Education Week - August 19, 2020 - 9

Balancing Equity Concerns
Like so much in this pandemic, the
focus on learning pods is exposing inequities in access, funding, and educational opportunity that have been
around for a long time.
Some parents are trying to navigate
the difficult equity issues themselves.
Kristin Thomas Sancken, a parent in
Charlottesville, Va., has two daughters entering 5th and 1st grades.
Her older daughter was already
being homeschooled because of special education needs. But Sancken
loves the diverse public school that
her younger daughter attends.
She posted on a neighborhood
group to see if anyone was interested
in forming a learning pod, and got a
gratifying number of responses-but

they were all from middle-class white
families like her own, which does
not reflect the school's demographic
makeup.
"I need to figure out how to do this
in an equitable way," Sancken said
she was left thinking. So the parents
are reaching out to other families in
the school and to community organizations to try to get a broader representation.
She's still not sure how it's going
to work. "In my wildest dreams, this
would be something that would really bring our community together
and bring parents together in a new
way," she said.
Abby Paske, an elementary science
teacher in Berkeley, Calif., and a parent of a rising kindergartner, a 5th
grader, and an 8th grader, said that
parents should wait to form pods or
other informal groups after school
districts group their children into
classrooms. Because classes themselves are often balanced among
different demographics, parents
can at least work within a grouping
that might be more diverse than just
reaching out to their small networks.
"There's clearly lots of parents who
have the bandwidth to think about
this," Paske said. Since parents are already "freaking out," she said, "let's
take a quarter of that 'freak out' and
put it towards equity. We can make it
that much better in the end."
Sharon Foley, a parent of a rising
3rd grader and a kindergartner in
Austin, Texas, said she hopes that
some good might come from the
painful reckoning. She is considering
organizing a pod, and thinking about
how she can be a broader community
resource.
"It's really uncomfortable in the
moment. But I actually think that
parents are going to be so much more
engaged than they have been about
what's actually happening in their
schools," she said.
Calarco, the Indiana University
researcher, offered a multipronged
approach that might help parents address equity concerns. If parents are
looking for more instructional support, fixing that problem should be
led by districts, who could focus on
small classes and fairly paid teachers-a costly solution, but the fairest
one for all, she said.
If child care or social interaction is
the main concern, the child-care coops are more equitable than learning pods. While that approach is
not perfect, parents can get support
without draining resources from
public education.
"If they're purely for social purposes, then at least they don't give
privileged students an extra leg up
in school," she said. "And arguably,
they'll also be better for kids' mental
health, in that they reduce the pressure on students to be spending all
their time thinking about school."
Coverage of how parents work with
educators, community leaders and
policymakers to make informed decisions
about their children's education is
supported by a grant from the Walton
Family Foundation, at waltonk12.org.
Education Week retains sole editorial
control over the content of this coverage.

WHAT THE

RESEARCH SAYS

Will Opening Schools
Make the Pandemic
Worse?
By Sarah D. Sparks
Will reopening schools cause the nation's
already simmering coronavirus pandemic to
boil over? While the picture from studies and
reopenings in other countries is beginning to
come into focus, it's unlikely school and district
leaders will have a clear answer before they have
to make their own decisions for this fall.
After relatively scant research on children
and the coronavirus in the early months of
the pandemic, there has been slowly building
consensus around just a few findings: that
children, particularly pre-adolescents, appear to
be less likely to contract the disease; and that the
majority of those that do have either mild or no
symptoms.
In a new study, the American Academy of
Pediatrics analyzed data on COVID-19 infection
rates in 49 states, New York City, Washington
D.C., Puerto Rico, and Guam. It found that of
the more than 380,000 total COVID-19 cases
reported so far among children, nearly 180,000
have been reported from July 9 to August
9-a 90 percent jump within a month. That
represents an infection rate of 501 for every
100,000 children.
In more than half of states, at least 1 in
10 people with COVID-19 now is a child or
adolescent.
The AAP has found that children still make up
only 3 percent to 12 percent of all those tested for
COVID-19 in the states. In the absence of
widescale testing, researchers have relied
on case studies of existing outbreaks and
comparing the relative amount of viral
particles in children and adults to try to
compare how much they may pass on.

