Zoom meetings. Khan Academy lessons. A Facebook Live panel discussion. These are the new realities of life during the pandemic.
At least they are the reality for some of us. Those who are lucky enough to have an internet connection and the technology needed to participate in the new virtual reality of our time.
But for many families, figuring out that access in a time of crisis has been difficult, and the upheaval of the pandemic is exasperating long-standing inequities. This is even clearer in the education world, where low-income families are not only losing access to education but to food and daycare they counted on as schools continue their closings.
And as the pandemic progresses the scale of the inequity in our education system becomes more and more clear. This can clearly be seen in the responses to the pandemic from St. Louis area districts, Francis Howell and Riverview Gardens.
In Riverview Gardens, already one of the worst-performing districts in the state, schools have been closed as a result of the pandemic since mid-March and the district announced a plan for continued learning while students are at home on March 23.
That plan included a suggested daily schedule for parents to enforce on their own (regardless of whether or not those parents were able to work from home) along with a weekly packet of worksheets for K-8 students to print out (hard to do if you can’t afford a printer and the libraries are closed) or pick up at food distribution centers. High school student learning options are all based on third-party online resources.
This week the district suspended all food distribution efforts after workers in another district died from Covid-19 after helping to distribute food leaving K-8 parents no way of accessing the learning materials without internet access and a printer.
Nowhere in the posted plan is any indication of how these worksheets would be graded, turned in, or any help with actually teaching students on at home so they can succeed on the worksheets.
Also missing is any indication of how the district will deal with fourth-quarter grades (although they have provided some guidance for high school seniors on how to complete credit requirements to graduate) or requirements to actually ensure that students are doing some form of learning.
The end result is that education has completely been left in the hands of parents at home, with no real accountability for the district or structured plan for the students to continue learning during the pandemic.
In more affluent suburbs, access to food during school closures is less of an issue, which has allowed more districts like Francis Howell to develop a wide range of resources and plans for its students.
Francis Howell has developed a concrete plan for how students will learn during their time at home, providing district-wide parameters that limit assignment time in each class to no more than 30 minutes a day, providing parents with clear instructions on how to access digital resources that will be used by all teachers for the foreseeable future, and creating a hold-harmless plan on grades for the fourth quarter of the year that gives students assurances that their grades will not be impacted negatively by the pandemic.
All teachers are using Google Classroom to keep in constant contact with their students. Some are scheduling Zoom or Google Hangouts check-ins with their classes so that the students can keep in touch and maintain socialization during the time at home.
The district has also created a grading system that requires students to complete at least 60% of the assigned work and provided parents with information on how to track that completion.
In short, it is far from what students would receive in a normal school year, but the district is providing a concrete plan to keep students engaged and learning during the pandemic.
The end result of this is that the students who were already behind in Missouri are going to fall further behind as a result of the pandemic.
Students trapped in districts like Riverview Gardens are essentially loosing at least two months of education, right before the summer which means they will start next year far behind where they should be.
Students in affluent districts like Francis Howell will continue to learn during this time, reducing the impact of a summer slide on their preparedness for next year.
In a virtual panel discussion last week Arne Duncan, Former Secretary of Education, highlighted the issues that disadvantage students are facing in these strange times.
“Times like this just demonstrates the massive inequities that exist in our country,” he said. “The fact that the K-12 system is funded based upon local property taxes by definition means baked into the very fabric of K-12 education, is that the children of the privilege the children of the wealthy get more resources every single year pre-k through 12th grade and the children of the poor that’s just one huge example that we’ve never had the honesty to grapple with as a country
“Right now what is slapping us in the face is the digital divide,” he added. “The hope and the dream of technology is to equalize opportunity, but if it actually serves to exacerbate the divide between the haves and have nots now then that tool does feel good for some and just leaves others further behind. Is this a time to back off and do less for our most vulnerable students and frankly violate their civil rights or is this a time to be creative and innovative and figure out how to meet those needs in some very, very different ways?
“If this time allows us to address those in a fundamental way long-term that could actually be amazing,” said Duncan. “I just don’t know whether we have the courage to do those things.”
As we consider what education looks like in an A.D. (After Disease) world, we need to make sure that we are building a system that will reduce these inequities in the future.
That means giving parents more options on how to educate their children, better access to online/virtual learning programs that provide real structure, support for parents who want to home school, and eliminating artificial barries based on zip codes that create such inequities across a region.
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