The Virtual Learning Apartheid & COVID-19—Who’s Left Behind? | #StillCompromising, Ep. 5
By: Lacey Corbett and Cristian Vargas
A special thanks to the Center for Civic Research and Innovation for data management and analysis support.
As the Coronavirus pandemic began sweeping across our unprepared region in March, life was turned upside down for students, their families, and educators. St. Louis City and County officials in the region closed area schools on March 18th. Just over three weeks later, on April 9th, Gov. Mike Parsons declared that Missouri schools would remain closed for the rest of the 2019–2020 school year. School districts, educators, students, and families were thrust into distance learning — many without the means or a plan.
In this episode, we will discuss the shift to online learning in the wake of COVID-19 school closures, how the region’s Black students are more likely to have a harder time making that shift due to systematic barriers to internet access, why we should care, and what we can do to ensure all students have the opportunity to engage in distance learning.
The Still Compromising Series: In March of 1820, the Missouri Compromise was signed and the state of Missouri was born out of an insistence on the continued systematic subjugation and devaluation of Black lives.
In March and April of 2020–200 years later — COVID-19 is revealing that we are still very much grappling with that original sin. The pandemic and its disproportionate effects on Black St. Louisans are pulling back the veil on our broken and inequitable systems. In this series we explore how COVID-19 has laid bare the ways we continue to compromise on our shared values and how we can use this crisis as an opportunity to catalyze Racial Equity. #StillCompromising
The Switch to Distance Learning
While plans for responding to the official statewide cancellation of school looked different from district to district, in one key way, they were all the same: they required students to have access to the internet. Leaders knew they couldn’t assume this to be the case, so they started implementing creative ways to connect students with internet service like extending school and community building WiFi networks, providing students with hotspots, and using buses for mobile WiFi hotspots. However, nearly two months into distance learning, the Missouri Department of Elementary and Secondary and Education (DESE) estimated that 23% of Missouri’s students lacked sufficient internet at home, with the most commonly cited reason being affordability.
“In 10 census tracts in our region, the majority of internet-enabled households have speeds below 200 Kbps (for context, 200 Kbps was the minimum threshold to qualify as “broadband” internet back in 1996; today, that minimum threshold stands at 25 Mbps, or 125 times faster). Those ten tracts are all majority Black.”
COVID-19 Casts a Bright Light on the Digital Divide
The reason school administrators knew to expect issues with internet access is because it is a long-standing barrier to education — the pandemic was simply highlighting something that was there all along. Indeed, the so-called “digital divide” has persisted over the years despite the growing understanding that the internet is as essential as water, electricity, and heat. In schools, the divide has taken on a new moniker, “the homework gap,” because of the necessity of the internet for completing modern school assignments.
“One study projects that next fall, students will return having made only 70% of the reading gains they would have normally made in a typical school year, and less than 50% of typical gains in math due to the ‘COVID-19 slide’.”
Students who don’t have the internet at home have to figure out other ways to complete their school work. A 2016 national study found that 48% of students in the homework gap had to go to school early or stay late to complete assignments using the internet at school, 32% of students used the internet at fast food restaurants or other related places for homework, and 30% used the internet at the public library in order to get their work done. COVID-19 has made internet access more crucial than ever while simultaneously cutting off many of these alternative sources for accessing it.
The Digital Delmar Divide
In St. Louis, the Delmar Divide is a notorious relic of segregation that continues to reinforce racial and socioeconomic separation. Much like the Delmar Divide separates Black and White, and poverty and wealth, it marks a digital divide between students who have internet access they need to stay engaged in learning from home and those who don’t. In St. Louis City and St. Louis County, Black residents are 3.5 times more likely to have no internet connection than White residents (or about 1 in 6 Black residents compared to about 1 in 22 White residents), and those without internet are concentrated north of Delmar Boulevard, as shown below. Black residents are also 3.6 times more likely to have cell data plans as their only internet connection (or about 1 in 9 Black residents compared to about 1 in 31 White residents).
Virtual Apartheid: Urban Deserts of Connectivity in North St. Louis (Check out the interactive version of the map below here)
Not All Internet is Created Equal
Even when households do have an internet connection, Black households in St. Louis are more likely to have slower and less reliable connection speeds. For example, in 10 census tracts in our region, the majority of internet-enabled households have speeds below 200 Kbps (for context, 200 Kbps was the minimum threshold to qualify as “broadband” internet back in 1996; today, that minimum threshold stands at 25 Mbps, or 125 times faster). Those ten tracts are all majority Black. For the 4,089 school-age children in these tracts, these antiquated internet speeds are far from adequate for meeting the demands of distance learning.
