoon. And these encampments have now started cropping up at universities from coast-to-coast, at Harvard and Yale, but also at University of California, at the University of Texas, at smaller campuses in between. And at each of these institutions, there’s presidents and deans, just like President Shafik at Columbia, who are facing a really difficult set of choices. Do they call in the police? The University of Texas in Austin this afternoon, we saw protesters physically clashing with police.

Do they hold back, like at Harvard, where there were dramatic videos of students literally running into Harvard yard with tents. They were popping up in real-time. And so Columbia, really, I think, at the end of the day, may have kicked off some of this. But they are now in league with a whole bunch of other universities that are struggling with the same set of questions. And it’s a set of questions that they’ve had since this war broke out.

And now these schools only have a week or two left of classes. But we don’t know when these standoffs are going to end. We don’t know if students are going to leave campus for the summer. We don’t know if they’re going to come back in the fall and start protesting right away, or if this year is going to turn out to have been an aberration that was a response to a really awful, bloody war, or if we’re at the beginning of a bigger shift on college campuses that will long outlast this war in the Middle East.

Well, Nick, thank you very much. Thanks for having me, Michael.

We’ll be right back.

Here’s what else you need to know today. The United Nations is calling for an independent investigation into two mass graves found after Israeli forces withdrew from hospitals in Gaza. Officials in Gaza said that some of the bodies found in the graves were Palestinians who had been handcuffed or shot in the head and accused Israel of killing and burying them. In response, Israel said that its soldiers had exhumed bodies in one of the graves as part of an effort to locate Israeli hostages.

And on Wednesday, Hamas released a video of Hersh Goldberg-Polin, an Israeli-American dual citizen, whom Hamas has held hostage since October 7. It was the first time that he has been shown alive since his captivity began. His kidnapping was the subject of a “Daily” episode in October that featured his mother, Rachel. In response to Hamas’s video, Rachel issued a video of her own, in which she spoke directly to her son.

And, Hersh, if you can hear this, we heard your voice today for the first time in 201 days. And if you can hear us, I am telling you, we are telling you, we love you. Stay strong. Survive.

Today’s episode was produced by Sydney Harper, Asthaa Chaturvedi, Olivia Natt, Nina Feldman, and Summer Thomad, with help from Michael Simon Johnson. It was edited by Devon Taylor and Lisa Chow, contains research help by Susan Lee, original music by Marion Lozano and Dan Powell, and was engineered by Chris Wood. Our theme music is by Jim Brunberg and Ben Landsverk of Wonderly. That’s it for “The Daily.” I’m Michael Barbaro. See you tomorrow.

• April 26, 2024   •   21:50 Harvey Weinstein Conviction Thrown Out
• April 25, 2024   •   40:33 The Crackdown on Student Protesters
• April 24, 2024   •   32:18 Is $60 Billion Enough to Save Ukraine?
• April 23, 2024   •   30:30 A Salacious Conspiracy or Just 34 Pieces of Paper?
• April 22, 2024   •   24:30 The Evolving Danger of the New Bird Flu
• April 19, 2024   •   30:42 The Supreme Court Takes Up Homelessness
• April 18, 2024   •   30:07 The Opening Days of Trump’s First Criminal Trial
• April 17, 2024   •   24:52 Are ‘Forever Chemicals’ a Forever Problem?
• April 16, 2024   •   29:29 A.I.’s Original Sin
• April 15, 2024   •   24:07 Iran’s Unprecedented Attack on Israel
• April 14, 2024   •   46:17 The Sunday Read: ‘What I Saw Working at The National Enquirer During Donald Trump’s Rise’
• April 12, 2024   •   34:23 How One Family Lost $900,000 in a Timeshare Scam

Hosted by Michael Barbaro

Featuring Nicholas Fandos

Produced by Sydney Harper ,  Asthaa Chaturvedi ,  Olivia Natt ,  Nina Feldman and Summer Thomad

With Michael Simon Johnson

Edited by Devon Taylor and Lisa Chow

Original music by Marion Lozano and Dan Powell

Engineered by Chris Wood

Listen and follow The Daily Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Amazon Music

Columbia University has become the epicenter of a growing showdown between student protesters, college administrators and Congress over the war in Gaza and the limits of free speech.

