The Washington Post reports that education leaders are worried that students are falling behind due to school closures and extraordinary measures must be taken so they can “catch up.”
Of course, there is good reason to worry about children who have experienced months without formal schooling. Many, however, do have access to emergency remote teaching. The children likeliest you have no educational opportunities are those who are already farthest behind, those with no access to a computer or the internet, those who get no academic support or direction at home.
When school ultimately reopens, the children who need the most help should have extra-small classes and intensive time with experienced teachers. That requires more money, however, and states are unlikely to increase spending when their revenues are plummeting. The poor kids are likely to get testing and lamentations, not the small classes and instruction they need.
Here is the latest:
Only weeks after the coronavirus pandemic forced American schools online, education leaders across the country have concluded that millions of children’s learning will be severely stunted, and are planning unprecedented steps to help them catch up.
In Miami, school will extend into the summer and start earlier in the fall, at least for some students.
In Cleveland, schools may shrink the curriculum to cover only core subjects. In Columbia, Mo., this year’s lessons will be woven into next year’s.
Some experts [i.e. Mike Petrilli of the conservative Thomas B. Fordham Institute] suggest holding back more kids, a controversial idea, while others propose a half-grade step-up for some students, an unconventional one. A national teachers union [i.e., the AFT] is proposing a massive national summer school program.
Graduates from the Class of 2020 shared how they’re coping after the coronavirus outbreak brought senior year to an abrupt ending.
The ideas being considered will require political will and logistical savvy, and they are already facing resistance from teachers and parents. They’ll also require money, and lots of it, at a time when a cratering economy is devastating state and local budgets, with plunging tax collections and rising costs.
As Congress considers another coronavirus spending package, schools’ ability to make up ground may hinge on how much more they can pry from Washington.
The $2.2 trillion stimulus package approved last month included $13.5 billion for K-12 education. In the next round, a coalition of school administrators and teachers unions is seeking more than $200 billion, citing those depleted state budgets.
In New York state, for instance, schools were poised for deep cuts, with the state anticipating revenue losses as high as $10 billion. The stimulus package will reverse those cuts, but without more bailout money, schools won’t get any extra funding to deal with the crisis.
Just a month ago, most American children were attending school as normal. Today, virtually every U.S. school building is closed. Seventeen states have ordered campuses shuttered through this academic year, another three recommend it, and educators and parents across the country are bracing for a lost spring — and maybe more.
Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, said last week that he expects schools can reopen in the fall. But he can’t be sure, he said.
Whenever schools return, researchers say, the likely result is a generation of students forced to play catch-up, perhaps for years to come. Most vulnerable are those who are always the most vulnerable: homeless children, those living in deep poverty and students with disabilities. While some students are adapting to distance learning, others are struggling to find quiet spaces to study, lack reliable Internet access or must care for younger siblings during the day, among other barriers.
“ This may be the biggest challenge public education has had to face in the four-plus decades I’ve been doing this work,” said Michael Casserly, executive director of the Council of the Great City Schools, a nonprofit coalition of 76 of the nation’s largest urban public school systems. He said that online learning is likely failing many low-income families and that without “substantial” new spending, schools won’t have the money to reverse the damage. “We are facing an educational catastrophe.”
In some districts, the problem is just getting kids to show up. In the Los Angeles Unified School District, the country’s second-largest system, 1 in 4 students has not logged on at all. Older students were more likely than elementary children to be connected, but on any given day in one recent week, a quarter of high school students didn’t log in.
Before the coronavirus crisis, only about 1 in 4 students in the high-poverty Baltimore City Public Schools had computers. More Chromebooks are on order, but for now teachers are trying to reach families by phone and Instagram, and the district is broadcasting lessons over its television station. “What we are providing now is not going to make up fully for all of the time lost,” chief executive Sonja Brookins Santelises said.
In Atlanta’s public schools, about 6,000 children still don’t have computers, and about 10 percent of students have not yet logged in to the remote-learning system, Superintendent Meria Joel Carstarphen said. One recent day, Carstarphen visited the home of a family whose children had not logged in. She found their mother struggling to provide food, and discovered the house was in an Internet “dead zone.” She also realized she knew the family’s oldest child, a “super sweet kid,” from her visits to his high school football team. “He’s the man of the house and he’s only a junior right now,” Carstarphen said. “He has not been doing his work and neither have his siblings for three weeks.”
