For as long as there’s been education, there have been debates about the best way to provide it. From rote memorization to New Math or the importance of Greek and Latin to Hip Hop in poetry class, we’ve seen incredible shifts in the way that education is provided.
For years, claims have been made about the next iteration of learning, from home-based and community schooling to the adoption of new technologies for virtual instruction. In June of 2000, an article from Paul T. Hill at Brookings, a DC think tank, detailed homeschooling growth in the U.S. and predicted that online resources and support from public districts would make homeschooling more accessible for families in the future.
Unfortunately, whether or not homeschooling or online learning is as good, better, or worse compared to traditional live classroom instruction has always been nearly impossible to determine. James Murphy at Vanderbilt said it perfectly in a 2014 article:
We were careful to the point of redundancy in exposing the incipient and immature nature of the research on homeschooling.
The short answer is we couldn’t know anything for certain. The sample sizes were always too small and longitudinal research is hard and expensive. Plus, parents who chose to home school obviously already had the means and motivation. That’s a pretty strong selection bias.
But all of that is about to change.
Education in the age of COVID-19
We’re about to embark on an educational odyssey unlike anything we’ve seen before. For over a month now, we’ve been hearing from prominent think tanks, professional organizations, and public health leaders that reopening schools this fall is imperative. To quote the American Academy of Pediatrics, any plans that schools make for the upcoming year “…should start with a goal of having students physically present in school”. From the CDC: “…the harms attributed to closed schools on the social, emotional, and behavioral health, economic well-being, and academic achievement of children, in both the short- and long-term, are well-known and significant.”
Despite those dire warnings, schools across the country are exploring alternatives that will test delivery models, technology, parents, and students in a petri dish of new pedagogical ways. For the first time, families with various incomes, parental employment, educational attainment, and access to technology will participate in new models of instruction. In many states, counties that share a border will have entirely different solutions this fall. Or even within a single city, public schools may reopen while private schools do not.
We have to get through the immediate future, but what we know about education is about the expand 100-fold.
Home Schooling
Regardless of what local schools are doing, there’s already growing interest in outright homeschooling. Keeping in mind the research limitations mentioned above, there’s some suggestion that home-schooled students generally perform better on standardized tests and may progress through grade levels a little faster.
But what’s going to happen when we scale the home school experiment to dramatically more families? So far, home-school parents have generally chosen to home-school, but parents now may be forced into the decision.
A 2010 study published in Education and Urban Society found a significant difference between public school parents and home school parents in their own attitudes towards being an active partner in a child’s education. Home-school parents were more likely to feel like they could contribute to their child’s education and felt more strongly about their child’s progress. Because the public vs home school students’ answers didn’t differ in the study, there’s some suggestion that the difference between any home school and public school outcome is found in the parents instead of the students.
Let’s add to that mixture the long-term effects of a parent’s education level and income on educational attainment. Already, we’ve seen that more affluent parents invest more time and money in their children’s education.
If parents who wouldn’t normally choose to home school feel forced to or just need to play a more active role in their child’s education because schools in the area have gone remote, we’re finally going to test how scalable the homeschooling model really is.
The limits of virtual learning
The obvious answer to concerns about parental involvement is that they won’t be alone. Schools that aren’t conducting live instruction will still be offering online learning, and even for parents who do try to truly home-school, there are more virtual resources available than ever before. But here, too, we have challenges.
The first is simply availability. In a series of surveys conducted by the Center on Reinventing Public Education immediately after schools began closing in the Spring, less than half of districts had a fully realized virtual program, including a curriculum, online instruction, and progress monitoring, by mid-April. By May, the number was to nearly 60% but still with about a third of districts offering a curriculum but no instruction. In an American Enterprise Institute study, only about 20% of schools offered “rigorous” online instruction during this period. In many districts, students were essentially converted to homeschooling without an alternative.
In cases where online instruction was offered, access is still a serious concern. In Miami-Dade schools, more than 20% of students in some economically disadvantaged areas had online attendance issues during the first weeks of virtual instruction. A mixture of parents who have to work, lack of home internet, and incompatible digital devices can keep children from benefiting from whatever virtual resources might be available.
