Tuesday, April 14, 2020


The coronavirus will widen the education gap in the UK

The British lockdown must be reversed.  Australia has decreed that its schools must stay open

Under normal circumstances, it would now be the spring holidays for most schools. But, instead of packing the car to take one of my daughters to visit her grandparents for a few days, I just got off the phone to students who attend my school.

We are more than three weeks into a lockdown in the UK. My school - an academy on the outskirts of West London - serves a wonderfully diverse community, but nearly half of all students are what the UK government determines as disadvantaged.

Their families are eligible for free school meals as a result of being in receipt of Universal Credit, a monthly payment in the UK to help with living costs for those on a low income or out of work.

However, sitting above that group, perhaps a further 20 percent or more of our school population, whose families are not eligible for Universal Credit, are still very much the working poor.

Both of these groups constantly live on the edge of poverty. Their already fragile economic situation is easily tipped by an unexpected expense - a pair of new school shoes, an electricity bill or a broken washing machine.

This situation is now exacerbated tenfold by the ravages of a global coronavirus pandemic. And this is the issue.

While the daily news bulletins bring unfathomable death tolls from every corner of the globe, tales of woefully unequipped hospitals, overflowing morgues, exhausted front-line hospital staff and desperate grieving relatives, there lies beyond that a further crisis of poverty and desperation in Britain.

In 1940, at the start of the second world war, the mass evacuation of nearly 1.5 million British children from the cities to the countryside exposed a chasm in society.

Tales of malnourished and diseased children arriving in the countryside from the inner cities galvanised a team of civil servants, led by social reformer William Beveridge, to work on creating a fairer post-war society that would eradicate evils including poverty and lack of education by bringing in social insurance and equality of education through the 1944 Butler Education Act.

Nearly 80 years on, the lockdown of our nation, including the decision to close schools, has once again revealed huge inequity and inequality.

Currently, 1.3 million children in England are classed as disadvantaged - the number entitled to free school meals. These children are now prisoners in their own homes, many of which are small, cramped flats with little or no outside space.

Here, they are supposed to participate in distance learning. This involves accessing online lessons and resources for anything from two to five hours a day.

But, for many of the 1.3 million as well as the 20 percent beyond them who are not entitled to income support, this learning is not taking place in a quiet corner of a room seated at a desk with books, pens and a helpful, well-educated adult on hand.

Not for these children the accoutrements found in many a middle-class home including access to a device, whether a tablet or a personal computer, or the internet.

Data sourced from TeacherTapp - an app that pings daily questions to more than 6,000 UK teachers - revealed at the end of the first week of lockdown, that 10 percent of students in their schools do not have access to either a device or the internet.

While it is difficult to determine the accuracy of that statistic, I know from my own school that a child's access is likely to be an allocated 60 to 90 minutes on a shared household laptop, personal computer or tablet.

In a number of families, their only access to an online classroom is via their mobile phone, which makes any completion of work and uploading it onto an online platform almost impossible.

The same data set also revealed that teachers working in the most disadvantaged state schools felt that 43 percent of their students were doing less than an hour of learning a day, compared with only 14 percent of students as reported by teachers working in more advantaged state schools. It is a significant difference.

What is clear is that the learning and, therefore, the attainment gap - between those who are disadvantaged and those who are not - that has worried the profession and the government for over a decade will grow exponentially.

As our lockdown looks set to be extended - possibly until the end of the academic year - the impact of more than three months of missed schooling will have long-lasting effects.

Academics who have looked at home/school effects on academic attainment by children often refer to the 1:9 ratio. This means that it is thought that home impact accounts for nine-tenths of the influence on a child's development, habits and behaviour, while school only accounts for one-tenth.

But the reality for those of us working in disadvantaged communities is that the school effect can be a powerful one-tenth. If many already vulnerable children cannot attend school for the duration of lockdown, then that effect and long-lasting impact is lost.

If, for three months or more, the learning habits acquired within the structure and routine of a well-equipped school are pulled away, then without a doubt we will see a huge dip in the learning gap.

The question for us now is how will we plug that gap? The schooling we will need in place for September will need to look and feel very different.

