The Biggest Obstacles To Moving America’s Public Schools Online

Sasha Cohen, 16, was pleased that his school day started an hour later than usual this morning. “I just wake up and there’s no commute,” he says. His public high school, Millennium Brooklyn, is a 45-minute subway trek from his Bushwick apartment.

But in many other respects, the remainder of the school year will pose big challenges for him and the 1.1 million New York City public school students who started their first online classes this morning. Late on Sunday, March 15, Mayor Bill de Blasio announced that the city’s 1,800 schools would be closed at least until April 20. New York joins districts across the country that have shut down in an effort to slow the spread of the novel coronavirus.

Sasha’s school is more tech-savvy than many. He already receives and turns in assignments using the Google Classroom web service and teachers post his grades there. But until the shut-down, he and the other 660 students at his high school learned the old-fashioned way, in brick and mortar classrooms with live teachers and face-to-face discussion with classmates.

Today he got assignments for nearly all of his eight classes. Only one, his French elective, held a virtual class for 25 minutes using Zoom conferencing software. “It was hard to ask questions because there were so many people and it just felt weird,” he says. He doesn’t yet know how many of his other teachers plan to conduct virtual classes. “It’s going to be hard because I don’t know if there will be anyone who can help me,” he says.

New York City and school systems across the country are in the midst of a massive experiment. Forty-six states have closed all their K-12 schools and today Virginia joined Kansas in announcing that its schools would not reopen this year. Most districts, like New York, have said they will offer classes online in the hope that students will stay on track.

But according to Daniel Domenech, executive director of AASA, a nonprofit that represents the nearly 14,000 school superintendents in the U.S., only 30%-40% of American public schools are prepared to offer online instruction. Schools, teachers and students face a long list of challenges, he says. “Kids have to have laptops, they have to be able to access the system, the system has to have software in place, the teachers have to be trained in order to give online instruction,” he says.

Fewer than half of American schools have so-called one-to-one laptop programs that loan computers to students for the school year. As for teacher preparedness to immediately offer effective online instruction, he says fewer than half have the requisite training. Hardly anyone knows how to teach young children online. “It’s just not going to happen at the elementary level,” he says.

Another huge issue: According to federal data, 14% of students age 6-17 live in homes with no Internet service.

In contrast to New York, throughout Washington state, school districts are not offering online instruction for credit. Tim Robinson, a spokesman for the Seattle public schools, explains that the district is legally required to give all students equal access to instruction. Since many students don’t have Internet connections, the district isn’t planning any online classes. Instead its site makes recommendations like reading for 60 minutes a day and it refers families to online resources including the Seattle public library and a math site called mathscore.

“We can’t do online learning,” says Robinson. “It’s an equity issue.” What about other districts that are moving ahead with remote instruction? Says Robinson, “Who’s going to pay for the computers? Who’s going to pay for the Internet access? Who’s going to pay for the teacher development?”

Domenech says that superintendents across the country are wrestling with all of these questions. The private sector is making donations of hardware and software and offering free internet service. More than a week ago, Zoom CEO Eric Yuan announced he was giving schools in the U.S. and several other countries access to his conferencing software for free. Fairfax County, Virginia is deploying school buses equipped with Internet connections as hot spots.

But a federal law, the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA), also poses challenges for school districts. Some 14% of public school students receive help mandated by the law, which can require that children with special needs work with hands-on classroom aides. The Americans with Disabilities Act also guarantees protections to students with autism and other challenges. On March 21, the U.S. Department of Education released a fact sheet suggesting that schools proceed with online learning even while taking the law into account. But Domenech says superintendents fear ambulance-chasing lawyers will sue districts that proceed with online education and don’t find a way to give students with disabilities the individualized help they are legally entitled to.

Denise Marshall, executive director of the nonprofit Council of Parent Attorneys and Advocates, which supports IDEA, says her organization wants schools to move ahead with online learning during the pandemic. “We don’t want the equity issue to be used as an excuse not to provide services.”

Domenech has a call scheduled with Vice President Pence tomorrow, and he hopes that the federal government will issue clear legal protection to schools offering online education. Ideally, students with disabilities will get extra services when schools finally reopen, he says.

But he fears that even if schools do open in the fall, assuming scientists have yet to develop a COVID-19 vaccine, new infections could surface and schools will again be forced to close. “The situation we’re in is dire,” he says. “Online instruction in the best of circumstances isn’t going to compare to students being in school full-time.”

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UK students' union calls on universities to cancel summer exams

NUS says some students could be disadvantaged if exams go ahead during coronavirus

The National Union of Students has called on universities to cancel or postpone this summer’s exams to avoid further stress and disruption to students’ lives during the coronavirus pandemic.

The NUS said disabled, international and poorer students would be significantly disadvantaged if universities go through with plans to hold online exams and assessments next term.

It said final-year students should be given a choice of how to complete their degrees, such as receiving an estimated grade based on prior attainment, doing an open book online exam, or taking their finals at the university at a later date.