Even when students have computers, parents and caregivers fear that minimal learning is underway. Billie Stewart is raising her 8-year-old grandson, Tony, on Detroit’s east side. She’s received little direction from his school, she said, and trying to keep up with the school’s online offerings has been “almost overwhelming.”
Stewart, 73, has worked hard to lay out a daily schedule for Tony but finds herself unable to keep up. “If I get asked for another password, I don’t know what I’ll do.”
In Philadelphia’s public schools, teachers have been told not to teach new material, due to concerns that lessons cannot be equitably provided to all. Philadelphia plans to begin remote education later this month, but for weeks families have been left largely on their own.
“
We’ve been looking for guidance from teachers, but they don’t really know what they’re supposed to be doing,” said Stacy Stewart, who has two children in a North Philadelphia elementary school, plus 1-year-old twins. “Ever since they’ve been out of school, there’s been no structured virtual learning. It’s just been flying by the seat of their pants.” The school provided a study packet for Mikail, a second-grader, but no direction for Abdul Malik, who’s in kindergarten, other than links to a few education websites. There’s only one computer in the house, which Stewart needs for work, and it’s been a struggle to keep her kids engaged in anything that looks like learning. “I mean, I’m not really a teacher,” she said.
To understand how deep the setbacks may be, researchers are examining data on the so-called “summer slide,” in which students, particularly those in low-income families, lose months of reading and math knowledge. Research differs on the magnitude of the loss, but there’s broad agreement that this year’s losses will be greater than normal.
Of course many will fall behind in varying degrees compared to attending school the conventional way, especially our youngest students who are not oriented towards distance learning.
What did leaders expect? We are in the thick of a pandemic and it’s all about the difference between learning how to survive (period!) vs. anything else.
Remember Maslow?
Good grief! Listening to these so-called “education leaders,” you’d think that every kid was going to forget everything they ever knew. Sounds like phony edu-alarmists with packaged curriculum they’d like to cash in on, not actual teachers
.
Agree. The majority of time in the last weeks of school are spent preparing for standardized tests and then weeks of taking these tests. Perhaps students will forget how to be so stressed under weeks of testing conditions. Lets’s hope.
TAGO!
My reaction exactly.
Joanne,
Behind so much of the hand-wringing is the testing industry.
Yeah, cut all the standardized tests and kids will time to catch up easily with their studies. Just don’t take their (and the teachers’!) summer away.
Agree. They sound like “Chicken Little.”
I read about a mother who was worried about the worksheets her kid wouldn’t get done. OY.
There’s so much the kids and parents can do.
https://www.space.com/night-sky-observing-from-home-guide.html?utm_source=Selligent&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=9155&utm_content=SDC_Newsletter+&utm_term=3363602&m_i=PnkrQbWbwdDrkrBvnvvkA2DpCaq9rtvMGz8hggqxrGX63T0jjIcJLHKTJ4cY512SQitSl2PGNjDfMoCwZhrjVXtjBjortl5hiqXzg6%2BPPq
Kids should be keeping journals of all that is happening. What a treasure trove to bring to school when kids go back to school.
Your post reminded me of a post that Peter Greene linked to: https://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/can-my-son-get-more-worksheets-before-the-world-ends
That link should go viral. Thanks, Dienne.
I had to laugh when the first photo I landed on was the “night” sky one hour before sunrise. One of my sons has two young daughters who are up early two times a year–Christmas and Easter(–if their parents are lucky). You can guess why. I laughed at the thought of them getting up to “study” the night sky at 4 or 5 in the morning. That observation aside, the site to which Yvonne provided the link is pretty interesting. I am passing it along.
What does “fall behind” mean anyway? Isn’t it a relative term? As Peter Greene points out, this is completely different than when your child falls off the education train because of illness or something. This is the whole damn education train slamming to a halt.
Why not open schools with a tri-semester? Begin with 12 weeks at the 2020 grade. Promote everyone except 2020 grade 12 who graduated. Make 2nd semester new grade. Everyone gains. One week break between semesters. A few holidays can be interspersed. Colleges and universities may do better with a tri semester approach too.
It hardly matters if time is “lost” WHEN THE ENTIRE PLANET IS FACING THE SAME DILEMMA!
