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The Atlantic
What Teachers Need to Make Remote Schooling Work
The coronavirus pandemic is increasing academic gaps, and educators are scrambling to reduce them.
Kristina Rizga
April 13, 2020
San Francisco’s Mission High School is one of the most diverse in the
nation. Its roughly 1,100 students hold at least 47 different
passports; more than 60 percent of students are considered low income.
Even before the coronavirus threw the nation into an economic crisis,
most of Mission High’s students already struggled with access to basic
needs—health care, housing, food, or access to the internet or
computers—in a city among the nation’s wealthiest. Pirette McKamey, an
English teacher of 27 years and Mission’s first-year principal,
estimates—based on two weeks of calls and emails to Mission High
families after San Francisco’s public schools shut down on March
16—that close to 30 percent of students don’t have a computer at home
or access to high-quality internet.
San Francisco’s public schools didn’t begin formal remote instruction
until today, but many teachers at Mission High kicked into high gear in
the very first week of closures, providing voluntary assignments and
attempting to connect with every student—including those with
disconnected phone lines, those in homeless families, and recent
immigrants speaking only Arabic, Spanish, or Mandarin. McKamey and
other teachers have lent out laptops, and the district swiftly raised
funds for additional computers, internet access, and free meals—the
demand for which has doubled each week since the district began giving
out food on March 17. Meanwhile, teachers are collaborating to adapt
their curriculum to learning online, a big challenge in a school that
is intentionally designed to maximize individual interactions. (DeLara
Armijo, a freshman, told me she’s looking forward to working on a
short-story assignment—“Coronavirus Quarantine Love Story”—math
assignments, and daily exercises sent by her PE teacher).
As the coronavirus pandemic has forced the vast majority of schools
across the country to close, educators are scrambling to find ways to
keep reaching students during a crisis that is exacerbating existing
inequities and increasing academic gaps. The twelve teachers
interviewed for this story—from the Mississippi Delta to San Francisco,
Texas, Arizona, subarctic Alaska, Michigan, and Pennsylvania—identified
the four most urgent needs that must be addressed in order to help
reduce rapidly increasing disparities in access to learning.
Free, High-Speed Internet for Students
An estimated 12 million students—or nearly a fifth of all students in
the U.S.—don’t have internet at home. A 2016 report on the digital
divide found that a quarter of families below the median-income level
rely on cellphones for internet access, and that 20 percent of the
respondents with a home computer said their internet had been
disconnected at least once in the year they were surveyed because they
couldn’t afford to pay for it. Even if schools can provide their
students with computers, the lack of good-quality internet is
disrupting classroom interactions for all students.
Some cities, like San Francisco, Los Angeles, and New York, are
creating partnerships with private companies and foundations to bring
Wi-Fi-enabled devices to students’ homes. Across the country,
universities and public libraries are offering free Wi-Fi hotspots; one
district in Tucson, Arizona, is creating Wi-Fi hotspots in school buses
parked near low-income neighborhoods for families who are farther away
from schools and libraries. And a bipartisan group of lawmakers is
pushing congressional leaders to include funding for small broadband
providers—who are already providing internet for students in low-income
families—in future coronavirus-relief bills.
Peer-to-Peer Professional Development
Many teachers are already being trained to use virtual-teaching tools,
but different disciplines require different digital approaches.
Teachers need specific instruction in how to effectively translate
their subject to online platforms. “Learning how to teach online is
hard,” Renee Moore, who teaches high-school and college students at the
Mississippi Delta Community College, said. She suggested that educators
more familiar with teaching online be paired up with those who are
newer to it.
Teacher-to-teacher collaboration can help educators figure out how to
tailor assignments to the specific needs of different students.
“Effective teaching is not just about good assignments,” Robert Roth, a
recently retired history and ethnic-studies teacher and a current
teacher-mentor at Mission High, told me. “Teaching is also about
engaging students: talking to them about their work with a piece of
paper in hand every day, encouraging them, helping them develop their
skills in the moment.” Roth spent much of last week collaborating with
his colleagues to make lists of students who will need extra support,
and developing strategies for reaching students who don’t have internet
access.
The Ability to Bend the Rules
Teachers say they need to be trusted to prioritize their students’
well-being, even if it requires unusual approaches. Chuck Yarborough, a
U.S.- and African-American-history teacher at a public boarding school
in Columbus, Mississippi, is shortening the amount of some of the
content he’ll cover, and plans to be more flexible with deadlines and
assessments. In challenging moments like this, he told me, there are
more important things than covering all of the presidents and battles.
“School is so much more than academic content,” he said. “Education is
also about a sense of community, collaboration, empathy, confidence.”
In Philadelphia, where many students live in racially isolated areas of
concentrated poverty and already have a lot to deal with—including gun
violence, foster care, and homelessness—educators are prioritizing
access to meals, counselors, and a sense of stability and safety.
Educators are waiting until April 20 to launch formal instruction, but
optional learning materials are available online while district
officials are giving out laptops and securing broadband for all
students. Angela Crawford teaches English at a school in Philadelphia
where 37 percent of students have learning disabilities. “I’m gravely
concerned with all of my students and their parents without health care
during coronavirus,” Crawford told me. “We have to prioritize basic
needs during this unprecedented crisis. It’s hard to focus on
schoolwork if your family members are getting sick and you don’t know
where your family will sleep tomorrow.”
Some researchers have argued that districts that are under-resourced
and have large numbers of students living in poverty might serve their
students better by forgoing remote lessons altogether, and instead
focusing on providing face-to-face instruction when schools
reopen—possibly during the summer. “A growing body of evidence suggests
that online learning works least well for our most vulnerable
learners,” Justin Reich, an assistant professor at MIT and the director
of the Teaching Systems Lab there, argued in EdSurge. “If you are going
online, the number one question is not: ‘What tech to use to teach
online?’ It should be: ‘How will you support your most struggling
students?’”
Emergency Aid to Low-Income Families
Back in San Francisco, DeLara Armijo told me that her mother and
stepfather, who work as hairdressers, have been without work for close
to a month. When the Mission High School history teacher Nancy
Rodriguez called close to 100 students in the first week of school
closures to see how they and their families were doing, many were
already reporting that their parents had lost their jobs.
Some economists now forecast that unemployment may reach as high as 41
percent, and GDP may contract by nearly a quarter. Such large losses
would mean lower revenues for state and local governments, and could
eventually result in budget cuts to schools that struggling families
rely on for food, counselors, and teachers’ individualized care and
attention. While the federal government sent $13.5 billion to public
schools as part of its emergency coronavirus funding package—providing
crucial relief for emergency costs, such as extra meals, technology
needs, and professional development—some state officials are concerned
that this won’t help districts deal with the looming budget holes.
Some cash-strapped districts in cities like San Francisco and
Philadelphia have already been channeling emergency resources to
finance distance-learning plans, but teachers see this as only one part
of the much bigger task schools—and the country, more broadly—will be
facing in the coming months. “Our district has been working tirelessly
to help schools provide food, access to devices, and learning,”
McKamey, the Mission High principal, told me. “But the government needs
to find ways to provide sustained financial assistance and housing for
low-income families. From our conversations with students and their
families, these are their most urgent needs right now.”
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