Where’s ‘disaster plan’ for students struggling online?
Children stagnate, regress with lackluster virtual lessons
MILWAUKEE – Ruby Rodriguez remembers the days when English class meant walking to her desk, talking to friends and checking the board.
Now class begins when her classmates’ names appear online. She sits alone at the dining room table, barefoot and petting the family dog. It’s her freshman year at St. Anthony High School, a private Catholic school in Milwaukee. She doesn’t know what all her classmates look like because nobody ever turns on their cameras.
After schools in Milwaukee went remote last March, Ruby and her friends in eighth grade at St. Anthony’s middle school missed their graduation ceremonies and parties. Her close friends went on to different high schools. St. Anthony, like many schools in urban areas, including Milwaukee Public Schools, started the fall semester online amid the coronavirus pandemic.
Virtual learning might be keeping Ruby, 14, and her family safer during a public health crisis. But it has made it exponentially harder for her to stay motivated and to learn. Her online classes are lectureheavy, repetitive and devoid of student conversation. Her grades have dropped from A’s and B’s to D’s and F’s. She stays up too late. She sleeps a lot. She misses her friends.
Like millions of students attending school virtually this year, Ruby is floundering academically, socially and emotionally. And as the pandemic heaves into a winter surge, a slew of new reports show alarming numbers of kids falling behind, failing classes or essentially disappearing.
With about half of U.S. students attending virtual-only schools, it’s becoming increasingly clear that districts and states need to improve
remote instruction and find ways to give special help online.
But at the moment, plans to help students catch up are largely evolving, thin or nonexistent at school districts across the country.
The consequences are most dire for low-income and minority children, who are more likely to be learning remotely and less likely to have appropriate technology and home environments for independent study compared with their wealthier peers. Children with disabilities and those learning English have particularly struggled in the absence of in-class instruction. Many of those students were already lagging academically before the pandemic. Now, they’re even further behind — with time running out to meet key academic benchmarks.
In high-poverty schools, 1 in 3 teachers reports their students are significantly less prepared for grade-level work this year compared with last year, according to a report by the RAND Corp., a nonprofit research institution. Class failure rates have skyrocketed in school systems from Fairfax County, Virginia, to Greenville, South Carolina. Fewer kindergartners met early literacy targets in Washington, D.C., this fall. And math achievement has dropped nationwide, according to a report that examined scores from 4.4 million elementary and middle school students.
“This is not going to be a problem that goes away as soon as the pandemic is over,” said Jimmy Sarakatsannis, leader of education practice at consulting firm McKinsey and Co. He co-wrote a report that estimated the average student could lose five to nine months of learning by June, with students of color losing more than that.
Beyond that, tens of thousands of children are unaccounted for altogether. Hillsborough County, Florida, started the year missing more than 7,000 students. Los Angeles saw kindergarten enrollment drop by about 6,000.
“We almost need a disaster plan for education,” said Sonya Thomas, executive director of Nashville Propel, a community group that works with many Black parents in Tennessee.
The Nashville school system offered some in-person learning in October and
November before reverting to all-virtual instruction after Thanksgiving, as COVID-19 cases surged. Some parents say their children are failing every single subject, Thomas said.
Others say they still don’t have digital devices or high-speed internet, or that their children’s special-education learning plans aren’t being followed.
“Our parents are afraid their kids are falling behind, and they don’t know what the solution is,” Thomas said. “They’re looking for leadership. They’re looking for help.”
How much has learning slowed this year?
The extent of academic regression is still a guessing game. And it looks different from student to student.
Johnny Murphy, 15, struggled for a month this fall to learn how to unmute himself during live video lessons with his class at Vaughn High School in Chicago. Murphy has autism and an intellectual disability.
His mother, Barbara Murphy, knows her son likely never will read beyond a third-grade level. But he’s backtracking on educational goals such as engaging with his peers and on life goals like leaving the house safely and using money, she said.
For Lily McCollum, 15, classes move more slowly online than they did in person. She’s a sophomore at Southridge High School in Kennewick, Washington, where she has been learning remotely all year.
“We’re probably the farthest behind in English and math,” she said. “It’s really hard to stay focused, especially if I don’t have my camera on.”