Being able to continue to live out their lives, with their families as healthy and intact as possible, is what’s most important, not that all kids be on the same page of learning as their peers every single day.
So true. These people have their brains in a freezer.
best line
Really? What are those kids doing every day that they are forced to stay home? Digging out the lower 40? What is preventing them from doing their (extremely reduced) assignments? Our district has provided free laptops and wifi access in addition to food and mental health counseling at considerable expense to taxpayers, yet over one third of said students has not bothered to log on in three weeks. And please be advised that their parents have also been contacted.
Many kids are learning that they need real teachers, not screens, and that their parents don’t know as much as they thought or how to teach effectively. I don’t think we need to worry when millions of students across the globe are in the same boat.
I agree that kids are waking up to the reality that they need flesh and blood teachers in brick and mortar classrooms, but they also need socializing with their flesh and blood peers more and most of that socializing takes place only at a real public school where kids are not forced to turn their mouths into bubbles as they move from one classroom to another and they get punished if they are seen talking to any other kids at any time like in Eva’s child concentration camps in NYC.
Heck, I need flesh and blood people to talk to IN PERSON! Since I still think about my students almost ten years into retirement, I know I would be missing the interaction with my students big time. We are social creatures; most of us need to interact with each other to stay sane.
My interaction with others had been almost all by phone and online. I live alone but have my own house with a fenced backyard. Every day I go out with carrots for the horses that live in the fenced pasture on a 1,000-acre ranch that is located behind my house. The two horses are always happy to see me, with those carrots, and they let me know.
Only once have I actually been in the same room with someone I know and that was last week when I called the restaurant I eat at the most and placed an order to pick up.
When I arrived, the owner was sitting at a table just inside the door and no one could go any further into the restaurant that few feet to reach the table. She had on a shower cap and a mask. Since I paid by credit card online, I picked up my order, stepped back away from the table and we talked for a few minutes until another customer showed up and I had to leave to make room for them in the space where I was standing.
During our brief talk, she (60 yrs old) said when she gets home each day, her sister (might be a few years younger than her but can’t be sure) makes her strip just inside the front door and then go straight to take a shower and the clothes she wore to work are washed.
Great points! I’m a very strong believer in the importance of socializing, as well as social influences on learning.
With the necessity of social distancing though, in order to prevent the spread of the virus, options are severely limited for socializing with peers and adults beyond the home right now, such as to communicating with technology, like phones & computers (gotta love how creative people have gotten on youtube lately!) and good old fashioned snail mail, etc.
O..M…G. Poor little Philadelphia kindergarten student Abdul Malik, no direction other than links to a few education sites [which he can’t use anyway as Grandma needs the computer for work].
Setting aside for a moment the obvious– that K is/ should be about socialization, w/ minimal academic content [so K students are SOL during pandemic]– there is a no-brainer low-tech way to deliver some appropriate PreK-2 [or… all K12!] content to low-tech households: TV. WHYY in Philly [which can even be received via antenna] claims it’s doing that during covid stay-at-home, but a quick look at today’s schedule shows nothing but the usual smorgasbord of quasi-educational, randomly age-appropriate animated series.
Why isn’t the school district working w/PBS to get something targeted to local grade groups on the air? Surely there’s some appropriate stuff in the archives. Years ago you could tune into W-NYE for classes in all sorts of things for various ages. (I know for a fact there’s, e.g., a fab beginner Spanish series from Georgia PBS called “Salsa.”) Betcha somebody could queue up Ken Burns et al history/ current events specials that synch w/what hisch soc stud was working on pre-pandemic. Likewise science specials like Nova. And how about some cheap fast-to-air productions, e.g., borrow some zoom classes from chi-chi districts?
Grandma could set the DVR for the age-appropriate stuff, & monitor a schedule that works for the family.
These “education leaders” worried about students “falling behind” need to take off their stds/aligned-assessments headsets, & get a reality check. Stop whining! Delivering “online ed” to the privileged minority w/ high-tech connections, space to study & participating parents is a pathetic substitute for IRL school, anyway: kids WILL “fall behind” your ridiculous non-educational rat-race, which is already grossly sub-par, compensated for only by the most creative teachers who manage by flying under the radar– why worry about those you were already leaving in the dust via brick&mortar? Get your act together by working w/PBS, & forget about the worksheets & “personalized ed.”
