In yet another example of asteroid strikes earth, women and minorites affected most, New York City public schools will reopen, which, the New York Times reports, exacerbates the “racial divide.”
But as some school buildings reopen this week, the mayor has found himself presiding over a starkly unequal school system in which many white families have flocked back to classrooms while most families of color have chosen to learn from home indefinitely.
That gulf is illustrated in a startling statistic: There are nearly 12,000 more white children returning to public school buildings than Black students — even though there are many more Black students than white children in the system overall.
There is a well-worn list of problems arising from this, from the fact that remote learning is inadequate in itself, even though some teachers claim otherwise, to the problem of black students lacking computers or wifi access. But then, if schools are open, why then are these students who are otherwise denied an education not attending?
In New York and across the country, politicians and education officials have found that many nonwhite families are not ready to send their children back to classrooms — despite their struggles with remote learning — in part because of the disproportionately harsh impact the virus has had on their communities.
There’s no cite for this claim, and “in part” is doing an awful lot of work here. But the mere fact that black students are not choosing to go to school is sufficient to give rise to calls for extraordinary means to accommodate their choice not to return.
But the fact that so many students of color have chosen remote over in-person learning is raising alarms that existing disparities in the nation’s largest school system will widen, since remote learning has been far less effective, parents, educators and officials said in dozens of interviews. More than ever, they say, the city must quickly bolster online instruction — or risk having its neediest children fall irrevocably behind.
The risk that the “neediest children” will “fall irrevocably behind” is certainly true, but what is the answer?
“It’s the perfect storm of marginalization,” said Jamila Newman of TNTP, a nonprofit that provides consulting services for districts on staffing and instruction. “That’s why there is the need to demand stronger instruction remotely.”
It’s not that black students can’t go to school. They can. They choose not to. The solution isn’t computers or wifi, which can be accommodated, but that remote learning, in itself, is inadequate. So the solution is to “demand stronger instruction remotely”? What does that mean?
Educators also said they were scrambling to make lessons more engaging for students without much helpful guidance from the city. So while individual teachers and schools have honed creative strategies to improve online instruction, there is no clear citywide plan to do the same, leaving a patchwork system of learning across the city’s 1,800 schools.
Is there some magic about which most NYC teachers are unaware that will make remote learning “engaging” and change this failed approach into a success? But more to the point, is the problem that black students are marginalized or that they are being provided with the opportunity to get an education and are choosing not to avail themselves of it?
How far must schools go to “fix” the problem of students who need an education but don’t take advantage of what’s available? And what does it mean a few years from now, when their absence in jobs and higher education becomes the next wave of disparate impact?
*Tuesday Talk rules apply.
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It’s become a topic I hear a lot from residents that the disproportionate impact has fallen on black and brown communities, which are the hardest hit from COVID. The stats, I’ve found thus far, have some merit.
Anecdotally, if you’re like me and can work from home, you’re far less likely to find people to infect you between the kitchen and the dining room than a person that’s poor and needs to show up to work so they can deliver the amazon packages that I keep ordering from my dining room.
And if that’s the case, the people ain’t wrong. The impact is worse in their communities and perhaps a decision not to send their kids on the subway/bus/walk to school with a bunch of other kids from the same situation isn’t the worst call. But it’s not something the schools can figure out either.
Protracted socio-economic issues are not solving themselves overnight.
Is there some magic about which most NYC teachers are unaware that will make remote learning “engaging” and change this failed approach into a success?
Yes, and online education can be successful. I saw one day of a very successful online class for my kid. Sadly, there have been 266 other days since her school system went remote and those sucked, mostly because of little prep time and teachers that were never taught how to teach in a different medium.
TL;DR: life is complicated and “schools opening is racist”, is making kids dumber in ways the Times hasn’t (won’t?) grasped.
I’m going back to my coffee so I can set up
zoomGoogle Classroom, in an hour.So you’ve got nothing worthwhile to contribute. Thanks for your two cents.
These are good points. Furthermore, school systems have always expended more resources to help those who struggle with school than those who don’t, whether the differences be because of innate ability, or socio-economic or parental factors. This is appropriate; it is more important for a public education system to raise everyone to a minimum standard of education than to enable the more fortunate or gifted to reach their full potential. So, similarly, it is appropriate for them to put some thought into how to best educate those for whom sending the kids to school is riskier, and who therefore are less likely to be in school.
Remote learning is certainly crappier now than in-person learning, but it is an open question if it has to be. People really haven’t tried to develop it, except mostly on a crash basis over the last 9 months. I think the example of Sesame Street is a pretty good one. They did a lot of experimentation to figure out how to make it engaging, and were pretty successful.
“Put some thought in”? Sesame Street? You’re brilliant and should not deprive redditors of your deep thoughts.
I surmise you have not read about the experiments done during the development of Sesame Street. They set up experimental viewing sessions where they could monitor childrens’ attention, and developed the program to keep that attention. In the early days, poor households tended to have one television, so they simultaneously worked to ensure there was just enough of interest in there to keep the adult audience tuned to a kids’ show. They maintained these measurements over years, and as poor households ended up with multiple TVs on average, shifted the content, knowing they didn’t need to keep the adults from changing the channel. The whole time, they tracked the effectiveness of the programming in teaching basic reading. It was more effective than schools for quite a few children.
