With schools around the country examining their options on how to educate despite the ongoing pandemic, it is critical to take a clear look at the potential impact of moving to distance learning. The effects of distance learning on the local community will be measured in decades not years. The returns on education are cumulative over the course of a person’s lifetime and impact far more than the individual alone. One might suspect that the sudden reorganization of our schooling infrastructure into distance learning will not yield the same level of quality as years previous. But what can current research tell us about this achievement gap between the students who will distance learn this year and the counterfactual brick-and-mortar schooling they would otherwise receive?

A 2011 paper by Raj Chetty suggests a good elementary teacher can increase a student’s lifetime earnings by up to 1% each year, because good teachers help students strengthen their social skills and character traits, in addition to teaching the material. Over the course of a career, that difference can spiral into hundreds of thousands of dollars of lifetime earnings, which in turn can be the difference between a community attracting investment or stagnating and backsliding.

Can these non-cognitive skills be passed on remotely? Can a teacher bring two students together to resolve conflict when there is extraordinarily little social interaction happening under her eye? Can a remote school provide good examples and a sense of belonging through civil rites? The answer seems obviously to be no. So, the value of good elementary teachers as leaders of civic virtue will be lost for distance learners this year, and 2020 will initiate the first catastrophic step backward in education in this country’s history.

Socialization effects are one thing, but what can we expect from academics? Unfortunately, the picture there inspires little hope. Graduation rates at virtual charter schools hover around 50% compared to the public-school average of 84%, according to a 2019 analysis from the National Education Policy Center. While the defenders of virtual charter schools say they are helping disadvantaged students, their detractors point out that virtual schools are enrolling a lower rate of low-income students than national brick-and-mortar schools. There is no reason to adjudicate this dispute now, but it is possible that students who enroll in virtual charters for some reason were having a hard time “making it” in a brick and mortar environment, regardless of their socioeconomic status, say because of behavioral issues or a teen pregnancy. Perhaps, but this defense still points to the importance of the social dynamics of school which coerce otherwise failed students to hand in those three missing assignments that will allow them to skirt by with a ‘D.’ Maybe the difference between these two hypothetical students is only social, not academic. But the academic and communal aspects of school are linked, and having the right social environment makes learning Algebra possible.

Consequently, we should expect distance learners to have achievement levels closer to virtual charter schools than to the public-school average. And hence the academic losses will be severe. The National Education Policy Center’s 2019 report on virtual schools cites a half-dozen statewide reports each revealing lower achievement on statewide tests for reading and especially mathematics. A similar deficit seems highly likely for 2020-2021, a year in which Spring quarter came to a screeching halt, summer offered few remedial educational programs, and Fall will return many students to distance learning without all the added benefits of three quarters of rapport and camaraderie within the classroom as happened last year. Digital truancy and absenteeism have already proven hard to stop and remedial help harder to provide.

If these deficiencies are not addressed before graduation, graduation rates will fall. According to Lochner and Moretti’s 2004 study the societal benefit of a 1% increase in male graduation rates is worth more than $2 billion. With graduation rates poised to go other direction, we may see devastating long-term effects on the local community. Opportunities for continued education and better jobs will shrivel up as the achievement gap among students becomes palpable. The second order effects will include poorer families, increased criminality, and a decrease in ability to adapt and contribute to our complex society.

However, this gloomy picture is not our fate. Online charters typically have high student-teacher ratios and low engagement. Since teachers are teaching their normal group of students, teacher-student ratios will not become worse. Schools still have many resources to bring to students’ neighborhoods. Remedial help might be offered in person. Perhaps, some social capital from years previous will carry over and mitigate the losses. And many of the students in these classes will know each other and will certainly be spending their afternoons playing together. Already many schools, like Macomb Illinois Public School, are bussing food to families twice a day. All these things could help, but parents will be stressed, supervision scarce, and the many cracks in our systems threaten to become fateful chasms.

There is still hope that schools will find ways to test and trace, that lockdowns will become dynamic and based on community spread of the virus, that a daily testing regime will surface allowing us to measure whether individuals are infectious, and that districts will support remedial help for those who quite literally need their hands held. For years, staunch public-school advocates have declared the irreplaceability of the traditional model, given its better educational outcomes than distance learning, especially for disadvantaged students, and teachers have been building their pedagogies on social-emotional learning which requires in-person interaction to be most effective. Now is a good time to try to maximize the public schools’ capacity to provide quality education, despite necessary restrictions.

At the same time, this unfortunate disruption opens new opportunities for us as a society to experiment and build better educational models (in the full sense of that word: ‘educational’) and to work with our local communities to make systems which suit them. In the future, we will see far more hybrid schools which blend brick-and-mortar instruction with at-home practice, microschools which gather students into small educational groups with a professional facilitator, homeschooling pods and co-ops as thousands of people have already joined Facebook groups with the intent to homeschool in the past few months. Both parents and educators will be iterating over these models, fashioning them from the ground up to rebuild civil society, improve academic accomplishment, and prepare the way for greater social flourishing. The wreckage in education might be severe, but resolute communities who find a way to educate anyway will become the new leaders in America.

