In Brighton, Mass., Jose Escobar holds a laptop his school gave him for remote learning. Photo: Suzanne Kreiter/The Boston Globe via Getty Images
With the school year winding down, the grade from teachers, students, parents and administrators is in for America's involuntary crash course on remote learning: It was a failure, the Wall Street Journal reports.
The big picture: By mid-March, least 57,000 K-12 schools across the U.S. had already closed or were planning to close for weeks at a time due to the novel coronavirus — affecting at least 25 million students.
What they found: "There were students with no computers or internet access. Teachers had no experience with remote learning. And many parents weren’t available to help," the WSJ reports.
- "In many places, lots of students simply didn’t show up online, and administrators had no good way to find out why not," the Journal writes.
- "Soon many districts weren’t requiring students to do any work at all, increasing the risk that millions of students would have big gaps in their learning."
What's next: To prevent further learning loss — particularly among minority and low-income children — some school administrators say that teachers will need better training on remote teaching for the next semester, and more students will need internet and device access, the WSJ reports.
What they're saying: “I think we have this assumption that since they spend all their time on their devices, it’s no big deal for them to learn remotely,” Janella Hinds, a social-studies teacher at Brooklyn's High School for Public Service told the WSJ.
- “But being a digital consumer and a digital learner are two different things,” she said.
Go deeper: The income inequities of school-from-home