It becomes a much wider question of what the role of school and education is, how schools cannot be the catch-all safety net for wider societal issues, and crucially how schools are held accountable for these things.

Following a decade of government austerity policies causing schools to be underfunded, ministers' obsession with high-stakes testing, and schools then being held to account by inspectorates in the UK, it is no surprise that school leaders have been facing a national recruitment and retention crisis.

The fight against coronavirus has shown us that schools are much more than just education providers.

For more than one and a half million children in the UK at least, school is a place of safety, sanctuary and at least one meal a day.

SOURCE





Teaching Without Schools: Grief, Then A 'Free-For-All'

They thought they'd have more time, teachers say. Many couldn't even say goodbye.

"Everything happened so quickly," remembers Hannah Klumpe, who teaches seventh grade social studies in Greenville, S.C. "Friday I was at school, talking to my students, and they're like, 'Do you think they're going to close school?' And I was like, 'Oh, not right now!'"

That weekend, South Carolina's governor announced the state's schools would close immediately, including Klumpe's Berea Middle School, and she hasn't seen her students in-person since. Her story is not uncommon.

Talking through tears, Jaime Gordon remembers, "our governor just let us know that we will not be returning to school for the rest of the year, and I'm sorry, I get emotional when I say that. It's really hard to say that out loud." Gordon teaches third grade at St. Edward-Epiphany Catholic School in Richmond, Va. Like Klumpe, she says she was surprised by the move to close schools. "I didn't get to properly say goodbye to them."

America's schools are in crisis. Most of them have closed, according to a tally by Education Week, and nearly all of the nation's 56.6 million school-age children have been sent home. What began as two- to three-week school closures have crept inexorably into April and now seem capable, even likely, to outlast the school year. Already, more than a dozen states — including Virginia, Kansas and Arizona — have shuttered their schools for the rest of the academic year.

Educators are now shouldering an impossible task: to replicate the functions of school for months without an actual school building. And that means millions of teachers, like Hannah Klumpe and Jaime Gordon, now isolated at home, having to harness technologies new and old to reach and teach every student. America's schools have never had to improvise like this.

For Klumpe, the scramble began the Monday after classes were cancelled. It "was just like a free-for-all. We [teachers] all went to school. We created lesson plans in, like, 12 hours. So 10 days of lesson plans in a day, essentially. And we had to be prepared to launch those lesson plans by Wednesday and to start doing full-on e-learning, which our kids had never really done before without us."

In interviews with teachers and school leaders across the country — about how this vast experiment in remote learning is unfolding — a few important patterns emerged.

The digital divide is real. In many districts, the rush to build a remote learning plan began the old-fashioned way, with paper packets — enough to tide kids over while school leaders take stock. Namely, can they provide hardware and Wi-Fi access to every student who needs it?

The answer for many school leaders has been a dispiriting no.

"I would easily say that less than 50% of our students and families have access to either a consistent learning device and/or Internet access," says Nikolai Vitti, the head of Detroit Public Schools Community District. "I think that's our greatest challenge right now."

According to an Associated Press analysis of census data, Detroit is not alone. The AP found "An estimated 17% of U.S. students do not have access to computers at home and 18% do not have home access to broadband internet."

"There's a huge disparity in accessing Wi-Fi and students having devices," says Cara Godbe, a third grade teacher at Cottonwood Elementary School in rural Montrose, Colo. Godbe says her district is not requiring that students work online and is providing paper packets for anyone without a device or Internet access.

"I have a couple of students where, due to their life circumstances, being able to log in every day is not the reality," says Katie Benningfield, a sixth grade teacher at the School for the Talented and Gifted in Dallas. She says that doesn't just hurt their ability to connect academically "but also just their ability to contact us and be with us."

Many districts have been handing out as many devices and Wi-Fi hotspots as they can to the students who need them most. Member station WBEZ has reported that Chicago Public Schools is giving out more than 100,000 devices.