Nicholas Fandos, who covers New York politics and government for The Times, walks us through the intense week at the university. And Isabella Ramírez, the editor in chief of Columbia’s undergraduate newspaper, explains what it has all looked like to a student on campus.

On today’s episode

Nicholas Fandos , who covers New York politics and government for The New York Times

Isabella Ramírez , editor in chief of The Columbia Daily Spectator

Background reading

Inside the week that shook Columbia University .

The protests at the university continued after more than 100 arrests.

There are a lot of ways to listen to The Daily. Here’s how.

We aim to make transcripts available the next workday after an episode’s publication. You can find them at the top of the page.

Research help by Susan Lee .

The Daily is made by Rachel Quester, Lynsea Garrison, Clare Toeniskoetter, Paige Cowett, Michael Simon Johnson, Brad Fisher, Chris Wood, Jessica Cheung, Stella Tan, Alexandra Leigh Young, Lisa Chow, Eric Krupke, Marc Georges, Luke Vander Ploeg, M.J. Davis Lin, Dan Powell, Sydney Harper, Mike Benoist, Liz O. Baylen, Asthaa Chaturvedi, Rachelle Bonja, Diana Nguyen, Marion Lozano, Corey Schreppel, Rob Szypko, Elisheba Ittoop, Mooj Zadie, Patricia Willens, Rowan Niemisto, Jody Becker, Rikki Novetsky, John Ketchum, Nina Feldman, Will Reid, Carlos Prieto, Ben Calhoun, Susan Lee, Lexie Diao, Mary Wilson, Alex Stern, Dan Farrell, Sophia Lanman, Shannon Lin, Diane Wong, Devon Taylor, Alyssa Moxley, Summer Thomad, Olivia Natt, Daniel Ramirez and Brendan Klinkenberg.

Our theme music is by Jim Brunberg and Ben Landsverk of Wonderly. Special thanks to Sam Dolnick, Paula Szuchman, Lisa Tobin, Larissa Anderson, Julia Simon, Sofia Milan, Mahima Chablani, Elizabeth Davis-Moorer, Jeffrey Miranda, Renan Borelli, Maddy Masiello, Isabella Anderson and Nina Lassam.

Nicholas Fandos is a Times reporter covering New York politics and government. More about Nicholas Fandos

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Singapore Changi Airport’s passenger traffic for Q1 2024 exceeds pre-pandemic levels

Friday, 26 Apr 2024

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SINGAPORE (The Straits Times/ANN): Some 16.5 million passengers passed through Changi Airport in the first quarter of 2024, surpassing pre-Covid-19 levels on a quarterly basis for the first time, as China became the airport’s top market for the quarter.

This was a 0.5 per cent increase from what the airport handled in the first quarter of 2019, airport operator Changi Airport Group (CAG) said in a statement on April 25.

The airport handled 5.43 million passenger movements in January 2024 (96 per cent of the levels seen in January 2019), 5.35 million movements in February 2024 (104.3 per cent of that seen in February 2019), and 5.73 million movements in March 2024 (101.7 per cent of that registered in March 2019).

In the first quarter of 2023, 13 million passengers passed through the airport.

Changi Airport’s top five markets for the first quarter of 2024 were China, Indonesia, Malaysia, Australia and Thailand. In 2023, these were Indonesia, Malaysia, Australia, Thailand and India, with China in sixth place.

CAG said the roll-out on Feb 9 of a mutual 30-day visa-exemption arrangement between Singapore and China boosted travel between both countries, propelling China to the top spot for the quarter.

For the first three months of 2024, Denpasar (Bali), Manila, Taipei, Seoul and Shanghai were among the top 10 cities that outperformed the first quarter of 2019 by more than 10 per cent.

