The Wall Street Journal just ran a piece offering a very negative summary of the Spring remote learning attempts of K12 educators. [BTW – if you are interested in articles from the WSJ, I would recommend paying for Apple’s news plus. The service provides full access to a wide range of newspapers and magazines for $10 a month. The WSJ is included. Sorry, not the NYT. We all need to invest in more long-form content generated by reporters in addition to what we might consume from those who summarize.].
The problems began piling up almost immediately. There were students with no computers or internet access. Teachers had no experience with remote learning. And many parents weren’t available to help. In many places, lots of students simply didn’t show up online, and administrators had no good way to find out why not. Soon many districts weren’t requiring students to do any work at all, increasing the risk that millions of students would have big gaps in their learning.
The article also included estimates of the summer slide (the loss of knowledge over a typical summer) expanded by an additional several months due to the pandemic to reach 50% in elementary math.
It does seem there is a reasonable chance face to face education will emerge in the Fall, but at present it does not appear that the experience will be the same as a year ago. At best, it seems that the Fall experience will combine remote learning (some of which will be online) with face to face classes conducted with a portion of students. There are so many issues to be resolved in this arrangement. Parents will still be responsible for their children some of the time. Exactly how educators will handle full-time instruction with half of their classes and also offer remote experiences to the other half is unclear to me. I suppose that the experience might resemble a form of what has been described as the “flipped classroom” – student engage with content on their own and then use class time to discuss, receive focused assistance, and engage in other more interactive experiences. This would seem more reasonable for middle-school on, but even at the college rebel the expectation that students will come to class prepared to discuss often is idealistic. While some face to face time would reduce the need to rely on technology for remote learning, technology makes remote learning more efficient and the demands on an educator for face to face instruction, preparing technology-supported AND alternative resources not requiring technology seems based on an unrealistic of the workload that would be required. All of this will be happening within a setting even more underfunded than in the past.
What do I think it would take? I think additional faculty at the elementary level and an addition of technology resources for middle-school and beyond (hotspots and devices for families unable to provide) would make the most sense, but I have no idea how the resources would be generated. All educators should be compensated for a month or more of time during this summer to generate instructional resources to compensate for the additional commitment they will have to make to execute a “multi-group” approach in the fall.
Additional funds are going to have to come from somewhere. The issue here should primarily be about education, but the connection to the work force and providing supervision of children cannot be ignored. I wish there was more leadership from the Department of Education.