Will the equity divide in public schools widen post pandemic?
The ongoing Covid-19 pandemic should teach us for good that digital divide exists, and we are far from delivering education with equity.
We are debating about whether to open schools, and how to do so safely. Putting politics aside, we have to acknowledge that remote learning widens the equity gap. The motivation for reopening schools should be to close that gap. As this well written report from the German think tank recognizes, students who are home with more educated and wealthy parents fare far better than students who come from the uneducated and poorer families. This is exacerbated by dependence on connectivity, devices, and a place at home to use these devices to learn. In the world of remote learning, outcomes will not be equally distributed.
Schools that are opening are giving parents a choice whether to keep students at home, or send them to the classroom. This choice only matters to parents and students who find themselves in a position to make a choice. In other words, this choice is really only for families who find that they can give their children the support structure at home to learn effectively.
Come fall, will we see the same representation of families with children in the classroom as last year? Or will the more educated, wealthier families choose to keep their kids at home?
As time progresses, families will assess the risk of having their children attend school due to exposure to the Covid-19 virus. They will assess the benefit of being in classrooms 2–3 days a week, vs learning from home. Every family will make a decision based on where they lie on the risk/benefit analysis. I believe that once schools reopen, even the families whose children are learning remotely get exposed to a higher risk than schools remaining closed because of community spread of the virus. So we should be assessing purely on the merits of a classroom environment with the currently ongoing pandemic, vs kids learning primarily at home.
I hypothesize that in a post-Covid world, a larger number of families, especially the more educated families, who so far sent their kids to public schools, will choose to do distance learning. If the pandemic worsens, or continues for a longer time, this number of families will grow.
I worry that this may lead to a much wider gap in equity in the education our children receive. It may behoove us to act now to bridge that gap.
It might be better for classroom environments to serve as the tools to bridge that equity gap. What can schools provide children in these environments that rivals or does better than a private tuition at home?
Schools can invest in tools for hands on learning that no amount of online and distance learning can match. Schools can do so at a much lower cost per student than parents can do so at home. Examples of such tools include robotics, science labs, maker spaces, team sports.
Schools can also invest in helping kids learn effectively in a blended environment. Schools can provide better connectivity to students than they may get at home, along with a safe place to learn. Schools can change the classroom environment so that students can use that space and time to learn more from online resources. Schools can make the hours flexible, so that students can use the space for longer periods of time.
We don’t know where we will end up, but it is always the right time to rethink how schools serve our communities. This time is no different, and may even be more right than otherwise.
