The Students Left Behind By Remote Learning

Source: The New Yorker, Alec MacGillis
Photo: Society’s attention to kids like Shemar has always been spotty, but they had at least been visible. With remote learning, they have become invisible—safe from COVID-19, perhaps, but adrift and alone in dark rooms. (Paolo Morales for The New Yorker)

The desire to protect children may put their long-term well-being at stake.

Shemar, a twelve-year-old from East Baltimore, is good at math, and Karen Ngosso, his fourth-grade math teacher, at Abbottston Elementary School, is one reason why. “I would try to pump him up and tell him, ‘You’re a good student,’ ” she said. But she knew that he didn’t get enough sleep, and he was often absent. His home situation, like those of many of her students, was unstable: his mother suffered from drug addiction, and they moved frequently.

Ngosso kept an eye on Shemar even after he started fifth grade, which is when I met him, in late 2018, at First & Franklin Presbyterian Church, a few blocks from the transitional housing where he and his mother were living. I volunteered to tutor Shemar, and once a week I picked him up from school and we’d do homework at a coffee shop.

Shemar has a remarkably good sense of direction, which came in handy when he had to catch multiple buses and the light rail to get to school from wherever home happened to be. He has a knack for impish one-liners, often prefaced by “Can I just say something?” He is the only kid I’ve tutored who will, without fail, stop mid-text to ask about a word he doesn’t recognize. “Personification?” he’ll ask. “What’s that?” His own vocabulary is charmingly esoteric—once, he said that an older sister had “bamboozled” him into going to the store; another time, he asked me to tighten his swim goggles “just a smidgen.”

His mother takes Suboxone every day at a clinic, but stability is elusive. She and Shemar often stay up late watching TV, and when Shemar made it to school he was often drowsy in class. But being around teachers and other kids revived him. I continued to see him when he entered sixth grade, and on days when I picked him up he was typically tearing around the jungle gym with friends, with an unself-consciousness that, together with his slight frame, made him seem younger than twelve. Sometimes he’d help his social-studies teacher, a young woman in her first year on the job, straighten up her classroom.

One day, when I arrived, Shemar (this is his middle name) looked disconsolate. He thrust a sheet of paper at me—the social-studies teacher had quit. There was a tear running down Shemar’s cheek. “She was my favorite teacher,” he said.

By early March, there was a new social-studies teacher. Shemar’s English class was reading “Farewell to Manzanar,” a young-adult novel about the internment camps for Japanese-Americans during the Second World War. The hallways were decorated with posters for Black History Month. Shemar had made one about Bisi Ezerioha, the Nigerian-American engineer and race-car driver.

Then, on March 16th, as the coronavirus pandemic took hold in the United States, Maryland closed its schools.

Like districts across the country, Baltimore’s was unprepared. Initially, teachers made worksheets for each grade level, which parents had to pick up at school. Shemar’s school was three miles from his grandmother’s house, where he was living at the time, so I picked up the packet, along with one of the boxes of sliced-apple snacks that the school was handing out.

Remote learning started in earnest on April 6th. For Shemar, that meant just four hours per week of live online instruction—an hour for each of the main subjects once a week, with nothing on Fridays. Shemar had an Xbox but no computer, so the pastor at our church, Rob Hoch, said that it would reimburse me for buying Shemar a laptop. I dropped it off at his grandmother’s house, and helped his mother load onto her phone the app, called Remind, that Shemar’s teachers used for communicating with families. It required finding links and codes from weeks earlier. I felt slightly frantic, knowing that, in the early pandemic period, every minute spent together in the house brought greater risk.

It soon became clear that, even with the computer, this form of schooling wasn’t going to work for Shemar. He had a wireless connection at his grandmother’s house, but he spent some of his days at a row house, a mile to the southwest, that his mother had moved into, in one of her repeated efforts to establish a home for them. A few weeks earlier, a twenty-one-year-old man had been killed a block away. There was no Internet, and when his mother called Comcast to ask about the free Wi-Fi it was offering to the families of Baltimore schoolchildren, she was told that a previous tenant had applied, so she couldn’t do so herself. It was a familiar situation for her: so often, when she made an effort on her son’s behalf, it foundered quickly in a bureaucratic dead end.