There is no better way to perpetuate and reinforce brutal high school social hierarchy and favoritism than with a house system. That, at least, was my first experience of houses as a high school student. There were four houses which would compete in three projects a year upon which they would be judged and given points. In addition, teachers could give and take away points at will. Favoritism was rife, the ad hoc character of the program was extremely evident even to this fairly dense participant. Seeing people get rewarded for random things and fail to get punished for others served to heighten the sense of cosmic injustice that I felt was becoming a ubiquitous feature of my world. If I had read Harry Potter, I would have known that the Wizarding World suffered from a similarly high level of under-evolved social reward mechanisms.

However, despite the wretchedness of the system I was a part of, I still felt some love and solidarity for my house. It was one of few instances where I was able to hang out with students above my grade level and work alongside them on a project. When the program was disbanded, I felt it was the rightful death of terribly dysfunctional system. Nonetheless, wistful waves of nostalgia stopped me from rejoicing. When I set out to create a House System myself it began with one grade level. A teacher and I decided to split the freshman class into three groups for competitions. Between the two of us we taught this group over half of their courses, so by dividing them up into semi-permanent groups we would have ready-made teams which could compete for points that would accumulate across all four classes. There was no way to lose points, each game had the rules for points laid out beforehand, and the teams were designed by myself and the other teacher.

We created three teams because three divides into more numbers than four and because teams of four would be too small within a grade level. That was the beginning. In those days we had a lot of fun socially engineering the teams in different ways as my fellow teacher and I would switch up student teams each quarter. But the ultimate form of the house system was a random draw of the cards. The key reason for this was that we feared that any system which allowed for partiality would end in partiality. I didn’t want people seeing the house they were selected into as the arbitrary whim of a human, but like the Sorting Hat’s Song and pronouncement, something outside of human hands. Trust to the heart of the cards, to Providence.

Reading A Cooperative Species alerted me to social concepts of fairness and reward in behavioral economics. A key takeaway for me was that in iterated games people would tend towards cooperation and that people are generally altruistic if they are recognized for their altruism and see free riders get punished. It was around these ideas that I tried to fashion the official House System.

The first rule in my mind was that everyone had to have equal opportunity for points. Thus, points could only be acquired through clearly defined rules: like an A on a test or essay, taking the SAT, working on the Virtue of the Month project, winning in a classroom game. There would be no way to lose points. This would be a system for positive reinforcement only.

The second rule was to actually tell students when they received points, either orally or in writing. It is hard to be motivated or feel positive reinforcement from rewards you didn’t know you received. In addition, the house points total had to be public knowledge so that students who, for example, received an A on a test would both see the mark of PLUS ONE POINT on the paper and see the number on the BIG BOARD rise. In this way, individual excellence helps the whole team.

The third rule was being on the lookout for free riders. I have only been able so far to punish one level of free-rider: the egregious foot dragger, i.e. students who don’t show up to house (or are perpetually late). The secretary of each house brings me an attendance sheet afterwards so that I can discipline students who are late (or if you prefer verbosity “use self-reflective behavioral alteration techniques to encourage positive socialization”).

Each of the Three Houses has three months for which they create activities promoting the Virtue of the Month by any means they can. The House as whole receives points for the inventiveness and effectiveness of their virtue program.

In practice, I knew that this would go poorly the first few years as students had to be coached towards making the system work. And indeed, there is still lots of room for improvement (I will discuss the numerous weaknesses in a moment). One key innovation in the past two years having each house elect officers which then make up the Student Council. This created a group of mobilizing agents who have enough clout to encourage their peers to participate and get things done for their house, like homeroom cleanup at the end of the day.

Students (usually elected members) sometimes come to me and say that their house is too chaotic, that “no one cares” about the house, and that they can’t get anything done. The students are basically right about this, except on one point: the exaggerated “No one”. At least, 60% of students want their house to be the best (or at least better), are willing to do extra work to make it so, and feel some self-righteous belonging with their house. In addition, they like that they have the opportunity to mix with students who are not in their classes. So I tell them, “Yeah, the House System doesn’t motivate everyone, and it does need improvement. But it is motivating for a good number of students, and we can bring that number up if we fix the problems.”

Now here are the current problems:

1) Teachers do not give house points to students for doing well on tests and such. If every teacher just wrote to students when they gave them feedback +1 House when they deserved it and let me know, then students would receive a lot more points and the competition would feel more real.

2) The Virtue of the Month activities can get hung up by a lack of organization or ideation on the part of the students.

3) Scores are not updated to the big board quickly. This is exacerbated by the low level of teacher participation, which disincentivizes me from updating the scores.

I think these problems can all be remedied. But it is difficult to make the process streamlined enough to improve upon it. My current view of the house system is very positive. This past year students ran almost the entire thing themselves. There is still an immense amount of room to make the student experience better, but after four years, we are close to making a system which students can be very proud of.

Many people, teachers, parents, and students are innately curious – they love learning. At least we all love learning some things. It is such a disappointment when curiosity is squashed instead of nurtured. We have to nurture curiosity as much as we can, however natural curiosity is not enough to help a student become the free and responsible adult we want him or her to become. She needs guidance and practice and direction.

There is no innate human drive to master stoichiometry or read Latin poetry. Educational culture is necessary. A community must come together and give esteem and encouragement and praise for learning these things. This is why many students need classmates to excel – shared experience is foundation of culture. Rare is the student who is driven to master any subject which is set before him. Most of us require a mix of motivations to achieve excellence and virtue. And there is nothing wrong with that.