For the quarter, 89,400 flights departed or arrived at the airport – 94 per cent of the movements in the first quarter of 2019.

In comparison, there were 74,200 aircraft movements in the same quarter a year ago.

Between January and March, traffic to and from most regions recovered to or surpassed 2019 levels, with North America emerging as the strongest performer, with traffic exceeding pre-pandemic levels by 25 per cent for the quarter.

From January to March, airfreight throughput, or air cargo movements, totalled 475,000 tonnes, up 14 per cent from the same period in 2023, marking the first quarter of year-on-year growth after seven straight quarters of decline.

This was due largely to strong transshipment performance, especially for air cargo flows with China.

Speaking at the annual Changi Airline Awards on April 25 at The Fullerton Hotel Singapore, Transport Minister Chee Hong Tat said Changi’s passenger traffic in the first quarter of 2024 was a significant milestone for Singapore’s aviation industry.

“We look forward to the continued growth of passenger traffic at Changi, and will work towards our goal of exceeding pre-Covid passenger traffic levels for the full year.

“We have seen through the worst of the pandemic and emerged stronger together,” he said at the award ceremony, which honoured the airport’s airline partners for their contribution to Changi Airport’s growth as a global air hub.

Mr Chee outlined several areas to position Changi Airport for future growth, reiterating that construction on the upcoming Terminal 5 is on track to begin in 2025.

The terminal is set to be operational in the mid-2030s.

Aviation workers, he said, will also need to pick up new and relevant skills, and jobs may be redesigned, as the airport taps technology such as automation and assistive tools to augment the human workforce and raise productivity of labour-intensive roles.

Speaking at the ceremony, CAG chief executive Lee Seow Hiang said a shortage of manpower will be a major challenge for Changi Airport in the mid to long term.

“We have done deep automation in the last few years, and we are now on the cusp of a new phase with the impending launch of document-free travel by the end of this year.

“Using your biometrics... as the key to identity verification, we can reduce the need for passengers to repeatedly present travel documents... at many touchpoints,” he said.

The improvement will be transformational, Mr Lee said.

“By challenging the conventional norms in our business, we hope to take a step closer to our vision of an airport of the future well before T5 opens,” he added.

Mr Lee also gave more details about a planned new hotel at Terminal 2, the third landside hotel at the airport. Landside refers to areas of the airport that are before immigration clearance and accessible to the public.

He said the hotel – billed as Singapore’s first zero-energy hotel – will be ready in 2028 and have more than 250 rooms, and will be positioned to appeal to the younger set. It will be directly accessible from the terminal’s departure hall via a linkway.

Mr Chee thanked Mr Lee, who will step down on July 1 after 15 years at the helm of CAG, for spearheading Changi Airport’s growth and development.

“Seow Hiang’s vision and steadfast leadership has transformed Changi into a leading global air hub, and taken the airport through the darkest days of Covid-19, and seen through Changi’s recovery after the pandemic,” he said.

Mr Yam Kum Weng, CAG’s executive vice-president for airport development, who has been leading the Changi East project, where T5 will be sited, will succeed Mr Lee.

Mr Lee declined comment when asked by The Straits Times about his post-CAG plans, at the award ceremony.

At the event, CAG named Shanghai-based China Eastern Airlines its partner of the year for the carrier’s significant efforts in expanding Changi Airport’s connectivity to China.

The 2023 winner for this category was Singapore Airlines, for its role in driving Changi Airport’s passenger traffic recovery in 2022 as the world rebounded from the Covid-19 pandemic.

In 2023, China Eastern Airlines launched four new links, including a new route from Beijing Daxing International Airport, making Changi Airport its first South-east Asia point. The other new direct links for the airline are to Hefei, Nanjing and Hangzhou.

With the increased services, China Eastern Airlines operated a total of 52 weekly services between Singapore and China as at December 2023. - The Straits Times/ANN

Tags / Keywords: Singapore , Changi Airport , Passengers

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