The Remind app was another problem. Shemar downloaded it on his phone, which had no cellular service but could be used with Wi-Fi. But, when his mother lost or broke her phone, she borrowed Shemar’s. He often missed the reminders about his daily classes or the links to access them, which might change from week to week. I had the app on my phone, and every few days I got a message from him, asking me to send him the link and the schedule.

The biggest challenge was not technological. No one made sure that Shemar logged on to his daily class or completed the assignments that were piling up in his Google Classroom account. His grandmother, who is in her seventies, is a steady presence, but she attended little school while growing up, in a sharecropping family in South Carolina. She was also losing her eyesight. One day, she explained to me the family’s struggles to assist Shemar: though three of his four older siblings lived in the house, too, they had jobs or attended vocational school, and one of them had a baby to care for; Shemar’s mother was often absent; and his great-uncle, who also lived in the house, had dropped out of school in South Carolina around the age of eight, and was illiterate.

Shemar’s teachers worried about him but had a hard time reaching him, given his mother’s frequent changes of phone number. One time, his English teacher drove to his house and visited with him on the small front porch.

I checked on Shemar a couple of times during the spring, but, in hindsight, I was too willing to let the lockdown serve as an excuse to hunker down with my own kids, who were doing online learning at other Baltimore public schools. So I was startled when I received a text message in May from Shemar’s fourth sibling, who worked at an Amazon warehouse and lived with his girlfriend and baby, asking for the link to the day’s class. Shemar had moved in with them.

The following Sunday, I dropped by the house with some groceries. Shemar’s mother, who had been evicted from her row house, was there, too, and Shemar was in good spirits. But, the next afternoon, he was alone in the living room, the lights off, the blinds drawn, and the TV on. He had stayed up very late the night before, watching TV with his mother, and had slept past noon, missing that day’s class. For breakfast, he had eaten some Nutella that I had brought by the day before. I asked what he would have for dinner, assuming he would eat with his brother’s family. In fact, they usually ate on their own, upstairs. “Nutella,” he said.

One day, I wrote him on Instagram to ask if he was in his English class, and was cheered when he responded that he was. But he and one other student were the only ones there. The link for the class had changed at the last moment and he hadn’t received the message. He and his classmate had been sitting in their virtual space for twenty minutes, waiting for the teacher.

I have chosen to tell the story of Shemar’s remote-learning difficulties, with his family’s permission, because it was his plight that alerted me to the fact that remote learning was proving disastrous. As the spring went on, I grew increasingly distressed by the lack of public alarm over students like Shemar, who were sitting in countless dark rooms, safe from covid-19, perhaps, but adrift and alone. Society’s attention to them has always been spotty, but they had at least been visible—one saw them on the way to school, in their blue or burgundy uniforms, or in the park and the playground afterward. Now they were behind closed doors, and so were we, with full license to turn inward. While we dutifully stayed home to flatten the curve, children like Shemar were invisible.

Ryan Hooper, who teaches social studies at Joseph C. Briscoe Academy, a middle and high school for high-needs kids, told me that, of his typical class of between five and ten students, only one or two generally logged on for his sessions. Often, no one showed up.

Hooper, a twenty-eight-year-old native of Cleveland, became a teacher after serving in the Army. The kids at Briscoe, he said, were “very challenging students that come from awful situations.” Many are so emotionally troubled that, even with such small class sizes, each teacher is assigned a paraprofessional to help out in the room. But Hooper liked the challenge and the close bonds that came with the intensive interaction.

With the shift to remote instruction, he felt a “loss of purpose,” he said. “All the gratifying, purpose-driven reward benefits of being a teacher were stripped.” At first, he and his colleagues called to check on the students who weren’t logging on, but the calls only further overwhelmed their parents and guardians, roughly half of whom are foster parents. Some districts in Massachusetts alerted child-protection agencies about students who did not log on, but Baltimore did not take that step.

