For her 8-year-old son, Kai, Natasha Babaian says she may drop online learning and focus on creative projects that have been more enjoyable, like a ‘Pandemic Pantry Cookbook.’
Photo: Natasha BabaianNot long after the San Francisco Unified School District said it would be shutting its doors during the pandemic, Deepa Sureka felt a sense of panic wash over her.
With roughly three more months of the school year in the balance, she worried about what would happen to her daughters’ education. Would 11-year-old Aanya and 6-year-old Sibani be able to finish their curricula to tackle the next grades in the fall?
Remote learning that began a month later brought more concerns. Chaotic Zoom classes leave her daughters bored despite their teachers’ best efforts. Sibani spends more time changing the virtual backgrounds than paying attention to the teacher. The younger girl’s writing skills are waning, and Ms. Sureka fears Aanya won’t complete the year’s curriculum by summer.
Ms. Sureka’s concerns are echoed throughout the country, as parents and educators are trying to navigate the largest-ever experiment in remote learning in the U.S. Among other things, they are trying to understand what damage is being caused by what for many will be a monthslong learning loss—or, at the least, reduced learning.
At the same time, they are rethinking what online learning and assessments should look like, and what kind of teaching doesn’t translate as well online. And they are casting an eye months down the road, when they may be able to get students back on track with Saturday classes or remedial review once school starts in the fall.
“This pandemic is a uniquely challenging time for teachers and students alike. We recognize that everybody’s circumstances are different, and we have emphasized to students and families that our top priority is their wellness and well-being,” says Enikia Ford Morthel, deputy superintendent of instruction at the San Francisco Unified School District. The district’s approach “has focused on ensuring equitable access and a shared set of resources for our teachers to provide grade-level learning opportunities.”
Loss of gains
About 68% of parents are concerned about their children falling behind grade-level expectations, according to a recent survey of 1,381 U.S. parents conducted about a month ago by Varsity Tutors, an online tutoring service. Some 63% of the parents are worried that the pandemic will affect their children’s educational success for longer than a year.
Students from third to eighth grade typically lose 15% to 30% of the gains made in math, and 5% to 15% in reading, during the summer, according to the Northwest Evaluation Association. The association released forecasts in April projecting that those losses could worsen because of the school closures. The researchers estimate that if students stopped receiving instruction as of March 15, students could lose 50% of the learning gains made in math, with fifth-graders potentially returning to school almost a full year behind. In reading, the researchers estimate students could lose 30% of what they learned in the prior school year.
Deepa Sureka’s daughter Sibani, 6 years old, has been home since San Francisco schools closed in March. Zoom classes leave Sibani bored, the mother says.
Photo: Deepa Sureka“School districts really need to plan,’’ says Chris Minnich, chief executive of the evaluation association, a nonprofit education-services firm based in Portland, Ore. “How do I go back to school for a situation where students might not have gotten half of the school year?”
Previous natural disasters, though not perfect comparisons, offer a guide. It took students who were displaced by Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans two years to catch up to where they would have been had the disaster not happened, according to Doug Harris, an economics professor at Tulane University and founding director of the Educational Research Alliance, which has studied the effects of the New Orleans school system after the 2005 hurricane.
As a result of the hurricane, students went about a month without classroom instruction before enrolling in new schools, and once they returned there were weeks of other disruptions tied to displacement and district changes, comparable to the length of the current closure, Mr. Harris says.
Schools have rushed to launch remote learning to stem the slide. But the rollout hasn’t been uniform, exacerbating long-running inequities. More than a month after schools shut down, many students still don’t have access to the internet at home or devices to complete their assignments. In California, about 200,000 households with students still don’t have a device at home. Some parents who are essential workers can’t provide the guidance needed, and those who can feel burned out trying to wrangle the children to do the work.
Carry on
Experts say that a continuing education—even at a reduced level and delivered in nontraditional ways—will go a long way in keeping children on track and getting them through the current crisis.
“We have found that by far and away it is extremely important for education activities to continue in crises,” says Rebecca Winthrop, a senior fellow and co-director of the Center for Universal Education at the Brookings Institution who has worked on forming educational practices in emergencies.
This doesn’t mean powering through every homework assignment. Students can benefit from passion projects that are “play-based, interactive and social” that can be done with the family. Think learning fractions through baking or geometry through a carpentry project. Ms. Winthrop says one of the best things parents can do is to engage with children by asking open-ended questions.
Some educators say that the pandemic will force the school system to rethink how to assess what learning looks like. Already, in California, the shift to distance learning has prompted school districts to re-evaluate learning as “mastery of content,” rather than instructional minutes, says Tony Thurmond, the California state superintendent of public instruction, who has appointed a task force to address loss-of-learning issues.
When the school district of Cajon Valley, Calif., launched remote learning the week of April 20, it did so with a focused curriculum on reading comprehension, English language arts and math.
Other subjects like history and science aren’t being offered in regular rotation, says David Miyashiro, the superintendent of the Cajon Valley schools. In the middle school, students no longer have seven different teachers a day. Instead, they receive their weekly assignment—or “playlist”—in each subject at the beginning of the week and work on it independently, seeking help from teachers during office hours if they have questions. Teachers, who used to serve more than 150 students a day, have become “advisers” and will be the point of contact for the same group of 30 students during the shutdown to give them emotional support.
Mr. Thurmond says some districts are thinking about how to use the summer months to make up for lost time, such as Saturday academy programs.
Others are figuring out how to assess student levels when they can finally physically return to school, and how much time to spend on remedial learning, because no amount of creative thinking can supersede the basic sequence of learning some subjects. In math, for instance, fractions need to be learned in third grade, much of which happens in the second half of the year, to set the student up for more complex concepts like measuring volume and geometry to be learned in later grades.
No textbook
Even so, some parents, themselves exhausted by dueling demands from work, children and the weight of the pandemic, are ready to throw up their hands. Trying to get her 8-year-old son, Kai, to complete his six assignments each day has meant nonstop fighting, says Natasha Babaian, an outdoor-education teacher and mother of two in San Francisco. She and Kai get a quarter of them done, on a good day.
She’s considering dropping the online learning and sticking to creative projects that have been more enjoyable. She and Kai, who is in second grade, started a “Pandemic Pantry Cookbook,” which they filled with crisis-friendly recipes they have devised like pasta sauces and improvised cookies they made when they didn’t have enough butter.
She is willing to let a few months or a year of learning loss go if it means getting through the quarantine in one piece.
“If I let myself get worried about loss of learning I’d really lose it. So I let that go,” says Ms. Babaian.
One recent afternoon, Kai wanted to bake cookies, but Ms. Babaian said they were out of butter. He replied that if they had heavy cream, they could make butter. “We’ll turn a liquid into a solid, which is also science,” he told her.
Ms. Babaian says, “Maybe, just maybe, I’m doing something right.”
Ms. Koh is a Wall Street Journal reporter in San Francisco. She can be reached at yoree.koh@wsj.com.
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