Education Week - December 9, 2020 - 16

OPINION
WEIGHING
THE RESEARCH

elenab/iStock/Getty

What works
Wha
t doe
sn't

Remote Learning Hurts Attendance

I

By Heather C. Hill
HILL is a professor of
education at the Harvard
Graduate School of
Education and studies
teacher quality, teacher
professional learning,
and instructional
improvement. She is the
principal author of a series
on research and practice
for Education Week.

know a 10-year-old-social, responsible-who went AWOL for the first
two weeks of school this fall.
It's easy to imagine a scenario
like that playing out in thousands of
remote schooling households across
the country: K-12 students " stopping
out " or dropping out by not attending class or
completing assignments. In school buildings,
students mostly must remain physically present
once they arrive. But when students learn at home,
they have opportunities to disengage just about
hourly: from that synchronous session at 9 a.m.,
from the division of fractions video at 10 a.m., and
from the essay for English class that is supposed to
be in a Google doc by noon.
My 10-year-old friend had a teacher who called
home and got him back on track. In many cases,
though, it will take more than that.
Unsurprisingly, surveys and district data show
that remote attendance has flagged. In May, less
than 10 percent of teachers surveyed nationally
said that remote attendance approached normal
attendance levels, and two-thirds reported that
assignment-completion rates were down since the
start of the pandemic. Cities including Detroit,
Chicago, and Rochester, N.Y., have all reported
lower-than-expected attendance rates this fall.
Reduced attendance might explain the negative
impacts of remote schooling compared with
in-person instruction. As reported in Education
Week's Weighing the Research opinion essay series
earlier this year, a number of researchers have
discovered that on average, achievement suffers
with online classes. Recently, for example, Carycruz
Bueno found that students attending public virtual
schools in Georgia between 2007 and 2016 scored
significantly below students in the state's public
brick-and-mortar schools on standardized tests and
were 10 percentage points less likely to graduate
from high school, even taking into account the
different characteristics of online students.
Attendance data show a disturbingly uneven
playing field. Spring login data from Zearn, an

16 | EDUCATION WEEK | December 9, 2020 | www.edweek.org/go/opinion

Online Math Participation:
Jan. to Nov. 2020
Student participation in the Zearn online math
curriculum has dropped off much more in
low-income communities than high-income
ones during the pandemic.

NOTE: Data are from logins to the math program
Zearn, which combines hands-on instruction with
online lessons. Only students in schools that use
Zearn as a regular part of weekly teaching are
included.

-1.7%
High-Income

SOURCE: Raj Chetty, John N. Friedman, Nathaniel
Hendren, Michael Stepner, and the Opportunity
Insights Team. See tracktherecovery.org.

online mathematics curriculum, suggest that
student-participation rates in affluent communities
dipped in March but climbed back to normal by
late April. However, participation rates for lowincome communities never recovered, lagging
behind normal by about 40 percent at the end of
the spring. November data show Zearn logins in
low-income communities remain about 15 percent
below normal.
With the number of school closures already high
and rising, educators need to think strategically
about both measuring and encouraging remote
attendance. A look in the literature suggests
several lessons.
First, bring students back to school where and
when possible, prioritizing the most vulnerable
students.
Second, adjust attendance early-warning metrics
for COVID-19 realities and use them. Earlywarning metrics are a component of many programs

-15.7%
Low-Income
http://www.tracktherecovery.org http://www.edweek.org/go/opinion
Education Week - December 9, 2020

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