Early in 2022, groups of young students gathered in the school cafeteria in Elizabethton, Tennessee, to sound out words like “ball.” Tutors patiently helped each child blend the letter sounds together.
The school’s principal offered a prescient warning. He worried the state wouldn’t extend the corps once federal funding ran out. That happened last summer.
“Things that we know work, like tutoring, using proven curriculum and instructional strategies, especially for literacy and math, those really still are lagging,” says Robin Lake, director of the Center on Reinventing Public Education.
SOURCE:
National Center for Education Statistics
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Jacob Turcotte/Staff
The learning loss kids experienced, and how it hit students in lower-income schools hardest , is one of the thorniest legacies of the pandemic. Education reformers are calling for more innovation , like bringing in-school tutoring back. Families are looking to alternative models: Homeschooling, while past its pandemic peak, accounts for 4% of the school-age population , up a percentage point since 2016. Charter school enrollment is up nearly 12%.
As the long-term recovery continues, the school in the Tennessee mountains offers a lesson. Students and teachers find joy in mastering the ABCs, but it takes persistence.
– Chelsea Sheasley, national news staff editor and former education writer
In China, an economic hit from striving for “zero-COVID”
Each time I bicycled to the tiny tea shop off a residential alley in Beijing, the talkative owner told me a little more of her story.
Hailing from the tea-rich Fujian province in southeastern China, she’d moved to Beijing with her husband and young son several years earlier to launch her shop. Business was brisk, she said, until some of the strictest pandemic lockdowns struck Beijing hard in early 2022. “Now, it’s horrible,” she complained in her rapid-fire Fujianese accent, surrounded by shelves full of tea but no buyers.
A man wearing a protective face mask passes groceries through the barricades blocking a residential area in Wuhan in central China’s Hubei province, Feb. 23, 2020.
Traveling around China, I’ve asked scores of small entrepreneurs how their businesses are faring. Most of the time, they say, “It’s no good.” Months of mandatory closures ate away their savings – and too few customers have so far returned.
I often thought about the costs of Chinese leader Xi Jinping’s insistence that authorities strive for zero COVID-19 cases. This top-down policy required massive testing and quarantining of the population, coupled with sealing off vast cities and shuttering most businesses whenever tiny outbreaks occurred. The policy proved untenable and was lifted in December 2022, but China’s economy is still struggling to recover.
The Chinese are adjusting to this new normal. A young graduate student in central China, hard put to find a job, said she’s pursuing a more laid-back lifestyle.
In Beijing, I pedaled to the tea shop to find that the hard-working owner had taken on a new gig to try to make ends meet. She’d turned her shop into a distribution point to help neighbors save on delivery charges – capturing a small return for herself.
“Sorry, I’ll be with you in just a minute!” she told me, as she sorted a grocery order. “No problem!” I said, smiling. My tea could wait.
– Ann Scott Tyson, Beijing bureau chief
Pandemic response spurs youth activism in Africa
When I moved to South Africa from the U.S. a decade ago, at the age of 25, many people in my life wondered why. By then, the country’s glittering moment as Nelson Mandela’s rainbow nation seemed firmly in the past. Instead, it was in the uncertain throes of adolescence, beset by corruption scandals and political infighting.
But I was struck how impermanent these troubles felt to many South Africans my age. In the U.S., I had been raised to believe that ideas and institutions changed slowly. Young South Africans, on the other hand, lived in a society that had transformed radically less than a generation before. For them, the country’s future was wet clay, nearly totally malleable, and they were eager to get their hands dirty. As I traveled Africa, the world’s youngest continent, I saw this kind of hope and determination everywhere.
Over the last few years, I have watched as the pandemic and its aftermath cranked up the volume on the ambition of young Africans to build societies more just and democratic than those of their parents and grandparents. From Nigeria to Senegal to Kenya, young people have poured into the streets. They were protesting leaders they say failed them during the pandemic, whether in the form of restricting personal and political freedoms in the name of disease control, or failing to shield their populations from a tanking global economy.
People hold a poster and their national flag, during a nationwide strike called by Mozambique presidential candidate Venâncio Mondlane to protest the provisional election results in Maputo, Mozambique, Oct. 21, 2024. The pandemic awakened greater political activism in Africa.
Even when those protests have been brutally suppressed, as in Mozambique, where hundreds of young people died protesting a highly disputed election last year, their demands remain urgent. One young woman there, Estância Nhaca, told my colleague Samuel Comé something that echoes across the continent.
“It’s not over yet.”
– Ryan Lenora Brown, Africa editor
Returning to places of worship
The pandemic’s effect on faith services was drastic. Houses of faith stopped holding in-person services overnight. Congregants found themselves worshipping alone at home over Zoom, rather than sitting shoulder to shoulder with their community. Some houses of worship sued states, arguing that closure orders aimed at public health were harming religious freedom. Faith leaders worried congregations wouldn’t return, that the pandemic might spell a precipitous drop in an American religious life that was already becoming more secular.
Their worries were not unfounded. Over the past several decades, researchers had tracked a steady pattern of religious decline. But a surprise emerged from the pandemic: Over the past five years, the number of religious Americans has stabilized.
The Rev. Steven Paulikas, right, and curate Spencer Cantrell deliver an evening prayer service over Facebook Live in the Brooklyn borough of New York, on March 29, 2020. The pandemic forced widespread cancellations of in-person services.
About 24% of U.S. adults said their faith grew stronger as a result of the pandemic, according to a survey by the Pew Research Center in 2020. Only about 2% said their faith became weaker. In Pew’s newest survey on religion, concluded last year, some 83% said they believe in God or a universal spirit.