In Baltimore, the city's schools have just one device for every four students, says district CEO Sonja Santelises. "I said this to my board and my community, 'You cannot make up a 1-to-4 device-to-student ratio in the matter of a week or two in a pandemic. So we are prioritizing families that have no devices, and we're also, frankly, being creative in the use of our local television stations."

Santelises says, in addition to providing learning resources online for kids who can access them, her district is working with Baltimore's educational cable network to broadcast educational programming.

This tech inequity among students is also widening the opportunity gap, says Paige Dulaney, a first grade teacher at Merino Elementary School in Merino, Colo. "I think it's a gap that we're going to see for a long time," Dulaney says.

"[At school] they go through their entire day at least listening, picking it up and at least having the opportunity to hear English being spoken to them," Baldillez says. "That's not happening right now, and that bothers me."

SOURCE






Australia: Year 12, kindy should get priority when school goes back: teachers' federation

The NSW Teachers Federation has suggested a staggered return to school once health authorities and governments start lifting social distancing restrictions, beginning with year 12 and kindergarten.

As schools prepare to deliver term two online, federation president Angelo Gavrielatos said leaders needed to think about how to ensure an "orderly return" when circumstances changed, avoiding a deluge of students when older or vulnerable teachers were unable to return.

The NSW Teachers Federation says year 12 and kindy should be given priority when schools reopen.
The NSW Teachers Federation says year 12 and kindy should be given priority when schools reopen.

"An option could be a staggered return to our schools," he said. "I've advanced a proposition that part of an orderly [process], we could consider a return of year 12 and kindergarten, followed by year seven and year six, and progressively pad that out."

Educators cautiously welcomed the idea, although they said the process would be complicated and schools would need to be consulted.

It comes as Education Minister Dan Tehan said ministers were looking at options to make school systems more flexible and open for some students. "Is there an opportunity maybe to bring year 12 students back one day a week?" he said.

"Or would there be an opportunity for those doing vocational education at school to do some of their practical work at school? Or chemistry students - would they be able to come to school one or two afternoons a week to do the practical side of their chemistry?"

NSW Education Minister Sarah Mitchell said the government will be using the school holiday period to consider its options for term two and beyond.

“We will communicate this with school communities before school returns. All options will be considered in line with health advice,” she said.

While pandemic experts say children are not believed to drive the spread of COVID-19, teachers have been concerned about their safety, particularly those who are older or have underlying conditions. A 2017 workforce survey found the average age of NSW teachers is 37, but up to a fifth are over 50.

Before they began holidays on Thursday afternoon, NSW schools were not closed but were delivering remote learning to everyone, and parents were encouraged to keep their children at home. About 94 per cent of families did so. By this week, two thirds of the public school teaching workforce were working from home.

Schools have prepared to deliver term two lessons online. But as parents feel the stress of supervising students while working, or students become more restless about learning alone, some predict the number of students attending schools will rise.

Craig Petersen, head of the Secondary Principals Council, said the danger of allowing students to return whenever their parents chose could lead to a situation in which there were more students at school than teachers available.

An ordered return - prioritising high-needs years as suggested by the federation - made sense, but it would be complicated, he said. Year 12 teachers, for example, might have an underlying health condition, while some schools ran a "compressed curriculum" in which years 10 and 11 also did HSC subjects.

"This needs to be carefully thought through," Mr Petersen said. "It introduces a whole range of complexities. What we need is for the principals' associations, for the federation, and for educators to be consulted."

Mr Petersen said parents were already ringing schools, confused about what to expect next term. "We have to have clarity around this, schools cannot be left in this position where we become the target of parental concern and anxiety about decision we have no control over," he said.

"We are extremely frustrated with the lack of consultation and consideration for what's in the best interests of our students."

Jenny Allum, the principal of SCEGGS Darlinghurst, said schools had proven their ability to respond to changing circumstances over the past month. She said a staged return was "certainly a possibility", especially one involving year 12 as a priority.

"You can have 24 [year 12] kids working in three classrooms with one teacher, you can't have a class of 24 kindergarten kids in three classrooms with one teacher," she said. "But we are conscious that it's a significant demand on parents, to be supervising younger kids at home and trying to do their own work."

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