News Roundup

Re. the Atlantic article: I agree that the “distance learning” provided by schools is terrible, but I don’t agree that the solution is to put the entire burden of educating kids on parents. Most parents are not equipped to teach, and even those of us with teaching experience may find it difficult to teach our own children. If we end up having to “homeschool” next year, I will not be teaching my child; I will be paying for someone else to do it on line. Even homeschooling families don’t typically go it alone. They form co-ops to teach kids in groups, purchase complete curricula for some subjects, and often turn to on-line schools or community colleges for high school courses.

The rest of this school year is already a total loss. States should be working with school districts right now to prepare high-quality distance learning programs for the fall, when it’s inevitable that schools will be closed again as the virus comes back for a second (or third) wave. Trying to squish the existing structure of in-person school into an on-line format won’t cut it. Kids aren’t being served well with seven hours a day of Zoom class meetings and fill-in-the-blank worksheets. Existing course structures will need to be reimagined for a successful transition to on-line instruction. For example, instead of having two teachers each teach six sections of the same course, a school could have one of the teachers record a single lecture to be viewed asynchronously by all 300 students. Discussion and collaborative work could happen in small, weekly on-line meetings similar to a college recitation or discussion section. Many nonprofit and commercial providers have already developed formats that work, even for science lab courses. If schools can’t bring in consultants to design a workable on-line curriculum, they should be paying third-party providers (which are already a publicly funded option for students in some states).