Sometimes, you are as thick as a brick.
I may make you feel but I can’t make you think.
Touché.
No, they’re not “good points.” They’re the sort of nonsensical generic points that someone who has no clue what they’re talking about says. Of course we try to help “at risk” students, but you can’t make students learn when they don’t want to and don’t care.
Want to help students? Stop making up bullshit excuses for their failure when they and their parents are their primary cause of failure. You don’t help them and you just lie to yourself.
You can’t know which students are hopeless and which are not until you try to help them. You can’t know in advance if today will be the day you get through to a seemingly hopeless one.
This is not ‘pile-on-delurking’ day, but actually pouring resources into the worst is a waste of time.
Society would be better to pour resources into the best to make them their absolute best. That is where the advancements that will drag the poor upwards will come from.
In any welfare state the poor can comfortably sit at the bottom and get looked after all their life. That is because the best of us have made advancements that allow us to pour money on the poor to keep them alive.
Sesame St is an excellent example. If you want education to be more than a Govt-inspired propaganda session, get Govt out of education!
I don’t think DL realized what he was saying, that we should reduce education to its lowest common denominator. He was trying to be kind to the marginalized without grasping the implications. We put scarce resources to their best use. We don’t leave the bottom behind if we can help it, but if we can’t help it, there’s a limit to denying the resource to everyone else by throwing it into a hole that serves no one’s interest. This eluded DL. It’s a NY thing.
On the other hand, Sesame Street is great for what it is, a fun educational TV show for young children, to supplement actual education. It is not, as he suggested, the solution for all students, all grades, all education.
I agree with KP’s general point about advancements coming from the best. That is why I limited my point to public school systems, which are part of the welfare state. Maybe you both think they shouldn’t be, and that there should be some other welfare-state organization that supports the bottom 10% of children, but I think that horse left the barn decades ago. Now, to preempt reductio ad absurdum questions like “should schools should also care for people with severe intellectual disabilities?”, I think the answer is no. But, I do think it is within the mission of public school systems to serve children at the 5th percentile on some overall fitness metric that includes innate ability, socio-economic status, and parenting.
I offered Sesame Street as an example of a successful distance-teaching method for some children. It was demonstrated decades ago to provide educational benefit to some children. I did not suggest what you claim I suggested, and I think you have a general tendency to read more extreme positions into things people write than is in the words.
Let me correct your presumptiveness: You may not have meant what you wrote, but you wrote what you wrote. If you don’t want to be misunderstood, work harder at expressing your point with greater clarity.
No one gives a fuck what you personally think or whether you agree. You don’t play that big a role in anyone else’s world. Sorry. But if you want to make a persuasive point, then try being cogent and concise. Try explaining your point clearly. Try thinking it through before spewing whatever pops into your head. And try remembering that you may not be the most knowledgeable person here, and show a little humility.
Does Sesame Street show that distance teaching can be a sufficient substitute for all students, all ages, all classes, all subjects, all purposes? And even in its trivial contribution to educational TV, it took many years to develop. Does this help the exigent situation of students who choose not to go to school at this moment? If not, then it was a worthless example of an unhelpful outlier.
Are you getting any of this?
HS teacher here, been teaching “hybrid synchronous” (our butt-ugly term for some students in the classroom, some students in a videochat) since early September.
Good remote instruction can be done, but it’s a lot harder than good in-person teaching and it depends on a lot of factors over which the teacher has limited control, like:
-do the students in the classroom make an effort to include the students on the chat
-do you have reliable wifi and tech toys in your classroom or do you have 13-year-old laptops that crash when you breathe on them too hard
-do the students want to be in your classroom (in any form) in the first place
-does your school or district have a halfway decent online portal or a piece of expensive garbage
-do you teach a subject that works well in a seminar/discussion format (English, history) or a subject for which that is impossible (lab science, music)
Etc.
I am fortunate to be able to answer yes or “good option” to most of those questions because I work for a rich independent private school. The NYC PS system is…not that.
A while ago SHG wrote a post about revolutionaries versus janitors in law, and how it ends up being the job of the janitors to clean up the puke in the sink once the revolutionaries are done with their party. I’ve been thinking about that post a lot this semester, and have found a renewed sense of purpose in my work from being one of the janitors. Just trying to do right by the kids from day to day.
Is it money (teachers always say it’s money) or that your community values education enough to do what it takes to make it work?
Some of both. Because our community is very invested in the school, it was a full-community project to make this semester work so that any kid who wanted to could be physically in the classroom.
But our parents, who value education enough to pay a hefty private tuition bill for it, are also confident that their kids’ experience will not blow diseased whale chunks even if they stay home. About 40% of our kids are home right now, a jump from about 20% prior to Thanksgiving. Having reliable tech setups and good online platforms helps a lot, and those cost money.
BUT, even more than money, it helps to have the freedom to experiment in my classroom and figure out what works and what doesn’t in the hybrid setting. I’ve been given a lot of freedom to do that and to share those results with my colleagues. I would bet a large percentage of my net worth that most public school teachers do not get that freedom.
