Education Week - June 10, 2020 - 15

needs, will be harmed "for three or
four years down the road" from this
year's learning losses.
Some teachers reported that even
though they wanted to cover new
material, distance learning made that
tough.
"Without being in front of them, so
I could walk around, look over their
shoulders at their work, see the looks
on their faces to see if they're getting it,
it's really tough to introduce anything
new," said Shelton.
Before schools closed, she conducted 80-minute class sessions every
other day, each with 90 minutes of
homework. Now she assigns 40 minutes' worth of work every other day.
Parents are concerned about the
decline in their children's learning
time. In a few cities-such as Arlington, Va., and Newton, Mass.-they've
started petitions to demand more instructional time for their children.
Gallup polls showing rising concern
among parents about a negative impact on their children's learning. And
a poll conducted by AP-NORC found
that lower-income parents are particularly worried about their children
falling behind in the sudden shift to
home learning.
Dennisha Rivers, who has two sons
in the Louisville, Ky., schools, said
her children spend "maybe an hour"
each day on schoolwork. She has little
time to help them, and no doubt that
they're falling behind. She's confident
her 13-year-old can bounce back, but
she wonders how her 7-year-old, who
has a learning disability, will regain lost
ground.

No 'COVID-19 Pass'
Districts are taking very different approaches to instruction as they balance
flexibility and expectations.
Providence, R.I., requires students
to "attend" class from 8 a.m. to 3:30
p.m., a schedule similar to their brickand-mortar classes, except for a longer
midday break to let their parents get to
district-run meal sites.
Teachers take attendance, and use
monitoring apps, to track student participation, said its chief equity officer,
Barbara Mullen, and have consistent
engagement from about 80 percent of
the district's 24,000 students in this
working-class, predominantly minority community. Bus monitors have
been redeployed to work call centers,
so fewer than 100 students still elude
contact.
"There's no such thing as a COVID19 pass," said Providence Superintendent Harrison Peters, who said he got
some pushback from families wanting
more leniency.
"We were very sentimental about
what kids are going through right now,
but at the end of the day, this world
will still expect these kids to perform. I
have to have high expectations for children of color who already start behind
the eight ball."
Miami-Dade County, a big, highpoverty district, stuck with its planned
curriculum, making an unusually
smooth transition to remote learning
because of good planning and an aggressive push to distribute devices and
WiFi hotspots. The district had already
been incorporating digital learning

into its system, but Superintendent Alberto Carvalho kicked that transition
into high gear in January, when he saw
the virus take hold in China.
When buildings closed, the district
didn't attempt to replicate its sevenhour, 20-minute school day, moving instead to an approach in which
students cycle through live online
instruction and independent work
on assignments. Instead of starting
and ending "school" at fixed times,
Carvalho said, students and teachers
are "playing a wider field" of time,
interspersing work and breaks across
a 12- or 14-hour period.
The district's i-Ready learning platform for grades K-8 shows a consistently high level of engagement, with
90 percent or more of students in
every income bracket and ZIP code
using the platform every week since
buildings closed, Carvalho said.

Students Are Getting Less Instruction Time
During Coronavirus
Surveys by the EdWeek Research Center capture a picture of teaching and learning during the
pandemic. We asked teachers a range of questions about their work lives and their students'
learning. Their responses, from our May 7 survey, show that they believe students are spending
far less time on learning than before schools closed. They also show that teachers are spending
less time on instruction, especially presenting new material. In high-poverty neighborhoods,
students interact with their teachers less frequently, spend less time learning, and are more
likely to have teachers who say they have decreased time on new material.

Teachers: How many
hours a day do you
spend working?

9 hrs

7 hrs

Before schools closed

Now

due to coronavirus

'Abdication of Responsibility'
Martha Basulto, a 2nd grade
teacher at Coral Reef Elementary
in Miami, divides her 49 students
into two 90-minute Zoom sessions
daily, and with her co-teacher, moves
through the district's curriculum. She
boasts 100 percent attendance, and
she reports that formative assessments taken between September and
May show that except for one student
who needs extra support, all her students have gained academic ground
and are ending the year on or above
grade level.
"We followed that pacing guide to
the dot," she said. "We didn't drop
the ball."
Cleveland, another high-poverty
district, opted for a long-range approach when it switched to distance
learning. Christine Fowler-Mack,
the district's chief portfolio officer,
said the district deemphasized new
material in favor of review because
it knew that a large swath of students
lacked computer access. It scrambled
to distribute thousands of devices
and Wi-Fi hotspots, but a large gap
still persists.
"We knew we couldn't, in an equitable way, ensure that students, if
presented with instruction on new
material, would be able to engage,"
Fowler-Mack said. So the district
prioritized learning continuity, distributing paper packets designed to
review and strengthen core content
areas, while it dove deep into planning for summer and fall instruction
that will recapture missed material,
and build in extra supports and interventions for students who are struggling academically or emotionally.
Experts anticipate that most districts will face steep challenges in the
fall when they must help students
recover lost academic ground, especially since many aren't tracking
attendance or progress. That makes
it tough to know what students need
and how to be ready to support them,
said Dusseault, of the Center on Reinventing Public Education.
But if districts aren't better prepared in the fall, with "plans to address the different types of access
gaps, instructional gaps, then it's an
abdication of responsibility to those
students and their families," she said.

Since schools closed, how, if at all, have you
changed the amount of time you devote to
the following aspects of teaching?

Presenting new,

Presenting new, standards-aligned
material (by poverty rate):

31%

standards-aligned

material

59
Review

26%-50%

40
39

Enrichment

Student instruction

technology

more than
75%

71
87

Troubleshooting
problems with

51%-75%

[total amount]

45%

25% or less

55
27
73
24
76
24
76

More time

Less time

13
More time

Before schools
closed due to
coronavirus,
approximately how
many hours a day
did your students
spend learning?

Less time

6 hrs

Since schools
closed due to
coronavirus,
approximately how
many hours a day
have your students
spent learning?

3 hrs

Hours a day students have spent learning
(by poverty rate):

3 hrs
25%
or less

2 hrs

3 hrs

26%-50% 51%-75%

2 hrs
more
than 75%

SOURCE: EdWeek Research Center

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Education Week - June 10, 2020

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