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Jim Davis/The Boston Globe via Getty Images
The Hechinger Report
Remote learners feel shortchanged in districts pressured to reopen in person
Schools are struggling to serve both in-person and virtual learners.
Some parents and teachers worry that the quality of online learning has
been sacrificed to accommodate school reopenings
By Bracey Harris and Caroline Preston
November 22, 2020
It was the second week of the fall semester when Cassandra Wooten
realized her teenage daughter was sinking. The high school junior often
spent hours a day on her computer for online school, only to tell her
mom at the end of the day that she wasn’t sure she’d learned anything
at all. She felt she was trying to teach herself. One night in
mid-August, she came to Wooten’s room and proposed going back to
in-person classes at her high school in northern Mississippi.
Wooten had decided to enroll her daughter in the DeSoto County School
District’s remote learning plan last summer, when infection rates
surged across their home state of Mississippi and hospitals ran out of
ICU beds. Wooten was determined to keep her only child safe, and felt
confident that a computer, quiet space in their home and a good
attitude would keep her on track with her peers who were learning in
person.
But as it became apparent that her daughter’s experience would consist
largely of watching pre-recorded videos from her teachers and pacing
though classwork by herself, Wooten lost her optimism. Her daughter was
struggling to complete assignments. Sometimes teachers took almost a
full week to respond to the girl’s emailed questions. A strong student
before the pandemic, her grade in Algebra II slipped to a D. Before the
first month of classes ended, Wooten hired a tutor to assist her
daughter with the class.
“It’s absolutely pointless to have a program called virtual learning,
but there is no opportunity for any virtual learning,” said Wooten, who
works as an analyst tracking the arrival of medical supplies needed to
combat the pandemic.
Political pressure has been intense for schools in Mississippi to open
for in-person instruction. As in other Southern states, the governor
has urged full reopening, an idea backed by President Trump and, in
many cases, parents desperate for in-person education for their kids.
Some districts initially resisted offering online options for students
who wanted to stay home. Others eliminated the virtual option for
students a few weeks after classes started.
And even in districts like DeSoto, where remote learning is available,
families like the Wootens worry their kids have been neglected as
schools respond to politicians and parents clamoring for a return to
normal. Wooten was among 1,000 individuals there who signed a petition
asking that virtual classes include live instruction and more
opportunities for remote learners to interact with their teachers.
As the pandemic rages mostly unchecked in much of the country, some of
these families wonder if they’re being punished for choosing to keep
their kids home.
Providing an equal education to kids learning in person and to those
learning at home is undoubtedly difficult, if not impossible. School
officials say they just don’t have the means to do both well without
more funding and more teachers. Districts are contending with staffing
shortages, technological challenges and scheduling headaches.
Too often, it’s the remote students who are asked to make do with less
and, in some cases, learn and complete lessons almost entirely on their
own. In others, remote students are placed with in-person learners in
classes that have ballooned to up to 60 students and must fight for
face-to-face time with teachers who are overworked and overwhelmed.
In an email, Lauren Margeson, executive administrative assistant to the
superintendent of DeSoto County, said the decision about how to handle
remote learning was left to individual principals in the district, the
largest in Mississippi. Some have assigned teachers entirely to working
with at-home students; others have not. Margeson added the district
recently shortened the length of in-person classes on Fridays, so that
teachers could interact more with online students.
Wooten has not been assuaged by the district’s efforts. Her daughter
has only been able to join a class by livestream once; individual
attention from teachers has been scarce. Wooten said she hasn’t
received communication about the changes.
For Bonnie Owen, sending her two children to school in person didn’t
seem like an option. Owen, a former teacher and stay-at-home mom in
Williamson County, Tennessee, has asthma and her daughter has two
autoimmune conditions. The local school district welcomed students back
to full-time, in-person classrooms this fall, but Owen worried the risk
of exposing her family to the coronavirus was too great.