“In the current climate, student welfare must come first,” said Claire Sosienski-Smith, the NUS vice-president (higher education). “It is vital that there are no compulsory exams this year.”

The NUS added that all exams for first and second-year students should be cancelled, while postgraduate students should get a six-month extension to their submission deadlines.

The demand comes after thousands of students across the country called for alternative assessments to be put in place to ensure their academic performance is not adversely affected by the Covid-19 outbreak.

Many international students at Imperial College London face having to do their online exams in the middle of the night after the university notified them that “being in a different time zone cannot be used as a mitigating circumstance” and they must be “available at the correct UK time, wherever they are”. Some, including Chinese students, cannot access study materials due to internet censorship.

A physics student, who is quarantined in Shanghai, said he was unable to access Panopto lecture recordings for his revision because the site was blocked by China’s firewall. “Imperial College has made it more difficult than regular exams because now you have to deal with technology and censorship,” he said.

Max, not his real name, said Chinese students were also under great stress because relatives had died of Covid-19. “My grandmother passed away because of coronavirus,” he said.

The physics student said he might also face being quarantined for another fortnight when he returns to his family home in Wuhan, the centre of the Chinese outbreak, which would end around the time when his exams are due to start.

In a statement, Imperial College said: “We are putting additional support in place for students and we are updating our mitigating circumstances policy to take account of where a student does not have access to the equipment or facilities to undertake the assessment.”

Piers Wilkinson, the NUS’s disabled students officer, said the academic year should end now because universities cannot provide disabled students – who make up 13% of the student population – with the reasonable adjustments they are legally required to put in place due to the pandemic lockdown.

Wilkinson said most of the study support provided to disabled students could either only be delivered on campus or would be impossible to provide remotely. This included providing note-taking, sign-language interpreters, close captioning of lectures, and screen-readers that render text and image content as speech or Braille.

He added: “There is no way that disabled students can be on an equal level playing field as every other student during this pandemic. They should be allowed to suspend their studies until it’s reasonable and equitable for them to start again.”

A spokeswoman for Universities UK, which represents 137 higher education institutions, said universities were looking at various options to ensure students were fairly assessed. She added that “universities will try to be as accommodating as they can” to students’ varying needs for support.

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The provision of early childhood education and care in Australia is broken and the Coronavirus has revealed the extent to which the system is flawed.  The sector is on the brink of collapse

Consider this.

For several weeks there has been uncertainty about how school should be delivered. Will they close? Should students attend? Are teachers safe?

There has been no uncertainty, however, about whether teachers or schools are needed. It’s understood both are, obviously, critical. The manner in which education is to be facilitated, in the short term at least, has been up for discussion but its existence is assured. As it should be.

When it comes to early childhood education & care the questions are the same but the answers are very different. Childcare centres aren’t government-funded like schools. Parents receive subsidies from the government that are passed on to centres and they pay any gap between the subsidy and the daily rate. Those subsidies and fees support the wages of the educators and all the associated operating costs.

But as Lisa Bryant wrote in The Guardian Australia on Monday, parents are currently withdrawing their children from childcare “in droves”.

“They are doing it because they are concerned for their children and because they are told to keep children home if possible. But mostly they are doing it because childcare is expensive. When families lose their income, childcare is an obvious place to cut.”

In these circumstances it isn’t surprising but the impact is potentially devastating. It means that unlike primary and secondary school teachers, who haven’t all been dismissed because students aren’t coming, many early childhood educators have already been let go.

Last week Goodstart Early Learning, one of Australia’s largest providers, had to lay off 4,000 casual educators. These are among the lowest-paid workers in the country so the idea of them being financially equipped to withstand this unexpected job loss is ridiculous.

It is also crushing to consider that, like primary and secondary teachers, educators and carers have been thrust unwillingly on to the front line of a highly contagious virus for weeks.

Centres and preschools haven’t been closed and while most other Australians have been told the safest thing to do is stay home, these employees have been told to keep turning up to work. Usually for a very basic wage with no loading for the health risk (or the value provided).

At least primary and secondary teachers haven’t needed to fret over their employment status while also panicking about the virus: early childhood educators and carers should be so lucky.

To lose their jobs after weeks of putting themselves at risk is incredibly insulting. As well as highly problematic.

Many childcare centres and operators in Australia may close for good because of the Coronavirus. That will be a disaster. For children, for educators and for parents.

When health workers can’t turn up to their jobs because they have no one to look after their children there will be an uproar - but it’ll be too late

Whatever happens now school won’t collapse, that much is clear. Early education and care shouldn’t either. It’s a critical function in society: it is a fundamental part of a child’s education and development and the best investment any country can make in its future.

And, yes, it is also important in an economic sense in that it facilitates the combination of paid work with family responsibilities.

There are, literally, millions of reasons that a nation cannot function without an early education system.

If there was ever definitive proof that Australia’s early childhood education and care system was broken, the idea that a virus could bring this vital sector totally to its knees is it.

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