people than states that waited until their
community infection rates were in the highest
quartile-representing some 1.37 million fewer
cases total during that time.
n By contrast, a research analysis by Canada's
public health agency and McMaster University
which looked at contact tracing and case studies
of outbreaks found that children 10 and under
didn't drive coronavirus outbreaks in schools
or daycares. When they did occur, they tended
to be traced back to adults in the school or the
children's families.
n A forthcoming multi-study review and a
separate study of children and adults in South
Korea both suggested that high school-aged
students may be significantly more likely to
contract COVID-19 than elementary-aged
children.
While the studies offer somewhat mixed
evidence on how infectious children may be
and what role they contribute to the spread of
the pandemic, they do highlight one keystone
for district leaders' decisions about school
reopening: Community virus rates can make a
big difference in whether a school's reopening
improves access to learning or spreads disease.
The journal Science found, in a review of 20
countries' school reopenings, that while requiring
face masks and social distancing, and keeping
students in small cohorts (so-called "panedmic
pods" among some U.S. schools and parents)
did reduce outbreaks, the biggest factor was
the overall rate of infection circulating in the
community.
Countries that reopened schools with low
community infection rates, such as in Denmark,
have seen overall COVID-19 rates continue to
decline even after schools and daycares opened.

The last several weeks have brought
a flurry of new, more school-focused
findings, including:
n One University of Texas-Austin
analysis of the New York Times' pandemic
tracking data suggested 4 in 5 Americans
live in a county where the rate of COVID19 infection in the community is high
enough that at least one student or staff
member at a 500-student school will
Corinth Elementary School students have their
show up with the illness if schools reopen temperatures checked by a thermal scanner as they arrive
in fall. However, epidemiologists pointed for their first day back to school last month in Corinth, Miss.
out that its projections likely overestimate
that risk because they were based on what was
Others, such as Israel, reopened schools amid
likely a sicker-than-normal sample of children.
higher community infection rates and had to
n Another study that tracked the timing of
shutter them after significant outbreaks.
school closures and incidence of COVID-19 in
Building public confidence could be a major
U.S. communities from March through early
challenge. As schools across the United States
May finds statewide school closures were
have begun to reopen for in-person instruction
associated-in time-with a 68 percent drop
in the last few weeks, districts in several states
in the weekly incidence of the disease and 58
including Georgia, Illinois, Indiana, and
percent fewer deaths per week. Over a 26-day
Mississippi have been forced to send more than
period, states that shuttered schools when their
a thousand students into quarantine following
community infections were in the lowest 25
coronavirus outbreaks, particularly in secondary
percent had nearly 130 fewer cases per 100,000
schools.

Adam Robison/The Northeast Mississippi Daily Journal via AP

part of the school year, and then send
their children back to school once
coronavirus cases drop and in-person
classes resume-and, crucially, after
official enrollment tallies have been
taken and per pupil money allocated.
North Carolina has seen a swell of
parents filing with the state to homeschool-so much so that the first
day families could file online with
the state to homeschool, the system
crashed from the traffic according to
the Associated Press.
There's also concern about how
homeschooling-whether in pods or
individually-could affect students'
education, said Jennifer Wildman,
the superintendent of Mammoth
United School District, which serves
a ski resort town in California's Sierra
Nevada mountains.
When Wildman started to hear
rumblings of parents looking into
home schooling, she said she grew
concerned that pulling students
completely out of the public school
system would cause more potentially
harmful disruptions to their educations, on top of schools closing last
spring.
But, unhappy with remote learning
this spring, a number of parents, including teachers in Mammoth USD,
weren't keen to repeat the experience, said Wildman.
"A few [teachers] went overboard,"
she said. "They did Zoom classes in
the evening. ... There were frustrations around Google Classroom and
some of the expectations."
Wildman heard from parents "that
some of our teachers were requiring too much and some not nearly
enough."
She responded by creating two distance learning tracks: The first is more
hands-on with students interacting
through teleconferences with teachers every day. That track is positioned
to transition into in-person classes
once coronavirus case numbers go
down. The second track is a long-term
independent study program that is
more self-driven, with separate assignments and only weekly check-ins
with a teacher. It's not a flawless system, said Wildman. Because of state
rules, only 10 percent of students
can participate in the more hands-off
track, and she expects the district will
reach that cap. But she's hoping the
added option will keep her families
enrolled in the district.

From remote learning for young children to playground infection risks, schooling under the pandemic is raising
a lot of questions for teachers and education leaders. This new research column aims to help readers understand
what the research says-and doesn't say-about our new context for learning. If you have a question, please send
it to ssparks@educationweek.org.

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Education Week - August 19, 2020

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