Owen was comforted by what she heard about the district’s virtual
learning plan from school administrators: Children from families like
hers would be taught the school district curriculum by
district-certified teachers. Before the pandemic, the county had begun
offering a handful of online classes designed by the district’s
teachers. Owen assumed the new virtual classes would be akin to those.
Now, Owen and other parents in the affluent community outside of
Nashville say they feel misled. Just before school started, the
district shifted remote learners in middle and high school to
Edgenuity, a virtual platform that presents recorded video lessons to
students and uses artificial intelligence to grade their performance.
While teachers are required to hold check-ins with students in addition
to the Edgenuity instruction — weekly for middle schoolers and monthly
for high schoolers — parents said those sessions aren’t nearly enough.
Teachers, meanwhile, are too burdened by the demands of both
instructing the students who have returned to classrooms and those
learning from home to provide additional support.
“The online students are basically an afterschool activity,” said Owen,
who added that teachers are “overworked, overloaded and overwhelmed.”
In October, fed up with the quality of remote learning, she decided to
send her sixth grade son back to school in person for the second
quarter, despite the health risks.
Dave Allen, assistant superintendent for teaching, learning and
assessment for Williamson County Schools, said in an email that the
district simply doesn’t have enough teachers, time or resources to
build new content for courses and provide students a fully online
option. “Edgenuity was chosen to provide teachers course content to
align with Tennessee state standards,” he wrote, adding that county
teachers have the “ability to replace or supplement” its content “as
they see fit.”
Megan Faison, another Williamson County parent, called the district’s
handling of virtual learning “a bait-and-switch.” Faison chose to keep
her two sons home because her husband has an underlying medical
condition. Like Owen, she felt reassured by what she heard of plans for
the virtual option. But the reality, she said, has been “a shock.”
“They literally just dumped this program in our laps and expected us to
navigate it,” she said. Her oldest son, an eighth grader who is gifted
and dyslexic, has struggled and fallen far behind, she said. The A.I.
grading system doesn’t pick up on subtleties of language, say teachers
and parents, and marks correct answers incorrect and vice versa.
More than 1,000 people have signed a petition protesting the use of the
platform and asking the district to stop grading students until the
problems with it are fixed. (In an emailed statement, Edgenuity said
the platform uses algorithms “not to supplant teacher scoring, only to
provide scoring guidance to teachers.”)
As in Mississippi, the problems with remote learning in Williamson are
marked by politics. When the school district announced in August that
older kids would spend the first two weeks of school online, parents in
favor of a full reopening rallied for their children’s immediate return
to school buildings. When a high school was shut temporarily because of
a coronavirus outbreak in September, parents protested again. Families
have also sued the school district over its mask mandate.
The superintendent, Jason Golden, explained in an email to Faison that
the district told parents in its public meetings that it “didn’t
recommend the online program” but was “providing this option because
there were clearly some parents who said they would not be comfortable
having their children on campus during the pandemic.”
Faison called his statement a “lie.” She said she would have
homeschooled her children if the district had been honest with parents
from the start about its plans to move students to Edgenuity.
“It’s become a political thing and it shouldn’t have been,” said Owen.
Owen, Faison and other parents said they wish the district had provided
what it promised: county-approved teachers instructing their students
and providing individual interaction and support.
Education experts agree that individual attention from teachers is key
to keeping online learners on track. But with budget cuts ahead and
little hope of more federal help coming soon, experts also say there’s
no simple or straightforward way to meet the demands of remote
learners, especially in short-staffed districts.
Online learning platforms aren’t necessarily a bad option – but only if
they are supplemented by plenty of individual support from teachers,
said Ben Cottingham, associate director of strategic partnerships at
Policy Analysis for California Education, a research center based at
Stanford University. He worries that school districts adopted online
teaching platforms as a way to cope with staffing shortages without
realizing “they were never intended to be the sole instructor for a
student’s learning. They were all meant to be supplemental material.”
“In the rush to get back to school in some way that feels normal, a lot
of these platforms have gained traction in a way they probably
shouldn’t have,” Cottingham said.