Schools are ordering millions of laptops and tablets for students, but the digital divide (which has always been a concern) is going to take a very specific toll on education in the next few months. In 2019, the FCC reported that over 21 million Americans lacked access to broadband internet, of the kind that might be necessary for streaming a virtual classroom session. And families on the lower end of the income spectrum are also more likely to be “smartphone-dependent“, which makes filling out worksheets, typing up answers, or interacting with virtual lessons harder.
And last but not certainly not least, we’re not even sure if virtual instruction works. In the immediate aftermath of schools closing, virtual instruction was a nightmare of glitchy Zoom calls, absent students, and over-assigned homework. In March and April, the NY Times collected responses from students, and there are a lot of difficulties. Students struggled to manage their time and attention remotely, cope with an increase in self-directed work, and miss peer discussion in a live classroom.
It’s tempting to write all of it off as the price of disruption and a sudden change, but the Center for Research on Education Outcomes (CREDO) conducted a study of Online Charter Schools in 2015 that’s very instructive. Across 17 states and the District of Columbia, CREDO identified 166 online-only charter schools with more than 160,000 students across all K-12 grade levels. They compared this group to traditional public schools with in-person classroom instruction. I’ll let their first conclusion speak for itself…
Current online charter schools may be a good fit for some students, but the evidence suggests that online charters don’t serve very well the relatively atypical set of students that currently attend these schools, much less the general population.
When comparing students across income levels, ethnicity, states, and different technology delivery, online-only students showed lower academic progress in math and reading. The state’s educational policies, the specific school’s virtual solutions, or even if the schools were charter schools all showed relatively little impact. It was the fact that instruction was offered only online that made outcomes worse.
Much bigger questions
What I’m talking about here are the educational implications of changing our instructional delivery model across the country. We’re conducting a grand experiment in educational delivery that is going to prove or disapprove a lot of what we think we know about what works. We’ll likely see some exciting innovations and some amazing success stories. And we’re also likely to see some very bad news about falling test scores and students being left behind.
At this point, there’s no way to not conduct the experiment. Teachers are expressing perfectly reasonable concerns about their own safety, and the American Federation of Teachers, a union representing 1.7 school employees, has announced support for groups that plan to strike over school reopenings.
Even the CDC’s guidance for school reopening isn’t exactly calming. They say it’s perfectly reasonable for parents to be concerned but don’t worry “…the best available evidence indicates if children become infected, they are far less likely to suffer severe symptoms. Death rates among school-aged children are much lower than among adults” (emphasis mine).
With outbreaks happening at summer camps and schools that have already started back, it’s a question of when outbreaks happen, not if.
But many parents also need schools to reopen. Schools have become a lever of the economy. The value of school-provided childcare alone is significant. Without schools, many middle and lower-income families (especially single-parent households) will struggle to balance work and parenting.
With unemployment still at record high levels, 47% of American families are now living with hunger. We’re seeing long lines at food banks and may be on the edge of a massive eviction crisis. Families need income, and a University of Chicago study suggests that 11% of workers, more than 17 million people, won’t be able to return to full-time work without childcare.
We’re in for a bumpy ride
There are no easy solutions right now. Added to everything above is the important role that schools play in socialization, providing special education and mental health services, and feeding kids. On the opposite side is the emergence of Multisystem Inflammatory Syndrome related to COVID-19 infections in children. As a child, I both benefited from school-based speech therapy and had a similar inflammatory disease called Kawasaki Syndrome. I wish everyone had access to one and no one had to suffer the other.
The next school year is going to be difficult. It will be hard for parents, students, teachers, and society as a whole. Every system and every parent will be required to make constant adjustments and do the best they can for students.
On a million fronts, COVID-19 is forcing massive changes, and we’re going to learn a lot whether we like it or now. I hope that we support one another, support our teachers, and support American families as we all work to figure it out.