Four Reasons Why We Should Do E-Learning in the Fall
There are many reasons why going back to a live classroom in the fall is a bad idea.
Of course, the most obvious reason is that it is unsafe from a public health standpoint. It endangers the safety of our kids who, even though they are infected and develop complications at a much lower rate, are by no means immune. There is still a whole lot that the medical community doesn’t know about childhood infection. It endangers teachers, many of whom are in at-risk categories, and it will push good teachers out of the profession and is already causing significant damage to teacher mental health. Additionally, children also have parents and grandparents — and what kids pick up at school they tend to bring home, whether it’s glitter and pipe cleaner art or a long list of diseases. These kids might not get sick, but by going to school, they will expose and endanger their caregivers.
But really, I’m not here to argue the health point. I’m not a medical professional and many people have already made that argument better than I ever could. As an educator of 14 years and a parent to two seven-year-old children, I’m here to make arguments for why school districts should do e-learning rather than in-person learning in the fall that I haven’t seen given enough attention. After spending dozens of hours planning for the possibility of a live start to the school year, it is my professional belief that any model for in-person learning in the face of our current health crisis will do more harm than good. While it is a bitter pill, parents, educators, and administrators need to abandon the idea of a return to our school buildings next month.
This is going to be a ridiculous waste of money
In dozens of conversations with teachers, parents, and administrators, I’ve yet to come across anyone who thinks that any in-person learning model will last us past November. Every conversation assumes that this is a temporary solution and that it will likely fail miserably, be rendered unnecessary once a vaccine is on the market, or both. This is a foregone conclusion that has been referenced by administrators, school boards, and other elected officials. This means that any “updates” or “new procedures” we put into place in a district will last months at best. At worst, they will be prepared for and supplies will be purchased, never to be used because in-person school will be cancelled before opening day.
But really, we’re just talking about a little bit of extra soap and some Clorox wipes, right? How much could that possibly cost? The answer is probably a lot more staggering than you think. In Chicago Public School’s recently announced preliminary plan, they report that they will be hiring 400 new custodians. In terms of supplies, they have purchased 1.2 million reusable cloth masks, 40k containers of disinfecting wipes, 42k containers of hand sanitizer, and 22k touchless thermometers for their new entrance procedures. According to Janice Jackson, chief executive of Chicago Public Schools, these costs, as well as others that will be incurred preparing schools, will amount to a whopping $280 million, taken from both local and federal funding sources.
That’s a cost of almost $1,000 per pupil in CPS. We’re talking about an underfunded district, where 78% of students are considered “low income”, and they are allocating almost $1,000 per kid to put up plexiglass shields and hire health clerks. Before Covid-19, some of these schools didn’t have enough funding for full-time nurses or social workers, but now there’s suddenly more money than the GDP of Finland to cram kids into school for as long as possible before this attempt fails.
For that amount of money, the school district could be making sure that every child had a chromebook to assist them with e-learning, which would be a smart move considering that with CPS’s blended reopening plan, kids will still be learning remotely for more than half the time, only attending in-person school for two days a week. For almost a grand per kid, CPS could work to make sure that all students have reliable internet at home. They could also use this infusion of funds to improve the HVAC in crumbling public school buildings, which would be a far better long term investment than 22k forehead thermometers, which will end up mothballed in a warehouse by November.
This expenditure is not unique to Chicago’s school system. Suburban school districts in the area are reportedly purchasing outdoor tents for “mask breaks,” a variety of cleaning supplies, personal protective equipment, and plexiglass shields for student and teacher desks. What does a school district do with 20 outdoor tents once school gets shut down in mid-September? Or with hundreds of safety shields? Each of these tents costs hundreds of dollars and will be fairly useless once this disease passes. No one needs plexiglass dividers in a post-Covid world, and they will likely end up in a landfill. What a disturbingly expensive way to destroy our planet. In districts that have been cutting teaching staff and increasing class sizes for a decade in the name of fiscal responsibility, this seems like a complete change of direction and for all the wrong reasons.
All this said, if these hefty price tags could ensure that our children and teachers were safe, that they were able to learn in a full-time school environment for the entire school year, and that parents could rely upon a consistent school schedule going forward, they’d probably be worth it. But again — not a single administrator or politician is even pretending to hide their skepticism about those things. We are pouring money on this inferno, but instead of the money smothering the flames, the fire will just devour every dollar and leave us no better off for it.
