Teachers facing added stress online
In virtual classes, ‘lost’ students are difficult to find
WASHINGTON — One month into the school year, Linnet Early, a social studies teacher outside St. Louis, has an anxious new ritual: scanning the Zoom squares on her computer screen at the beginning of each class to see which of her sixthgrade students are missing.
It is usually quite a few.
“I’ll have kids gone for a week, pop in for one class the next, then miss the second class that week,” said Early, who has 100 mostly low-income students spread across eight classes, all online. “It’s hard to know what their struggles are, how to wrap your arms around it.”
Around the country, teachers and school administrators are hoping a patchwork of plans cobbled together over the summer will help address one of the most pressing challenges they face as millions of students start a new school year online: How to make sure they come to virtual class, and what balance to strike between punitive and forgiving policies if they don’t.
Attendance data from last spring, while limited, suggests the problem loomed large in many districts after school buildings closed in mid-March. In one survey of 5,659 educators around the country, 34% of respondents said no more than 1 in 4 students were attending their remote classes, and a majority said fewer than half their students were attending.
Disengagement was especially high in poorer communities, including many urban school systems.
In Seattle, elementary school students logged into the learning portal less than half of the time, on average. And in Los Angeles, the nation’s second-largest school system, a quarter of students were not logging in at all in May.
Early data from the new school year suggests that the problem persists. By the end of the first week of school in Detroit — where learning is mostly being conducted virtually — 78% of students had shown up to class, compared with 90% by that point last year.
Data on why students disappear from virtual school is hard to come by, but there are some obvious explanations. Many lack a computer or stable internet; others have to work or care for younger children; some families were evicted and had to move.
“Some of these issues are largely beyond the reach of schools to address,” said Justin Reich, director of the Teaching Systems Lab at MIT, who has been studying remote learning during the pandemic.
“If all the adults in the house lose their job and the only person who can work is in high school and is assigned shifts during the day, it’s not that schools are totally powerless to
address that situation,” he said. “But you’re asking schools that are already under tremendous strains to take on responsibilities that are probably better addressed by other forms of social policy.”
It is also likely that some students found online learning so tedious or hard to keep up with that they just dropped out, especially since many schools stopped grading or taking attendance once they closed their doors.
Most states are pushing school districts to return to normal attendance and grading policies this fall, now that they have had some time to improve their distance learning programs. That is putting pressure on schools not only to keep students engaged but also to keep tabs on their personal circumstances and emotional health.
“There’s no question states have moved from treating remote learning as a special-case scenario in the spring, when they let up on expectations, to saying now, ‘You need to go back to business as usual,’” said Bree Dusseault, a researcher at the Center on Reinventing Public Education, which is tracking distance learning around the country.
Returning to normal attendance expectations has sharpened a debate among education officials about how to approach truancy. Last spring, Massachusetts school officials reported dozens of families to the state’s Department of Children and Families because of issues related to their children’s participation in remote learning, The Boston Globe reported last month. Districts with large Black and Latino populations filed the most reports, the paper found.
“When they come in for an investigation, there is always a possibility of your child being taken away,” said Meri Viano, associate director of the Parent/ Professional Advocacy League, a statewide group that has been in touch with parents who have been reported, although she added that she had not confirmed any instances of that happening as of yet. “That, to me, is a huge unnecessary risk for families that are in crisis in this pandemic.”
But Hedy Chang, the director of Attendance Works, a national group that promotes solutions to chronic absenteeism, said many districts had in fact eased up on harsh truancy rules — which can involve fines and even jail for parents and, sometimes, students — during the pandemic out of concern that students had legitimate obstacles to attending class.
“I do think more schools are open to the notion that you need alternatives to legal action,” she said. “There’s a lot more empathy.”
In Washington, D.C., public schools this fall will send “We Miss You” postcards to students who skip virtual class and call not just parents but other relatives and emergency contacts to track them down. In California, a law passed in June requires school districts to develop “reengagement strategies” for students who go missing from distance learning. And in Mississippi, schools will dispatch attendance officers to the homes of students who don’t show up for online instruction.
Reich of MIT said that on the plus side, schools know which of their students are least likely to engage in distance learning this fall based on what happened in the spring. The bad news — “a recipe for disaster,” as he put it — is that unlike in the spring, most teachers will have no existing relationship with their students and it will be hard to establish one-on-one bonds when everyone is remote.
When MIT researchers interviewed teachers about distance learning in the spring, Reich said, “One said she could text kids and harass them to participate ‘because they know I love them. But how will it work in the fall when the students don’t know I love them?’ ”