Another young teacher in Baltimore, who taught reading to a middle-school special-education class, told me that three of his ten kids never showed up online. One boy told him that his mother had just lost her job. “I don’t want to do it,” he said, of remote learning. “I don’t care if I fail. I’m fourteen, in seventh grade—I don’t think they’re going to fail me again.” He was right. Students in Baltimore were not penalized for failing to do the work—their third-quarter grade would carry over into the fourth quarter, though they could get bonus points for making an effort.

The school alerted parents that they could get free laptops, but only one of the special-ed teacher’s students made an appointment to get one. The other six students who sometimes logged on did so with smartphones, which made it more difficult to use Google Docs, the program used for most assignments. The students rarely turned their cameras on. “None of them like showing their faces,” the teacher said. “You don’t know if they’re there or not.” One time, a girl did turn her camera on, and he saw paint peeling off the walls behind her.

The teacher was driving downtown one weekday when he saw one of his students from a summer-school class last year washing windshields at an intersection. When the boy saw his former teacher, he panicked and ran away.

The United States was a pioneer in universal education. In 1797, Samuel Harrison Smith, a Washington newspaper editor, won an essay contest with a piece making the case for why it was essential to the country’s success. “An enlightened nation is always most tenacious of its rights,” he wrote. The new nation was strikingly free of the British upper-class fear that educating the working class would give it dangerous ideas—with the major exception of slaveowners, who withheld schooling for that very reason. Those in power in the North and the Midwest, as Carl Kaestle notes in “Pillars of the Republic,” his 1983 history of schooling in the early U.S., saw education as a means of alleviating poverty and squalor in rapidly growing cities and helping to assimilate immigrants.

In the early decades of the nineteenth century, a patchwork of schooling spread across the U.S. In small-town New England, and eventually in the Midwest as well, “district schools” mixed children of all ages, including “trundle-bed trash,” as people called kids barely past toddlerhood. Students showed up with whatever primer they could obtain, and corporal punishment was so prevalent that schools often employed women as teachers only in the summer, when the older boys that they would have trouble physically subjugating worked in the fields.

Coastal cities had a few “charity schools” for the urban poor, supported by churches and philanthropists who wanted to break the generational cycle of poverty. “One of the central goals of charity-school workers was to rescue children from an allegedly harmful family environment,” Kaestle writes.

Increasing numbers of state and local governments in the North and the Midwest began authorizing taxation to pay for public schools. Reformers recognized that the way to build support for taxes was to create a school system that would be used by all. “If taxation was going to work, it could not only be for the benefit of ‘other people’s children,’ ” Jack Schneider, a professor of education at the University of Massachusetts, Lowell, told me. “It had to benefit everyone.”

By mid-century, more than ninety-five per cent of adults in New England could read and write, and three-quarters of children between the ages of five and nineteen were enrolled in school; the rest of the North was not far behind. “In no country in the world is the taste for reading so diffused among the people as in America,” a Swedish visitor wrote, in 1853. Public schools, the New York governor, William Seward, said, were “the great levelling institutions of the age . . . not by levelling all to the condition of the base, but by elevating all to the association of the wise and good.”

In the South, however, slaveowners denied instruction to nearly all the Black children they claimed as property, and local and state governments lagged behind in building public schools. Even in the North, Horace Mann and other reformers were reluctant to push for integrating the new systems, and the children of free Black families mostly remained in separate schools.

It took decades more to realize truly universal education. Episodes in this country and elsewhere have shown the consequences of failing to provide that basic good. The destruction caused by the Second World War, for example, affected a generation of children. One researcher found “significant, long-lasting detrimental effects” on German children, with those in the most heavily bombed cities completing 1.2 years less of school and seeing their future earnings decrease by an average of six per cent. Other studies found similar effects among children who were evacuated from London—as the authors of one study put it, “Participants describe a whole different life they believe they could have had if they had had the opportunities they feel they lost.”