Digital Exclusion: Black St. Louisans More Likely to Have Outdated Internet Speeds (Check out the interactive version of the map below here)
Compounded Effects
Every summer, kids go home from school for three months and come back having lost some of the progress they made in the past year. This is a fact of education so entrenched it has a catchy name: the summer slide. We also know, with a similar level of grim certainty, that this slide is steeper for low-income and Black students. The authors of The Summer Slide What We Know and Can Do about Summer Learning Loss found that summer learning loss accounts for 35% of the growth in the Black-White achievement gap in test scores from 2nd to 9th grade. With some calling school closures due to COVID-19 the “longest summer vacation ever,” we can anticipate a widening of the achievement gap, especially given the cumulative effect of toxic stress from financial instability and the ever-present fear that a loved one may contract COVID-19.
One study projects that next fall, students will return having made only 70% of the reading gains they would have normally made in a typical school year, and less than 50% of typical gains in math due to the ‘COVID-19 slide’. These shortfalls will be even greater for many of our Black students because of racial disparities in access to high-quality internet access. Given what we know about the link between education and lifelong well-being, it is not an overstatement to say education inequities revealed and amplified (but notably not created!) by COVID-19 could compromise our Black students’ health, wealth, and success for the rest of their lives.
“In St. Louis City and St. Louis County, Black residents are 3.5 times more likely to have no internet connection than White residents (or about 1 in 6 Black residents compared to about 1 in 22 White residents), and those without internet are concentrated north of Delmar Boulevard.”
Toward A More Connected Future
With COVID-19 promising to cause education disruptions well into the 2020–2021 school year and potentially beyond, we must take action now, especially in the wake of a recent $131 million cut to public education in Missouri. The new normal of life during — and after COVID-19 — will continue to assume internet access. So what can we do to turn that into a safe assumption to make?
At the state level, administrators have been busy getting a handle on the issue of internet access disparities. They should disaggregate any data they collect on this topic by race. As these officials continue to develop guidance for educators navigating school re-opening planning, they should pass on the advice to disaggregate distance learning data by race and include explicit advice for engaging with students who fall into the homework gap. Alongside this, state-level education administrators should partner with their economic development colleagues to use the authority, mandate, and bargaining power of the state to bring internet providers to the table to imagine and implement solutions that bring down the price of quality broadband internet.
At the local and regional level, elected officials and community anchor institutions should work with internet service providers to develop low-cost or free high-speed internet plans for students and families that qualify for the free and reduced lunch program. Additionally, these entities should leverage the Missouri Broadband Grant Program and other funding opportunities to close the internet access gap. In the absence of private sector action, Missouri statute specifically allows municipalities to provide their own community-owned “Internet-type services,” which are almost always cheaper than private internet service providers. This could offer a long-term solution to internet access in underserved areas where private service providers have been unable or unwilling to invest.
School district leaders should collaborate across districts to share and compare problems, solutions, best practices, and resources. They should apply a Racial Equity lens to their COVID-19 planning by disaggregating data by race (among other dimensions) to determine whether some students are falling through the cracks, and have a distance learning plan prepared for those students who are impacted by the lack of internet in their home. To help support their individual needs, as well as access the places, spaces, or structures needed to support cross-district collaboration, district leaders should collaborate with colleagues in other sectors, including education-adjacent non-profit organizations.
Funders (e.g., the Missouri Foundation for Health) should convene cross-sector discussions, that include local business owners, for tackling the digital divide. While the impacts of the divide are most heartbreaking for our children, they are felt in many other corners of our community, from those looking for jobs, to those trying to stay connected. Additionally, funders should direct resources to creative solutions for closing the homework gap.
More so than ever before, the internet is a lifeline to education, employment, information, and engagement. Will we continue to allow insurmountable barriers to it to keep our Black children and neighbors from getting the health-, wealth-, and education-guaranteeing access they need to survive and thrive? Or can we use this moment as an opportunity to take a systems-based approach to closing the digital divide once and for all?
Read #StillCompromising Episode 4 on “Who Pays the Price of the COVID-19 Economic Crisis” and sign up for our newsletter to be the first to hear about future releases.