Lane McKittrick, a research analyst with the Center for Reinventing
Public Education, a think tank based at the University of Washington,
said that for many districts, the logistics of reopening schools for
in-person teaching absorbed the lion’s share of attention this summer.
In a review of charter and district reopening plans in 50 states, her
group found that almost a third didn’t specify whether teachers were
required to check on students learning remotely. Only 35 of the 106
districts reviewed had information on the amount of instructional time
that families could expect.
The lack of district-level guidance when schools shut down last spring
meant that students within the same district and even the same
household experienced “wide variation in what remote learning looks
like,” according to a previous analysis from the group. Without clear
expectations for instruction in school reopening plans, the same could
play out this fall. “In the absence of that, it’s up to the school and
teachers to figure it out on their own which leads to inequity,”
McKittrick said.
Some parents said their request for live instruction could easily be
accomplished with the use of a platform like Zoom. McKittrick cautioned
that approach can come with its own challenges if teachers are assigned
to instruct students physically in the classroom along with those at
home. “To do it right,” she said, “you might need more staff in the
classroom.”
The rush to return children to classrooms has left districts with the
duty to provide quality instruction and no good options for doing so.
In Florida, schools scrambled to comply with a July state order
threatening funding cuts unless they began offering in-person learning
five days a week starting the next month. Many parents opted to keep
their kids home anyway, and in some cases, districts encouraged this
option in order to thin the number of students returning to school
buildings.
To educate both sets of students, some districts opted for what might
seem like the simplest path: letting online learners tune in to the
in-person classes through video conferencing. That way, in theory,
everyone would get the same instruction by the same teachers. But the
approach hasn’t gone well for anyone, teachers and parents said, and
especially for the kids who’ve stayed home.
Janet Cunningham, a special education teacher in Pinellas County, said
teachers are teaching into their computer cameras at the front of
classrooms, while students in the room crowd around a limited number of
devices and try to follow the virtual lesson. As lousy as that
experience is for the in-person students, she said, it’s often worse
for the kids at home. (The district did not respond to multiple
requests for comment.)
“You pay attention to the ones that are right in front of you,”
Cunningham said. “Although they are saying we are providing a rigorous
education, I don’t believe that’s the case.”
Amanda Loeffler, who has three kids in Pinellas County schools, said
her two middle schoolers, who beam in to in-person classes via
Microsoft Teams, get little support from teachers. She and other
parents said the district gave the impression in pamphlets and on its
website ahead of the school year that at-home learners would have
dedicated teachers. Now, nearly 3,000 people have signed a petition
accusing the district of misleading parents and calling for designated
teachers for online students.
In Mississippi, some districts took the step of livestreaming in-person
instruction or assigning dedicated teachers to virtual classes. But, as
frustrations with online learning have boiled over, others are simply
ending the option for students to stay at home.
In the Gulf Coast school district of Jackson County, most remote
learners now face two options: Come back on campus, or withdraw. At the
start of the second quarter in October, 60 percent of students enrolled
in the remote program had an F in at least one class. And 40 percent
were failing at least two subjects. Another district, Lamar County,
announced that children in pre-K through fifth grade must have a
medical exemption in order to continue online lessons.
In DeSoto County, 17 students and 12 staff members have been diagnosed
with Covid-19 since the beginning of the school year. Infection rates
have started to increase across the state again, after the lift of
Mississippi’s mask mandate. (Masks are still required in schools.)
Wooten’s not ready for her daughter to return to Southaven High School.
Still, she has had one small victory this fall. After her daughter
received a low score on a history test, the teacher offered to let the
teenager watch a live-streamed history class. Wooten said the teacher’s
in-person advice about how to prepare for an upcoming exam was much
stronger than the guidance provided to remote students. On the test,
her daughter received an A, she said.
Wooten felt vindicated. It was “proof positive that the whole concept
of live teaching is very beneficial to the student,” she said. But,
there are no guarantees that administrators will accommodate her
requests going forward.
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