There is deep psychological damage to kids who sat alone, by themselves for the past year.
My kids and their friends repurposed their remote learning tools (MS Teams) and have had more creative interaction with their peers than they would have had otherwise (it's always been a pain organizing real-world play-dates). I'm surprised that this wasn't a more widespread experience.
My son would totally be in to that, and I figured he'd have an ok time in the pandemic because of that. Unfortunately, his friends (were 6th grade, now 7th grade) turn out to be complete cyberbullies online. They just get hyper aggressive with each other and every other week during the pandemic my son would be in tears because his friends were so toxic. Once back in person at school, they are totally fine (well, within standards for middle schoolers!) and have a great time, but even now there are several he can't be around online because they just want to find a target and gang up on them. Sometimes it is my son, sometimes some other kid.
Plus a lot of parents are paranoid about online interaction to a crazy degree and will hardly let kids interact online - it makes no sense, but they consider it to be the great bogey man of the 21st century and think that pedophiles are ready to instantly jump on their kids, even if they are in a private discord room just chatting.
It’s hard to measure this systematically and I’m glad that your experiences were positive. My kids had marked drop in grades and really suffered. It wasn’t so much the social aspect as teachers and schools not being to adapt to new methods.
I’d like to see trends in standardized tests during this period as I think the real harm was in knowledge not gained.
I've got decent insight into several local school districts. From less-close information I've picked up from around the country, our city doesn't seem to be an outlier.
For both fully-remote and alternating-day in-person, if schools still failed kids, they'd have had to fail over half of most classes. Percentages of engaged-enough-to-be-OK kids in online schools tended to sit in the 10-20% range. It wasn't unusual for half or more of kids to effectively be absent for an entire semester. [EDIT] The alternating-day half-in-half-out in-person schedule kids, in the one district that I have insight into that did that for fall 2020/spring 2021, seemed to fare even worse than the online cohort, incidentally.
> I’d like to see trends in standardized tests during this period as I think the real harm was in knowledge not gained.
Any places that did them, they'll be awful, guaranteed. IIRC at least some states skipped them in Spring 2020 since it'd have been nearly impossible to proctor them and everyone knew they'd be "tainted" anyway. The main point of them is to compare year-over-year progress to see what needs to be adjusted and whether progress is being made, for which a during-remote-learning standardized test would be worthless, since you already know it'll be bad and why it's bad and won't be able to get any actionable info out of comparing it to prior or future years. It'll probably be another couple years before we have something like a new baseline and the tests start to be useful for their intended purpose again.
My kids and their friends repurposed their remote learning tools (MS Teams) and have had more creative interaction with their peers than they would have had otherwise (it's always been a pain organizing real-world play-dates). I'm surprised that this wasn't a more widespread experience.