Remote learning pushes America's most vulnerable students even further behind

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Remote Learning Pushes America’s Most Vulnerable Students Further Behind

WSJ - July 2020



JACKSON, Miss.—After schools shut down in March, LaKenya Bunton would get home around 7 a.m. from an overnight quality-control job at a factory, doze for a few hours, then become teacher to her 16-year-old son, Amarrius.

Her son, a rising sophomore, had received no remote-learning materials from his school and didn’t hear from most of his teachers. Ms. Bunton’s method included collecting Amarrius’s cellphone and handing him the day’s work: a packet of practice college-prep questions she printed from the internet.

“I’m educating him the best way I can,” said Ms. Bunton, a 41-year-old single mother. “I don’t want him to be behind.”

With the next academic year quickly approaching, school districts and parents everywhere are racing to figure out how to resume learning during the coronavirus pandemic—with the interruption that upended the last school year beginning to look like a longer-term disruption. Los Angeles’s school system said Monday it will start the year online, while New York City recently announced a plan to bring students back to classrooms part time. Districts have to weigh the potential public-health risks of bringing students into classrooms against the shortcomings of remote-learning programs, which schools hastily rolled out in the spring with generally dismal results.

The problems were amplified for children in the nation’s worst-performing schools, including at Jackson Public Schools, where 95% of the students are Black and just as many are considered low income. District parents say if education is the great equalizer, their children are at a growing disadvantage.

These schools and their communities were already working to overcome legacies of racial inequities when the killing of George Floyd spurred national protests and broader actions to address racism. The pandemic set them even further behind.

In Jackson, like in many other districts, school officials essentially gave up on requiring remote learning last spring. In late April the district allowed children who were passing before the shutdown to skip the last two months of school and still receive an overall passing grade. Some students didn’t have internet access or parents available to help. Even some teachers couldn’t get online at home when schools closed.


Ms. Bunton and other parents said they tried to get homework packets with the rest of the year’s curriculum from their children’s schools, but were told there were none.

Jackson Schools Superintendent Errick Greene said the district was ill prepared for the pandemic. Beyond connectivity issues, Dr. Greene noted that some parents have their own challenges helping their children learn. About 28% of Jackson school parents age 25 and up had no more education than a high-school diploma, and almost 12% had less school than that, according to a five-year estimate in 2018 by the Census Bureau.

“We were caught flat-footed,” Dr. Greene said.

Preliminary research suggests students nationwide will return to school in the fall with roughly 70% of learning gains in reading relative to a typical school year, and less than 50% in math, according to projections by NWEA, an Oregon-based nonprofit education-services firm. It expects a greater learning loss for minority and low-income children, who have less access to technology and whose families are more likely to be affected by the economic downturn.

About 26 million public-school students, just over half in the U.S., are considered low-income and rely on free or reduced-price meals at school.

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