LaTricea Adams, founder of Black Millennials 4 Flint in Michigan, figures local children are at least a year behind in their studies, based on what she has heard from families and educators. Even before the pandemic, less than 30% of Flint’s third-grade students were proficient in English, according to the latest state test scores.
“Some of these kids really need oneon-one sessions, but that’s almost impossible for them to get in a virtual setting,” Adams said.
Quantifying the extent of learning loss is difficult.
American students in third through eighth grade have held steady in reading but have fallen behind in math since last fall, according to a report this month by nonprofit testing organization NWEA. The group examined academic progress in reading and math for 4.4 million students at 8,000 schools, with a big caveat: The students most likely to be tested were those attending classes in person, or attending schools with enough resources to test their remote learners.
In other words, the study makes the state of American education look better than it actually is, disproportionately reflecting the progress of students at higher-income schools who tend to score better on tests anyway.
Gap in digital resources
The digital equity gap has long been a stumbling block in American education, but the pandemic has exacerbated the divide.
In one recent study of low-income families in Los Angeles, 1 out of 5 parents of elementary school students said their child was using a device other than a computer to access their remote studies — likely a phone, said Stephen Aguilar, the study’s lead author and an education professor at the University of Southern California.
Further, 1 out of 3 families reported they never or only sometimes had a place in the home free of distractions for a child to learn and study. Half of lowincome parents surveyed said they rarely used a computer themselves.
“Many are not using technology every day, and yet we’re asking them to set up a remote schoolhouse for their children,” Aguilar said.
For younger and older learners alike, online classes can and should be restructured to focus on community and peer-to-peer connections, said Mimi Ito, who studies youth media practices at the University of California, Irvine.
At the moment, a lot of virtual classes feel like “a second-rate version of what’s done in a physical classroom,” she said, which is why they’re not very engaging.
Teachers can incorporate online gaming or social media into their classes, where children pursue goals or share content as part of a team or community, Ito said. She suggested games such as Minecraft and Roblox, or video platforms like TikTok and YouTube.
Steve Isaacs, a middle and high school gaming design teacher in Basking Ridge, New Jersey, addressed science and current events this fall by having students build models of the COVID-19 virus in Minecraft.
The game also allows students to build virtual museums or libraries, where they can show their knowledge of English and history standards, Isaacs said.
“I try to give kids choice in their learning pathways and activities,” he said. “On Zoom, I lecture less and split kids into a lot of breakout rooms, and then I randomly pop into them.”
Boring lessons, disengaged students
It’s 12 minutes into Ruby Rodriguez’s hour-long English class, and the teacher is still welcoming students online and urging them to complete a “do now.” That’s a quick warm-up exercise to signal who’s present and thinking.
Students have read Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have A Dream” speech as well as his essay “Letter from Birmingham Jail.” The warm-up is to explain which they prefer.
Ruby hasn’t written anything. She says she doesn’t even know her teacher’s name.
“We’ve been working on these same things for a week,” she shrugged.
The teacher coaxes the class to consider why King wrote each piece the way he did, what rhetorical devices he used to make his argument. There’s no student conversation. Those who do respond send their messages privately to the teacher, rather than putting them in the group chat for all to see.
The teacher uses those private responses to type out some sentences for the class, and Ruby copies and pastes them into her own document. She figures it’s just a matter of weaving in her own sentences around what the teacher has written.
Ruby’s parents, Lauro and Alma, are worried. Lauro, who works at a local manufacturing plant, has contacted the assistant principal with his concerns. Alma, a certified nursing assistant who works second shift, has a hard time helping her daughter.
“This is the first time I’ve felt helpless,” Lauro said.
At John Harris High School in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, teachers recently compiled the grades of all students still learning to speak and write in English. Until that point, no one had noticed that every English learner was failing at least one class. Spurred to action, they reached out to a local nonprofit focused on immigrants and refugees, which rounded up community tutors to work with students once a week. Teachers carved out extra time on Fridays for one-on-one sessions.
A month later, the percentage of English learners failing courses had dropped to 75%.
The pivot demonstrates the importance of assessing and surveying students — about their academic performance, their technical needs or even for their thoughts on how to improve remote instruction, said Angela Jerabek, the executive director of BARR Center, a school improvement nonprofit working with John Harris High School.
“We should be surging resources to the areas with the greatest need,” Jerabek said. “But if we can’t see the problem, we can’t solve the problem.”