But if I remember correctly when my children were younger and viewers of daytime PBS…..PBS is funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation? Oh, how we need more of the Gates’ crap on public television SMH. Free the children and let them play!!…best educational experience ever.
PBS has been funded by deep-pocketed philanthovultures since Reagan defunded it in the ’80’s– the first PBS “ad” I saw back then was Exxon’s. Let the ones who claim ed for the poor as a mantra put their $ where their mouth is.
PBS = Propaganda Bill(ionaire)casting System
I have a suggestion. Issue each student, teacher, and school support staff hazmat suits by the time school is supposed to start in September. When I was in Vietnam back in 1966, we were paid more because we were in combat. It was called combat pay in addition to our basic pay.
So, pay teachers and support staff a lot more, but do not start school without those hazmat suits. Dupont sells them for about $1,000 each while Grainger Industries sells them for $4,287 each.
Oh, and each school has sterilization tents where everyone has to go before and after school to be sprayed or whatever to sanitize the outside of each hazmat suit. Because there will be no bathroom breaks, everyone gets a supply of throw away diapers to wear inside the suit.
I do not think the country will be riskfree even in September. If Trump decides to “start the country” up again, the death rate will start to climb, too.
hahaha Lloyd your depiction of safe brick&mortar “back to school” is like a Doonesbury twist on a ’50’s sci-fi film! Note to IQ45/ Jared/ Ivanka: this is what “Reopening America” in May looks like.
If Trump opens America in May, when the death count from COVID-19 starts to skyrocket again, the victims will be the final screws that fastens the lid on his re-election coffin so it can never be opened again.
The only deplorable idiots voting for him will be the same people that would have voted for him if he had shot some innocent person on 5th Ave in front of 1,000 witnesses.
When COVID hits Trump country, not just blue states, he will show some real interest in it.
I just read this short “History of 1918 Flu Pandemic” – I thought the last paragraph was interesting since it sounds like what is happening now. Too bad Trump doesn’t like to read. I suspect even these three paragraphs would be too long for him.
“The 1918 influenza pandemic was the most severe pandemic in recent history. It was caused by an H1N1 virus with genes of avian origin. Although there is not universal consensus regarding where the virus originated, it spread worldwide during 1918-1919. In the United States, it was first identified in military personnel in spring 1918.
“It is estimated that about 500 million people or one-third of the world’s population became infected with this virus. The number of deaths was estimated to be at least 50 million worldwide with about 675,000 occurring in the United States. Mortality was high in people younger than 5 years old, 20-40 years old, and 65 years and older. The high mortality in healthy people, including those in the 20-40 year age group, was a unique feature of this pandemic.
“While the 1918 H1N1 virus has been synthesized and evaluated, the properties that made it so devastating are not well understood. With no vaccine to protect against influenza infection and no antibiotics to treat secondary bacterial infections that can be associated with influenza infections, control efforts worldwide were limited to non-pharmaceutical interventions such as isolation, quarantine, good personal hygiene, use of disinfectants, and limitations of public gatherings, which were applied unevenly.”
https://www.cdc.gov/flu/pandemic-resources/1918-commemoration/1918-pandemic-history.htm
Wow! Amazing, Lloyd.
Posted at OpEd: https://www.opednews.com/Quicklink/National-Education-Leaders-in-Best_Web_OpEds-Closures_Diane-Ravitch-200414-719.html#comment761262
with a comment that links to David Demming’s article and your link to John Shrocks ‘distant learning’ post.
Gotta keep the conversation going!!!
ELIMINATE the standardized testing next year. Gives schools 3-4 additional weeks of instructional time that can be used to plug whatever holes have come from this mess. Saves money from testing. Best of all worlds, and easy to do.
And all of these “experts” suggesting summer school or extended year or whatever? NO STATE is going to pay for that. I expect my class sizes to raise above 38 again this year. They just barely got lower this year. Many states have been spending less than they did in 2008, and this situation will just make the financial situation worse.
Wow, I was surprised to read the snarkiness of the responses on this blog. I think we don’t need the extra tone. I guess I’m in the minority of blog readers because I, too, am concerned about the loss of education these students are experiencing. Will online, typed discussions of “To Kill a Mockingbird” be as transformative as the varied experiences and discussions we normally have in class? I expect that about half of my students will not read the book. That is just one example of lost education. It is a legitimate topic to discuss ideas on how to make up this loss, not one that calls for derision.
