Schools Face Student Mental Health Issues

Rates of depression and anxiety for students have increased due to learning loss from the pandemic, researchers have found, with a bigger impact on students of color. Especially for urban school systems like Milwaukee, the mental health of its students can greatly complicate major learning loss. How these schools react to getting students back on track is crucial and changing views on the importance of standardized testing are part of the issue.

When No Child Left Behind became law in 2002, schools quickly focused on standardized tests that would be used to evaluate schools. Failing schools could be closed, turned over to other providers or restructured. Music, art and gym classes were often reduced and took a backseat to what critics called “drill and kill,” continually going over the type of questions on the test while killing any interest in real education. Educational researchers concluded that little was learned and less retained.

A backlash developed, and NCLB was replaced in 2015 with the Every Student Succeeds Act that lessened standardized tests and added other measurements to get a more rounded picture of school outcomes. Schools began adding the arts and other programs back to the curriculum.

Then the pandemic hit. Test scores plummeted and combating “learning loss” became a new focus.

Yong Zhao, a Foundations Distinguished Professor in the school of education at the University of Kansas worries that we may again get fixated on test scores, to the detriment of the education and mental health of our children. He was a keynote speaker at the Wisconsin public education convention in Milwaukee in 2020.

In his 2021 essay, “Build back better: Avoid the learning loss trap,” Zhao cautions that we must not repeat the mistakes of the recent past. Our response can “lead post-pandemic education in the wrong direction,” and “Governments may decide to launch standardized assessments to track students’ learning losses.” This could lead to the narrowing of the curriculum once again to mostly math and reading, ignoring losses in other disciplines and skill areas. “Test scores have often been found to have a negative correlation with students’ confidence and well-being,” he writes. And simple test scores are not a good measurement of future success. If too much effort is placed on remediation, it may damage students’ curiosity and active engagement with learning.

Recent data from Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction shows that students have significant mental health needs coming out of the pandemic.

Ann Reyes, a school psychologist at Madison’s East High School and an officer of the Wisconsin School Psychologists Association, notes that some students, even before the pandemic, had significant social anxiety issues. The pandemic allowed these students to stay at home and connect to their classes remotely online. But this allowed them to avoid social interactions, and they may have lost some ability to maintain or develop social coping skills necessary for human interaction. When they returned in-person to the classroom, “the after effects have thrown their anxiety into a tailspin,” she says.

When students have been out of school for so long, Reyes says, teachers must reteach them what it means to be a student. Just the concept of getting to class on time and understanding what grades are all about has been lost. Attendance in the Madison district is significantly lower. “We need kids to be invested in their own education again.”

The issue affects Milwaukee Public Schools, says Kimberly Merath, supervisor of Social and Emotional Learning for MPS. “There has already been pressure to improve academic achievement and raise test scores. It has been exasperated because of the pandemic,” she notes. “Schools, administrators and teachers feel the pressure to focus on academics and raise test scores because we are held accountable to those things [on the state report cards.].” But she points out that pressure is more internally in the mind of educators than from central administration.

“The pandemic is just one of many social issues that are exasperating the mental health needs of our kids,” says Merath. “Students that are more economically disadvantaged, who live in some of those under resourced areas of the city, potentially exposes them to more risk factors, make them potentially unable to access services.” Healthcare facilities are often located far from where they live and getting there can mean a long bus ride.

When in-person education returned in 2021, MPS provided in-service training for its educators to welcome students back, states Merath. That training has continued. MPS is struggling to provide services to its students because of a shortage of mental health clinicians. The district has contracted with several social service agencies to fill in the gaps. But even those agencies have been having trouble finding enough clinicians to fill the needs. Short term, MPS is partnering with clinicians to use teletherapy where students can interact with a clinician through a computer link.

Merath says we should not separate academic progress from emotional wellbeing. “Art, music and gym are helping to build some of those protective factors in kids,” she says. How teachers organize student learning can contribute to that growth. Teachers can utilize project-based learning, group work and partnership work, thus helping to build friendships and provide opportunities to be creative.

Zhao says the pandemic has forever changed education. Going forward, he says, we must educate the whole child beyond just the tests. We need to treat each student individually and engage families. We should engage learners as partners rather than just receivers of education. And at schools that have developed remote and online education successfully; we need to build upon those modes of education.

But Zhao takes a positive view of the challenge. “The pandemic, with its huge impact on education,” he says, “is a rare opportunity for us to rebuild our education.”