This Doesn’t Actually Help Parents
I’m a teacher, but I’m also a parent of young children. I have many non-teacher friends who have been struggling to keep their children safe, engaged, and out of their hair for the last four months. They’ve had to cut back on their hours at work or spend significantly more money to hire childcare so that they can continue to meet their employers’ expectations or go into their jobs as essential workers. In 2012, 60% of families in the United States were considered to be dual-income households, with both parents leaving the home to work. In 2017, 32% of US Children were living with an unmarried, single parent. This means that the average family doesn’t have someone ready and waiting to administer e-learning at home. This is a genuine concern, and it is likely the main driver for the in-person learning movement.
Talking to my other parent friends, the primary refrain I hear is that they need a reliable and consistent place to put their kids so that they can get back to their careers. Many of these parents don’t just use school — they also use public school busing as well as before- and after-school care. They don’t just need some school — they need school in its fullest, most supportive form.
And this is not the school that they are going to get in August.
Chicago Public Schools will have students in school for only two days a week. Other districts are calling for three-hour school days, alternating schedules, or phased reopenings. While this makes a lot of sense from a health and safety perspective, it does very little to solve the very real problems that parents are facing. They will still have their children at home for a significant portion of the week and will have to manage a lot more transition. They won’t be able to go back to work full-time, or even half-time, and some districts are doing away with bus service and after-school programs that parents rely on.
If your children are in three different schools with three different schedules, none of which are full-time, how much time are you really getting back to satisfy your professional responsibilities? And if that new system falls apart by October because of a resurgence in infection, you’ll be right back where you were in May, but instead of giving you a month to plan and prepare, as we could do now by just admitting that we’re going to end up going remote anyway, you’ll once again have to cobble together a plan on the fly.
This Doesn’t Actually Improve Education
One thing that has become very clear is that teaching and learning in a Covid-19 classroom will not be the same as teaching and learning in the classroom that I left in March. My teaching is not lecture-based. It hasn’t been for many years. Education has moved further and further away from the “stand and deliver” or “sage on a stage” model that many remember from their time as students.
There are whole days where I never once stand in front of the classroom to “teach” something. On the days where I do, I try to never talk for more than 10 minutes at a time, because we know a lot more about child and adolescent focus now, and because we know better, we are compelled to do better. Instead, my job is largely about coaching children through their work, discussing things with them in small groups, and helping to teach them larger student skills like time management and self-advocacy. I do a lot of sitting shoulder-to-shoulder with kids, working with them to solve real-world problems or to unpack a particularly challenging text. We’re in the hallways and courtyards. We’re on the floors and moving around.
In a remote learning classroom, I can still do some of this. I can have students working on differentiated assignments, and I can still meet with small groups via Zoom. In fact, I had excellent discussions with small groups of four and five kids during the remote spring trimester. I was even able to jump into a private Zoom with a kid who wasn’t doing their work and work through their limitations face to face, even from miles away. No, I couldn’t get down on the floor with a kid or hold a piece of metal steady while they soldered the other end of it, but Zoom and FlipGrid did still give me the chance to replicate some of the more progressive teaching that I was doing in the classroom. Through asynchronous video lessons, I could allow kids to move at their own pace and could assign different things to different kids depending on their readiness and interest.
In the classrooms that school districts are creating for the upcoming school year, I won’t be able to do any of that. Sure, kids will get to see me “IRL,” but they won’t get to see my facial expressions the way they could on a Zoom. They will have permanent assigned seats, so no flexible grouping. They won’t be able to be within six feet of other children, so no small group work. Since I can’t do anything that I used to in this new model, I’ll be forced back into a lecture model of teaching, one in which we all move at the same pace and no one gets any remediation or challenge or personal support. I get that we’re all worried about kids falling behind, but I’ve looked at both models, and I feel very confident that I can better educate children in a way that is more ethically and developmentally responsible through e-learning.
This Doesn’t Actually Address Emotional Health Concerns
No one who has an ounce of common sense would try to claim that this pandemic and resulting shutdown hasn’t been incredibly damaging to the collective mental health of our nation, and children are in no way immune from this. While not every child will experience significant emotional stress as a result of Covid-19, many will, and parents are understandably concerned. Many point to school as a panacea for this problem. After all, during regular times, school is a place that provides a great deal of social emotional support to children through both formal and informal delivery methods. But when our children go back to school at the end of August, it won’t be the loving, nurturing place that they are missing.
