There are major challenges in educating students outside of the classroom. The Stateline article points out that there are issues beyond providing broadband and computers, and that kids still need adults to help direct their learning. But students without computers or broadband have virtually no chance of keeping up in an environment that relies fully or partially on learning from home.
The article cites a recent study by the Annenberg Institute of Brown University that looks at the impact of the pandemic in the spring semester of this year. The study estimates that students returning to school this fall will have only made between 63% and 68% of the expected gains in reading that would normally have been expected from the last school year. Students will only have made between 37% and 50% of the expected gains in math. It’s hard to imagine what happens to current students if virtual or interrupted education carries through much of the current school year. I’ve seen articles where various educators are already calling 2020 a ‘lost year’.
As part of my ongoing work with community broadband, I’ve talked to communities with a wide range of circumstances and proposed solutions. For example, I talked to the school administrator of a small rural school district that has roughly 600 students. The area resides in a broadband desert and most homes have no good home broadband option – even traditional satellite service barely works in the community where homes are nestled into canyons and valleys.
This small school district is trying the full range of solutions we hear from across the country. The district has scrambled to find computers for students that don’t have them at home. The school district has obtained cellular hotspots for many rural students, although there a lot of places in the county with little or no cellular coverage. The local government has tried to fill in the gap in cellular coverage by deploying a number of public hotspots to provide places where students and home workers can find broadband. But probably the most important thing they are doing is that the superintendent of schools called every student in the district and is trying to find individual solutions for students that are having problems learning.
Even with all this effort, the school district acknowledges that this is not a solution that will work with all students and that some students are going to fall far behind. This school district is only able to tackle the above solutions due to the small number of students in the district. It’s hard to imagine how school districts with thousands of students can even attempt to provide individual solutions.
The pandemic has also shown us that ‘normal’ broadband is not adequate for homes with multiple students and adults trying to work from home at the same time. Even expensive cable broadband subscriptions can be inadequate when more than two people try to share the small upload bandwidth. Emergency home and public hotpots share the same problems and can easily get overwhelmed.
I don’t have any proposed solutions for the problem and as a country, we’re going to somehow deal with a whole generation of students that have fallen behind the expected education progression. I do not doubt that when school gets back to normal that many school districts will figure this out.
For now, local communities have to try to take all of the steps needed to at least try to help students. I talked to somebody who does broadband mapping and was surprised to hear that many school districts are just now trying to figure out which students don’t have computers or home broadband. It’s been six months since the start of the pandemic and it’s hard to believe that school districts didn’t gather these basic facts before now.
States and localities everywhere have scrambled to create WiFi hotspots, but nobody should rest on their laurels and think that solves the problem. Many states and localities have used CAREs money to buy computers, and as important as that is, it is only a piece of the solution. I’ve read that school districts scrambled all summer to adapt curriculum to an online format, but that also doesn’t fix the problem. The bare minimum answer is that school districts need to find ways to do all of the above, and more – and even with that students are going to fall behind this school year. But what other choice do we have? As the Stateline article points out, some lucky families will hire tutors to keep students up to speed – but that’s not going to help the vast majority of students in the coming school year.