They also don’t get your students or their parents.
As a PS teacher, you’re right that we don’t have the freedom to experiment, but you’ve taken a lot for granted. As you noted, it doesn’t work for certain subjects. It also works very differently for students of different ages and abilities.
But you (like others) keep suggesting that there is some “magical” way to do this better, and yet no one who says this manages to actually say what it is. If you have the secret sauce, share it. Or is it like that dope who tells us to “put some thought into it” as if nobody’s considered that before and didn’t come up with any magic answers.
Nope, no magic. Only ways to make it suck less, which depend (as stated) to varying degrees on a lot of things the teacher can’t control.
For HS English, book discussions where the kids’ grade depends on their participation are good. Small group activities using the GMeet breakout room feature have also been good. Traditional quizzes and tests have been useless because cheating from home is too easy. Any of this is dependent on your being allowed to do it and your students being willing/able to make it work.
The answer is pretty simple.
GO TO SCHOOL! GET BACK IN THE CLASSROOM!
Parents and students are going everywhere else except going to school and they need to quit pussy footing around and just open the schools and make attendance mandatory.
The alternative is a wasted generation.
The schools are open. Some choose not to go.
I taught in an inner city school. Before the pandemic, they either didn’t show up or they were disruptive in class. They didn’t do their homework. They failed tests. They were violent toward students who tried to learn and teachers who tried to teach them.
But now, with the pandemic, we make excuses and blame it on everything but the real problem that every inner city teacher knows. They don’t give a damn about education. We can’t change that.
They can’t all be that bad.
They’re not all that bad. But there are enough who are that they make it difficult, if not impossible, for those who truly want an education.
There is a profound cultural problem among inner city blacks that will not be resolved by throwing money at it.
I follow a blog in which the author relates the story of a black share croppers son. The son took advantage of what was offered to him: graduated high school, went into the Air Force, and learned electronics. He was hired by IBM as a Field Engineer and later went into management.
The son used to go into inner city schools and tell his story and how they could succeed in life. He stopped doing this some time ago because the kids would sit in the back of the room playing on their cell phones and calling him “Uncle Tom”, etc.
What can you do?
One of my foundational principles is that we cannot solve problems by denying their existence, even when problems are politically unacceptable. To the extent problems exist outside their control, that’s one thing. To the extent it requires people to take responsibility for their own choices and actions, pretending otherwise does not help them.
You are indeed correct. Reality is sometimes really ugly. But that is what is there. No one does any good by denying it.
My kids are lucky to have teachers in a public school setting who were given the time and effort to develop a system for doing some form of passable remote learning. It sucks to even think about it but should they be required to do online I’m happy knowing their teachers spent a good bit of lockdown time figuring out ways to teach remotely in ways that will work for them.
The school system took a chunk of money and supplied every student with a chromebook and portable hot spot if needed. During the day my son reliably informs me most of the work they do is on their laptops so if the worst happens and we’re forced to go virtual at least he’ll be accustomed to part of the routine.
My daughter’s a little worse off if we have to do virtual, but her teacher’s developed a way for quarantined students to still participate virtually in class through a laptop she bought that sits at a student’s desk if they’re at home. She can monitor them on camera, they can interact with her as best possible.
I suspect the trick on student engagement and making remote instruction work lies in the old Monopoly maxim “Make Do With What You’ve Got.”
So let me get this straight – since communities of color were hardest hit by the pandemic, and schools were believed to be spreading the virus, keeping the schools open disproportionately hurt people of color. Then when they closed the schools, it exacerbated academic achievement gaps between these same communities and whites (and Asians, who appatently are no longer people of color, but I digress) because remote learning proved to be inferior, and working-class parents hadn’t the luxury of working from home. Then, as they reopened the schools, it disproportionately hurt communities of color because they chose not to return, because of what happened before the schools closed?
Finally, someone actually read the post and saw the dilemma rather than told whatever story they pulled out of their ass. Thank you, DL.
“Circular firing squad” may be the applicable term.
This is just another variant of people being “irrevocably damaged” because they “reject bourgeois values,” but then wanting other people to pay the ticket to relieve them from the consequences. This is stupid bullshit, and media morons who are all guilt-ridden about “privilege” need to wake up and stop pushing such nonsense.
“…but that remote learning, in itself, is inadequate.”
I know I am a relentless cherry-picker, but I also think it’s safe to say the jury is still out on this question. While suggesting remote learning is inadequate helps Ms. Shapiro make her point, longitudinal statistics associated with pre-COVID19 distance learning tell a different story. Over 6 million Americans selected distance learning for post-secondary education in 2019 and there is no crisis in graduation rates among students who applied themselves.
It seems that we’re trying to turn a regular classroom into a Zoom experience for the COVID crisis which is problematic but correctable. After more than a decade of online learning, we know some things for sure. Online is not a classroom. It requires a different approach to instructional design that our current crop of primary and secondary school teachers seem unwilling or unable to leverage. That’s a shame.
Mixing apples and oranges isn’t cherry picking.