This past spring, school districts nationwide were thrown overnight into an unprecedented experiment in remote learning. If we are honest with ourselves, the experiment deserves a failing grade.
Students lost months of academic progress, with low-income and minority students falling farthest behind. Up to half of students in some schools and districts didn’t even log in.
Many words have been spilled concerning the “digital divide.” Some argue that it’s a simple problem — 9.7 million students live in homes that don’t have computers and broadband —- that can be easily fixed. But if many times more students than that were checked-out of distance education, simple math tells us that the problem is far more complex.
This isn’t to say that computers and broadband connectivity aren’t important parts of the problem; they are. Even before COVID-19, broadband companies aggressively sought to get everyone online with discounted programs for low-income neighborhoods. During COVID, many opened up Wi-Fi hotspots to the public and offered free broadband.
Some school districts bought and distributed laptops and WiFi hotspots. Progressive mayors showed leadership, too: Chicago’s Lori Lightfoot, Philadelphia’s Jim Kenney and Atlanta’s Keisha Lance Bottoms have forged public-private partnerships with broadband providers and others to offer free broadband service, low-cost computers, and digital literacy training to low-income K-12 households. These plans offer a roadmap that other cities can follow.
Leaders in Washington have talked about ways to address the problem, but so far, it’s all talk. More needs to be done at the federal level. For example, a much-discussed emergency broadband benefit could help defray the costs to low-income families who want to sign up to broadband. And Congress needs to appropriate significant money for a crash K-12 rescue program if we are to save schooling during the pandemic.
But solely closing the digital divide won’t get us a passing grade. Los Angeles schools scrambled to launch a public-private broadband hotspot program within the first weeks of school shutdowns in March, offering free service to any student who wasn’t already connected.
But by May, only 60% of public high school students were logging in on an average day. In Chicago, where 90% of public school students had online access, 41% logged into an online classroom fewer than three times a week.
To succeed, we need all hands on deck — elected officials, educators, parents, students and business leaders — to focus on a more comprehensive approach to ensure equal access to quality education in 2020 and beyond.
COVID has exposed some long-standing problems: teachers lack proper support and digital training, single parents often work two jobs and have little to no help, tens of millions of students lack needed digital skills. Many schools haven’t updated curricula to capture students’ interest and imaginations in online settings.
Columbus City Schools entered the shutdown with a technology plan auditors criticized as “dated and insufficient.” Chronic absenteeism, which stood at 29.8% in Columbus schools even before the pandemic, skyrocketed with distance ed.
And as the pandemic moves through communities, it leaves behind emotional scars. In the coming months, more families will face economic hardship, including eviction from their homes. For some, mental health issues will become acute. Clearly, districts and schools need federal and state funds to hire social workers and psychologists who can work with students and their families dealing with trauma.
These are the “human gaps” that must be recognized and fixed. If we don’t give them serious attention, all the computers and broadband in the world won’t change the outcome.
To address them we must start by recognizing that we also have a systems problem. Most of our large school districts operate using a model that is a century out of date: centralized, hierarchical bureaucracies that offer mostly cookie-cutter schools. They respond too slowly and fail to motivate too many of their employees and students.
In recent decades, cities as diverse as New Orleans, Washington, D.C., Denver and Indianapolis have taken a different path. By embracing public charter schools and “innovation schools” with charter-like autonomy, they have given schools more flexibility to respond to their students’ needs, to adapt their curricula and teaching methods, to train and develop their teachers and to work as partners with parents to get students engaged and hold their interest.
They also have embraced accountability for performance, encouraged their schools to adopt diverse learning models tailored to the diverse needs of children and given families the ability to choose the public schools that best fit their children. The results have included some of the fastest improvements in the nation.
We can close the digital divide. But we also need to close the human gaps. And to do that, we must drag our public education systems into the 21st century.
Curtis Valentine, a former teacher and current school board member of Prince George’s County Public Schools in Maryland, is deputy director of Progressive Policy Institute’s education work.