Research conducted six months after Hurricane Katrina found that about twenty per cent of students in New Orleans were either not enrolled in school or had missed more than ten days a month. One study reportedly found that, five years after the storm, roughly a third of the city’s children had been held back, nearly double the average in the South; another study reportedly found that the average seven-year-old in New Orleans at the time of the hurricane was, a decade later, more likely than his or her counterparts in all but two cities in the country to be neither employed nor attending school.

Prince Edward County, in Virginia, is one of the most wrenching examples of such disruptions. In 1954, when the Supreme Court, in Brown v. Board of Education, ruled against school segregation, districts across the South threatened to close their public schools to avoid integrating them. But only one place actually did so for an extended period: Prince Edward County, west of Richmond. In 1959, the county board of supervisors eliminated the entire school budget, for some twenty-one schools and an estimated three thousand students. White families raised tens of thousands of dollars for a new private high school, and received offers of temporary space from, among others, the Presbyterian Church, the Moose Lodge, and the Woman’s Club House. Textbook suppliers donated books, other districts donated buses, and leaders of the new academy stripped the public schools of books, desks, and football goalposts.

The county’s Black community lacked the resources to establish private schools for the roughly fifteen hundred Black students. About sixty-one of them were taken in by Kittrell College, a Black institution in North Carolina. Other children went to live with relatives in Philadelphia, Boston, and New York; in some cases, siblings were dispersed permanently.

Many kids simply went without school. Ricky Brown, who would have been in kindergarten that year, spent his days idly, occasionally joining some seventy-five students who attended “training centers” set up in the basement of the Reverend L. Francis Griffin’s church. “The only thing I got out of that was how to spell my name and the alphabet,” Brown told Kristen Green, in “Something Must Be Done About Prince Edward County,” her 2015 book on the shutdown. That was more education, though, than McCarthy Eanes received: Green recounts that Eanes and his fifteen or so school-aged siblings stayed home on their family’s tobacco farm.

The closure lasted five years, until the Supreme Court ordered the county schools to reopen and desegregate. When they did open, in the fall of 1964, as few as eight of the roughly fifteen hundred students were white. The Michigan State University researcher Robert L. Green estimated that thirteen hundred Black children in the county received no formal education during the closure. He also found that the illiteracy rates for Black students under twenty-two went from three per cent to twenty-three per cent. Years later, Doug Vaughan, who became a garment worker, tried to teach himself to read using Harlequin romances. “I always wondered, ‘Where would I be if I had gone to school, completed it, and gotten an education?’ ” he told Kristen Green. “Where would I be in life?”

Sonja Santelises’s parents went to segregated Black high schools in the Deep South during the fights over Brown v. Board and the white flight to “segregation academies.” They raised her in Massachusetts, after her father got a job as a chemist for Eastman Kodak. In 2016, having spent several decades as a school administrator in New York, Boston, and Baltimore, Santelises became the head of the Baltimore school system. She insisted on high expectations for Black and brown children, who make up ninety per cent of the district’s seventy-nine thousand students. This led her to conclude that the academic costs for Baltimore’s children of keeping schools closed this fall needed to weigh heavily in any calculation.

As a trial run for opening, and to provide catch-up for at least some of the students who’d lost ground in the spring, the city offered in-person summer-school instruction at six schools. About two hundred children attended. It was one of only a few in-person summer schools around the country.

