Virtual classrooms reveal grim realities

COVID, as people are saying, is changing everything. Personally, I don’t think we’re going to see the kind of radical reorganization of civilization some are imagining when this someday ends. Far too many people just want things back the way they were. While some may like their new work from home setup, outdoor exercise routines and rediscovery of home cooking, many others prefer the structure and predictability of office life, kids out of the house and a return to the separation between weekday and weekend.

But I’ve been wrong before, and one of those times has relevance today. This was about 10 years ago as the Greenwich school system was moving full steam ahead, introducing technological innovations into the classrooms. I was skeptical, and not because of the introduction of iPads and Chromebooks, the inadequacy I envisioned was Internet access.

See, I had recently attended a working session at the moderateincome housing complex at Adams Gardens, where a genuine concern was how to increase Internet access to those families of limited means, whose children still had to keep up with districtwide changes in how homework was researched, written and submitted online. Sure, many Greenwich parents responded to these upgrades in learning by switching to high-speed broadband service and plopping down a second family computer to use for homework. But at Adams Gardens, many school-age children still had to share older computers and a single Internet connection in common rooms to do online homework. Yes, the district might supply new and improved hardware, but at the time I thought the breakdown would come in the form of unequal access to the Internet, leading ultimately to unequal educational results.

But like I said, I was wrong. Instead of facing the backlash of concern and resentment I’d anticipated, access actually improved, and people simply found a way. Meanwhile, tech solutions overran the classrooms, webenabled devices in school became ubiquitous, teachers and students have greater access to more information than ever, and yet ...

“This works for everybody except the child,” contends local parent advocate Surekha Shenoy, who last year called for “a greater balance of traditional teacherbased instruction and appropriate use of technology in the Greenwich Public Schools system.” In the decade since most schoolwork went online and Greenwich made it a priority to make sure every child was equipped with a device which would allow him/her to receive better, faster and more customized learning, some people started questioning if more tech really meant better results.

It’s not just Greenwich. Before COVID, municipalities all over the country were reconsidering allowing technology to dominate their classrooms. A Rand Corporation study showed “no clear evidence showing which new tech-related education offerings or approaches work in schools.” A report from the Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development found that countries heavily invested in school computer technologies showed “no appreciable improvements” in reading, math or science. And a controlled trial in California showed that students with laptops saw “no improvement” on select educational outcomes, but that they did certainly increase their time spent on video games and social media.

Give kids laptops and InstaFaceSnapTok usage goes up while educational results remain flat ... who could have seen that coming? Evidently not our BOE because when pressed last year for basic information on how much time students are spending online, and for a breakdown on where that time is spent, the not great answer was effectively, “We don’t know.” Wonderful.

With a possible return to distance learning this fall, Greenwich may be faced with the ironic dilemma of having excellent technology, which simply isn’t enough to educate our children when we need it most. Teachers and administrators last spring did an admirable job coming up with a remote teaching plan on like, 15 minutes notice, but in reality, the kids got way less of an education than they could have. Now the kids are burned out on Zoom, they’ve figured out how to game the remote teaching system, and it turns out the tech we’ve invested so much into financially and emotionally really isn’t going to help Buffy get into Harvard. I’ve been wrong before, but this has all the makings of a real mess.