And our college-aged son was just lamenting today about how he misses being able to study in the library, where he can focus, and visit his professors during office hours, and conduct his lab experiments. He wants to learn.
I’m not saying go back to school now. I think we should wait. But we need to be discussing ideas in a respectful manner.
Montana,
I think the smarminess comes in response to two assumptions:
Remote emergency instruction will replace teachers.
What matters most is standardized test scores.
The Year of the Fall
They fell behind in 20
They fell behind, and plenty
Their life is over now
It’s over now, and how
The so called reformers are discovering that their so called reforms can not withstand the current crisis. Evidence is now up front that proves that all children are not equal and cannot be measured by a made up standardized formula.
The whole idea of standardized testing should be used to rate teacher and school effectiveness while ignoring the diversity of our nation was built on sand. Sand which now has turned into quicksand.
Hopefully when this national crisis is behind us the movement to scapegoat teachers and public schools will be dead.
“In Miami, school will extend into the summer and start earlier in the fall, at least for some students.”
Terrible idea. Yeah, let’s screw kids’ summer up after a catastrophic event. Instead, give them the summer to digest, to forget.
“In Cleveland, schools may shrink the curriculum to cover only core subjects. In Columbia, Mo., this year’s lessons will be woven into next year’s. ”
Sound reasonable, especially the first one. It’ll force teachers to reevaluate the material they teach. Imo, the math material can be cut by at least 30%.
“A national teachers union [i.e., the AFT] is proposing a massive national summer school program.
Terrible idea. So what if kids fall behind because of a singular event? What if they learn the Pythagorean formula 2 months later in their lives? Are they going to be scarred for life? Please….
Ah, but what if they never learn anything beyond basic math for math? Unless they have a strong interest in a field where they will “need” math beyond basic, there is no need to learn it.
They should only teach “basic math”, because that’s what 95% of the population needs. If they teach only that material, and they spend extra time to make it lively, interesting, well motivated, then it’s all good. There absolutely no need to teach stuff just because engineering or science students may need that stuff in college. Instead, colleges should be prepared to teach more.
No need to make the 95% suffer for the sake of 5%.
I agree.
I would be interested in what the cut off point is. I never understood until I had to teach a little bit about math that it is its own language. I can’t say I have needed a lot of math, but going back and teaching it taught me why I had been taught stuff. I started to use more of it in my daily life. Now granted it was and is all stuff I would consider pretty basic, but if someone had shown me the practicality behind the patterns I might have been more interested. Incidentally I quit math after Algebra II in high school. I took statistics a couple of times for psych and ed classes in college and grad school, and I made a half-hearted attempt at calculus in college, not realizing that I should have been in a precalc class. It all depends on what you use, and really that applies to any subject.
I think most math curriculums I have seen are technology, formula heavy. There is no reason for students to learn all kinds of technical formulas and practice tricky problems. In trig (which is heavy on formulas) kids need to learn the Pythagorean theorem, sin, cos, tan. By why learn sec, csc, and all the endless identities? Do they really need to learn the double angle formula, memorize the sin and cos of “special angles”? Why solve complicated equations involving these functions?
They do need to learn about the exponential and log function (they are everywhere in nature [as we have learned], finance, archeology, physics, computer science), but do they need to practice conversion from one base to another, solve crazy equations?
In geometry, they learn to prove lots of things not even mathematicians care about. Yeah, there are basic stuff, like the sum of the angles in a triangle is 180, how to find the center of gravity for a triangle, or how to calculate the area of a triangle using side length and the corresponding height, but do they need to learn the laws of sin and cosine and the tricky problems where they can be applied?
Much of the justification for the extra technical stuff is that “they will need the skill when they learn calculus”, but the calculus curriculum is also way too technology heavy which can be cut, and besides, the K-12 crowd needs to know only some basic ideas from calculus.
When I talk about the need of typical K-12 student, I do not mean stuff they may use in their lives. That may be extremely limited for most people. But, as you said, they need enough math so that they appreciate its applicability and hence they notice its appearance in their lives: banking, flowers, bees, rivers, art, architecture, barcodes, pandemic. And hopefully, students at least learn that math is neat, even beautiful. Like any other language: it’s useful to learn a foreign language for its applicability in conversations, but it’s a way to explore a different culture, full of songs and poems.