The Baltimore schools are perpetually strapped for resources: among other deficits, sixty buildings lack air-conditioning, which forces frequent closures in hot weather. But administrators were getting advice from experts at the local college, Johns Hopkins University, which is home to one of the country’s largest schools of public health and which had created a leading coronavirus database. Among Hopkins’s experts is Jennifer Nuzzo, an epidemiologist whose work focusses on outbreak detection and response. Nuzzo had supported lockdowns to slow the spread of the coronavirus in the spring, but by the summer she was arguing that schools should plan to reopen in much of the country. In an Op-Ed in the Times on July 1st, Nuzzo and Joshua Sharfstein, a pediatrician who has served as Baltimore’s health commissioner and Maryland’s health secretary, wrote that the coronavirus had mostly spared young people: children made up nearly a quarter of the American population but accounted for just two per cent of known covid-19 cases; they had been hospitalized at a rate of 0.1 per hundred thousand, compared with 7.4 per hundred thousand in adults between the ages of fifty and sixty-four. The authors mentioned studies from France and Australia suggesting that children were not major transmitters of the virus. And they noted that the American Academy of Pediatrics favored school reopening. “The disruption of learning can have lifetime effects on students’ income and health,” they wrote.

A number of experts were beginning to agree with Nuzzo and Sharfstein. According to reports, the rate of infection among teachers in Sweden, which as part of its less restrictive response to the virus had left most of its schools open, was no greater than it was in neighboring Finland, which had closed all its schools. “They found that teachers had the same risk of covid as the average of other professions,” said Martin Kulldorff, a professor at Harvard Medical School who develops statistical and epidemiological methods for disease surveillance.

In July, Meira Levinson, a professor of education at Harvard, co-authored an article in The New England Journal of Medicine laying out how to reopen primary schools. Levinson told me that she worried about what students would lose without in-person instruction. “Education is about learning to trust others and being vulnerable with others. If you are learning, you are doing something—at least for a while—you don’t know how to do,” she said. “That’s a vulnerable position to be in, and as human beings we need to have relationships with some level of trust to be able to do that.”

Joseph Allen, the director of the Healthy Buildings program at Harvard’s school of public health, wrote a sixty-two-page plan with a dozen colleagues listing steps that schools could take to reduce transmission risk. To improve ventilation and air quality, schools with air-conditioning could upgrade their air filters, while schools without it could make sure that their windows opened and set up fans to circulate fresh air from outdoors; when it got too cold for that, they could install portable air purifiers. Notably, the recommendations did not include a hybrid model, with students in school a limited number of days per week to allow for social distancing—students did not need to be spaced out much more than usual, Allen said, as long as they wore masks. “There’s certainly no such thing as zero risk in anything we do, and that is certainly the case during a pandemic,” he said in a conference call to present the plan. But, he added, “there are devastating costs of keeping kids out of school. When we have this discussion about sending kids back to school, we have to have it in the context of the massive individual and societal costs of keeping kids at home.”

Santelises found many of the claims persuasive. Baltimore worked on a plan to bring students into school two days a week, while allowing families the option of full remote learning if they preferred. Teachers with health concerns would do online instruction for kids who stayed home. As the Harvard report recommended, the schools would upgrade air-conditioners with better filters; schools lacking them would finally get windows that could be opened.

On July 7th, President Trump held a series of events at the White House with Betsy DeVos, his Secretary of Education, to demand that schools open. “We’re very much going to put pressure on governors and everybody else to open the schools,” he said. “It’s very important for our country. It’s very important for the well-being of the student and the parents. So we’re going to be putting a lot of pressure on: open your schools in the fall.”

The effect of Trump’s declaration was instantaneous. Teachers who had been responsive to the idea of returning to the classroom suddenly regarded the prospect much more warily. “Our teachers were ready to go back as long as it was safe,” Randi Weingarten, the longtime president of the American Federation of Teachers, told me. “Then Trump and DeVos played their political bullshit.” Ryan Hooper, the former soldier, saw the effect on his colleagues. “It was really unhelpful,” he said.

A week later, the Baltimore Teachers Union and the Maryland State Education Association sent a four-page letter to the Maryland governor, Larry Hogan, a Republican, and the state superintendent of schools, Karen Salmon, calling on them to bar any in-person instruction for the first semester. They noted that, by one count, nearly a quarter of teachers nationwide were considered especially susceptible to the virus, and cited the lack of funding for personal protective equipment and testing. They questioned whether students could be counted on to wear masks, wash their hands, and maintain social distancing.

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/10/05/the-students-left-behind-by-remote-learning