Virtual learning set poor children even further behind, study shows

“If the achievement losses become permanent,” the study warns, “there will be major implications for future earnings, racial equity and income inequality, especially in states where remote instruction is common.”

One finding is that the gaps were not as severe as the districts that held the most in-person schooling.

“The most important results in our study were that of remote instruction in high-risk and low-risk schools,” said Thomas Kane, an education and economics professor at Harvard and one of the co-authors of the paper. Kane said it is clear that students who have lost their high-poverty schools are “very much grounded” but that “there is a potential reflecting difference in access to broadband access at home, devices at home, study space at home.”

A double-whammy for students: they stand out and lose the most from virtual learning – and they spend, on average, more time learning remotely. The study found that mid- and low-poverty schools had more than 5.5 more weeks of remote instruction. Black and Latino students are also more likely to learn online.

These schools did less to contain covid. Their students flourished.

The paper is likely to be the last school year for students out of classrooms. Many big city districts, like those in Los Angeles and DC, remain closed for the second half of the school year or operated in hybrid mode for most of the school year.

This happens because of the pressure from the teacher, which is about the voiced reservations about returning to the classroom. But many families – whose communities were hardest hit by the pandemic – also chose to keep their children home, expressing more fears about safety than white parents.

In many GOP-led states, governors reopen forced school districts and in some cases threatened their funding. While gaps between students in high- and low-poverty schools persist in districts that remain open for the entire 2020-2021 school year, they did not grow during the pandemic.

The nation’s public school system has long been beset by inequality, which is reflected in the fact that everything from building students to the number of books in the library to the level of experience in the classroom. Students of color and those of their affluent white peers, compounding and perpetuating other inequalities. In 2018, a study by The Education Trust, found that school equity issues that focus on nonprofit, Black, Latino and Native American students receive 13 percent less than white students.

Returning to the classrooms of some families as the new school year begins

But the Pandemic has highlighted the importance of educational inequality and a new sense of urgency. A year ago, The American Rescue Plan provided $ 190 billion for schools, with much of the funding targeted at high-income schools.

“The pandemic shed is a light on a situation that has existed for a very long time, which is what bright and eager Black and Latino students and students from low-income communities are … Said Allison Socol of the Education Trust.

She said she hopes this paper – and the pandemic – “will be a call to action and a light under fire for school leaders and policymakers and the public for a long time.”

Both she and Kane emphasized the importance of schools directing the windfall of federal money from proven academic interventions, such as tutoring or extending the school year. Districts are required to spend only 20 percent of their funds on address learning, but they said school leaders should be allocating far more.

“I am most concerned about the catch-up plans that are working on the bills and the magnitude to make up for these losses,” Kane said.