“Cognitively, this sense of faith getting stronger or deeper or more mature from the pandemic may have contributed to the stability we’ve seen in the past few years, maybe not causing religious growth overall, but at least halting the pattern of decline,” says Chip Rotolo, a religion and public life research associate at Pew.
Communities typically pull together in the face of disaster – though a global pandemic is many degrees larger than other examples, says Dr. Rotolo. After the Sept. 11 attacks in 2001, Pew data showed unity among religious communities across the U.S.
Today, most people who would normally attend faith services in person are back to doing so. “There can be a sense, when events like this happen, that people want to seek meaningful community like they might find in their religious communities, or start being more engaged,” he says.
– Sophie Hills, religion writer
On campus and beyond, a harsher edge to politics
The pandemic acted as a catalyst for political radicalization. Social isolation and rampant online misinformation combined to push many people into more extreme political positions – and in some cases, actions.
On my college campus, I saw students suddenly itching to have an outlet for their frustrations. After the murder of George Floyd in May 2020, Black Lives Matter protests erupted across the U.S. While the majority were peaceful, some resulted in looting and arson as protesters descended on deserted downtowns. The Jan. 6, 2021, riot at the U.S. Capitol was a shocking outburst of political violence, as Trump supporters attempted to disrupt the peaceful transition of power.
A March 2021 survey found 15% of Americans agreed that “Because things have gotten so far off track, true American patriots may have to resort to violence in order to save our country.” That number rose to 23% in September 2023, but dipped back down to 18% this past fall.
More recently, we’ve seen the once-unthinkable glorification on social media of Luigi Mangione, the man accused of murdering UnitedHealthCare CEO Brian Thompson. And there’s been an increase in threats against politicians. In 2018, the Capitol Police investigated 5,206 threats against members of Congress; in 2021, it investigated 9,625. The number has been above 8,000 ever since.
– Nate Iglehart, staff writer
Mexico’s informal workers persist – without security nets
For many informal workers, like Obdulia Montealegre Guzmán, who sells corn-based treats like huaraches at outdoor markets in Mexico City, making it through the pandemic with her business and family intact came down to ingenuity.
“We stayed home for a month, but never really stopped working,” says Ms. Montealegre. Her daughter helped create a marketing plan for her parents on social media. They now accept to-go orders via WhatsApp, greatly upping daily sales.
A street food vendor has a microrestaurant set up on the Plaza de la Santisima in Mexico City Sept. 17, 2019. Almost 60% of Mexican laborers are considered informal wage-earners.
I have been in touch with Ms. Montealegre several times over the past five years. She has always had an optimistic outlook, even when she was wrapping her business in industrial-size plastic wrap as an early-days health measure against the spread of COVID-19. But I was surprised to hear that today, she sees the pandemic squarely in the rearview mirror.
Challenges facing her and her neighbors – from growing inflation to a weakening peso – have no through lines to the pandemic, she says. It’s more a reflection of governments that for decades haven’t managed the economy well. Almost 60% of Mexican laborers are considered informal wage-earners who don’t have access to social security or employment benefits like paid leave.
There was no notable drop in trust in public officials in Mexico following the pandemic, in part because that trust has historically been low in Mexico and in the region. Data from Latinobarómetro, a regional polling firm, found that only 1 in 5 people in Latin America expressed trust in their governments between 2009 and 2018, for example.
“This kind of work is really exhausting and means just hustling all the time,” says Ms. Montealegre. “But our challenges long predated COVID.”
– Whitney Eulich, Latin America editor
In a changed workplace, will in-person work make a comeback?
My first newsroom, which housed the student newspaper I worked for in college, was dynamic. It was filled with activity as we whipped stories into shape, argued over grammar, and gently coaxed the best out of each other. I assumed that professional newsrooms would also be hotbeds of activity where you could learn through osmosis.
But the reality was less romantic. When I started at the Monitor in 2023, the pandemic had emptied out offices, newsrooms included. The spirited discussions that for me defined journalism mostly happened on Zoom or Slack.
As the youngest person on staff, I wondered how this would affect my career. Some researchers say that when you’re just starting out, working in person is essential for learning. One friend, a software engineer, once texted me that he “can actively feel [his] career growing faster” when he works face-to-face.
Now, even as many employers aim for a greater return to offices, this challenge is affecting not just the news media but a host of industries.
SOURCE:
Jose Maria Barrero, Nicholas Bloom, and Steven J. Davis, 2021. “Why working from home will stick,” National Bureau of Economic Research (data from March 2020 – February 2025)
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Jacob Turcotte/Staff
It’s not that newsroom camaraderie is gone. I still feel connected to my colleagues, even if edits happen over Zoom. Yet it’s hard to imagine that workplaces will ever be quite the same.
Today, as people trickle back to the office, we’re getting some of that old newsroom energy back. And though how we come together has changed, one thing hasn’t: Journalism – or, really, any work – can only happen through collaboration.
– Cameron Pugh, staff writer and editor
This article was reported by Stephanie Hanes in Northampton, Massachusetts; Story Hinckley in Richmond, Virginia, Erika Page in Madrid (with pandemic visits to Sweden); Chelsea Sheasley in Boston; Ann Scott Tyson in Seattle and Beijing; Ryan Lenora Brown in Johannesburg; Sophie Hills in Washington; Nate Iglehart in Boston; Whitney Eulich in Mexico City; and Cameron Pugh in Boston.
