DOE’s Carr on Handling Schools in Next Pandemic: ‘We Have More Devices in the Hands of Students’

On Monday’s “CNN Newsroom,” Commissioner of the National Center for Education Statistics in the Institute of Education Sciences at the U.S. Department of Education Peggy Carr responded to a question on whether there’s a better way to handle education in the event of another pandemic by stating that “we’ve already done a lot.” She cited schools changing how they taught students, having “more devices in the hands of students” than before, and teachers getting more training “in how to impart instruction if something like this, God forbid, will happen again.”

Host Erica Hill asked, “So, as we look at this, there’s the one piece of, okay, how do we work to reverse this learning loss, how do we better serve our children across this country, pandemic or not? There’s also the question of, God forbid it should happen again, but if there is a future outbreak, if there is some sort of a pandemic situation, is there a way to do things differently?”

Carr answered, “Well, we’ve already done a lot. The schools pivoted. They did a lot of changes in how they were administering instruction to the students that I think we’re going to learn from. We have more devices in the hands of students than we had before. Teachers have gotten more staff development in how to impart instruction if something like this, God forbid, will happen again. I think that we are better — in a better place than we were before the pandemic, that’s for sure.”

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