I remember watching my kids walk into kindergarten for the first time. While they waved with nervous faces, other children couldn’t mask their anxiety at leaving their parents and burst into tears. Like some sort of superhero, the school social worker swooped in and wrapped a loving arm around the young students. She ushered them into the school, where she got down on their level, sat face to face with them, and addressed their very real emotional struggles with patience and humanity.
As a middle school teacher, I’ve also seen my fair share of dysregulated students. I’ve had to sit beside a student suffering a meltdown and coach them through it in a whisper. I’ve had to remove a kid and take a swift walk with them through the hallways, helping them to process an especially challenging group project. I’ve had crying teenagers yell in my face when they were overwhelmed by both social and academic demands. And this was in a wealthy district in the before times — the good times. Incidents like this aren’t going away just because we have masking and distancing requirements — in fact, they’ll likely increase exponentially.
But what happens when that dysregulated kid is crying at her desk with her head down on top of her iPad? As a teacher and human being, I will want to approach her and help her. As an obese asthmatic who is also the primary breadwinner and support system for my two children, I will surely pause, knowing that in order to “do the right thing,” I will be risking my life and my family’s future. How do you comfort a child from six feet away? How do you help a kid work through something difficult when you have a plexiglass shield between you and them? We need these safety measures so that we don’t get sick and die. These safety measures also make it impossible for us to effectively address students’ social emotional challenges.
We also need to acknowledge that the sterile environment of a Covid-19 classroom will likely trigger new anxieties and insecurities. Many children have expressed concern about the virus, worried that they’ll get sick or get other people sick. Putting them back into an environment where the very real danger of disease is all around them, staring them in the face in the form of temperature checks, masking, and new school health staff, will only amplify their worry. How can we expect kids to focus on school work while they’re simultaneously worried about the kid next to them coughing or the teacher who keeps adjusting his mask? For these kids, they’re far better off learning at home where these distractions and triggers can at least be removed.
Maybe it’s the lack of socialization that is really causing your kid to struggle emotionally. I’ve heard a lot of parents say that they want their kid to be around their friends, and that’s a very real concern, but again, this just isn’t going to happen in school this year. In the Covid-19 classroom, our kids will never be able to hug their friends, play a game of basketball during recess, chat for a few minutes during passing period, or work together on an art project or a science lab. In some ways, it may actually be worse to be able to see their friends, or to know that they’re there — in the same school but locked in a classroom two floors away — than it would be to just not see them in person at all. There will be no whispered conversations and lunch-table laughter. This is the real socialization that our children are missing, and regardless of whether school starts in person or not, this type of socialization is on hold until we have a vaccine or better treatment options.
Then there’s the real dark side of all this. As much as children are suffering emotionally right now, how do we think their emotional health will be impacted by experiencing the death or serious illness of a classmate, educator, or community member as the result of a school-based infection? We can help our children reacclimate after a year of isolation. We can return in a healthier time and put our focus primarily on social skills and mental health. Fixing the PTSD caused by the loss of a loved one is something that will be much harder to address, and the emotional damage it will do to a community will be long-lasting.
Regardless of my pleas and the pleas of many others, I imagine that many children are going to be put into in-person class at the end of August. I also imagine that many students are going to come home after that first day and burst into tears in their caregivers’ arms. Kids are genuinely missing school. I see it in their eyes during summer Zoom book discussions, and they articulated it in their writing during e-learning. Many reported having a newfound appreciation for their education, their teachers, and their classmates. This is a good side effect and could lead to greater buy-in from our students once we are able to safely return.
That said, if we return too soon, when it’s unsafe and the new school environment is an austere prison with little resemblance to the place that they were missing, we will have really lost them. I want to teach my students. I want to laugh with them and chat with them and cry with them. I didn’t become a teacher for the sweet salary or the glamorous lifestyle — I did it because I genuinely care about and enjoy middle-school students and I can think of no better way to spend my career than learning alongside them.
But none of that is in the cards for this fall. I’m mourning for that loss right alongside you. Even though we all want school to be back very badly, we need to acknowledge that if we force an in-school education model in the fall, it won’t be anything close to what any of us are missing and really, truly need. The Covid-19 crisis demands our care, wisdom, and patience, and rushing back to school before it is safe ensures a failure that will do long-lasting emotional, financial, and educational harm.
