It's Friday, June twelve. I'm Oscar Emrrors from the Daily Dive podcast in Los Angeles, and this is Reopening America. We have shifted into a new phase in the coronavirus pandemic. We are social distancing, washing our hands, learning face masks, and we are reopening America. I'll still give you updates on any new information about the virus and vaccine development, but I will also be focusing on how cities, states, and industries affected by the shutdown are opening back up.
When the country shut down to help prevent the spread of coronavirus, it was also thrust into the learning experiment of mass remote learning. As the end of the school year approaches, the results are in. It didn't work. The problems quickly stacked up in school districts ill equipped to make such drastic changes. Some students lacked access to computers or internet, teachers had no experience with remote learning, and
some parents were unavailable to help. Lee Hawkins, education reporter at the Wall Street Journal, joins us for how the remote learning experiment went and what's on deck for next year. Thanks for joining us, Lee, Thanks for having me. I wanted to talk about what happened to our schools this past year because of the coronavirus pandemic. Everybody was forced into this grand experiment, so to speak, of mass remote learning.
I think it was more than fifty million students from kindergarten all the way to twelfth grade had to use technology, and the teachers and the parents became this whole thing. And you know, after doing this for a few months, it's kind of the end of the school year. Now people are starting to think ahead, what's going to happen for this next school year. It seems like everybody roundly agrees that it was a pretty big failure due to a whole host of different reasons. Lee tell us a
little bit about it. There's some debate on whether or not it was a failure. In our story, we talk about the fact that many of the teachers and administrators that we interviewed said that it was a failure, and there were many, many problems with the adoption of it, and so the things that didn't work were a direct result of the way it started. It was very sudden,
it was abrupt, it was unexpected. All of a sudden, we had this coronavirus that came from overseas, and next thing, you know, as the number started the skyrocket, the leadership at many of the schools and the major cities and even in rural areas across this country were kind of reluctant to closed schools because they didn't know how to implement it in the future, how to implement remote learning over that time off. And so the fact that it was so abrupt and that there wasn't a lot of
notice meant that there wasn't a lot of training. And the fact that there wasn't a lot of training, and the fact that children didn't have the devices that they needed, all of the children because of economic disparities, that only compounded the problem. So if there would have been more adequate training on the front end, it probably would have
been a much smoother transition. But that actually haunted most of the schools in this country and has haunted most of the schools in this country all the way through the entire semester. We'll get into a lot of different specifics. The first thing I want to bring up, though, I think there's a name for it, even the COVID slide, and this is kind of the learning gap for the kids during this last few months. This whole time, you know,
maybe they're not learning at the same level anymore. I think there was a few statistics about it too, that kids are gonna return to school in the fall with roughly seventy of the learning gains in reading relative to a typical school year, and for math it's only so that's kind of most concerning to me too, is kids advancing to the next grade harder things that they're supposed to be learning, and they might not be prepared for it.
A lot gets lost in translation when you're talking about teaching over a computer as opposed to teaching face to face. There were many students that struggled, particularly special needs students and students with a d h D, students with autism, but even more than that, students who are more visual learners who need to connect with their teach jersey in
order to be able to comprehend the information. I'm not surprised at the difference between the performance of students and reading versus math, because once again, math is a very hands on endeavor, something that you need to actually maybe have follow up questions on. So that was one of the things that contributed to this COVID slide and it's going to require that schools, particularly like the New York
Public School System, do some remedial training. This summer, the New York Public School System is going to be putting over a hundred and fifty thousand kids in summer school, and a lot of those students were put there because they need to catch up, and so the crips are now if that if schools reopened in the fall, that there will need to be even more review work to
bring those kids up to speed. And if they don't do the review work, the question is will there be some learning loss that is long term that we start to see in standardized tests and tests to get to the next grade. So over time we're going to see how big this social experiment of remote learning full time the impact was on children long term, and that summer school is probably going to be done remote learning as well. So it's kind of continuing that when a sense there.
I wanted to also talk about grading because this was one of the things that you keep reading into a little more and you're kind of like, oh my gosh, you're not gonna be able to hold these kids accountable, I guess for learning, and it's tough. I know that there's huge problems with access, but we're talking about them not learning the right materials and if they advanced in
the next grade, they're not going to be prepared. What a lot of school districts were even doing, will say, don't issue grades that would be harmful, don't issue F grades. I think some school districts even banned the F grades. There was a lot of things. They're called hold harmless, So don't give grades that would negatively affect students, but ones that are neutral or help advance them, those are permitted.
Tell us a little bit about grading. There was a wide range of grading processes that happened across school Talk to people at private schools who gave an option of past fail credit, no credit, things like that, because listen, if you're spending fifty dollars a year to go to an elite school in New York or something like that, poor grades are things that can haunt you when it's
time to apply for college. And I think teachers and administrators understood that students should not be penalized if they did not perform well in remote learning environment. And it's not always because they don't get the remote learning. There can be family dynamics that are going on in the home. We see domestic violence suits up in periods like this, and reports of police coming to the home, and poverty
and children not having access to consistent meals. These are all things that build the Blasio, the mayor of New York City, was very concerned about. And so the whole idea is, if you penalize kids for adverse childhood experiences that interfere with their ability to do well on remote learning, it's not fair to see their grades suffer because everybody needs to be on an equal plane in order to
really grade everybody fairly. I mean, there's so much that's wrapped into this, and I'm just kind of moving through some of the points. Taking attendance was such a big hurdle for a lot of teachers and for the students themselves. They had a few statistics already showing that some of the kids weren't even showing up as soon as they were kind of getting when that maybe they weren't giving
the fail grades out things like that. I think in Los Angeles, for the l A Unified School District, they estimated that on any given day in a week span of high school students didn't even log in to do the remote learning. That's pretty crazy. A lot of our educational values come from our parents, but they also come
from the financial and economic situation that we're in. There are many children who are babysitting siblings, there are many children who have to share a device with four other siblings, and there are many children who may have other responsibilities or things to worry about, and their parents may not be aggressive about telling them to log into school. At the ten year old has to use his or her own motivation to log into school. A lot of the times they may not do that unless they're reminded to
do so. So, once again, there were many, many students who did not log in for these classes, sometimes maybe not even understanding how critical it was for them to do that, because once again, they are children, and there's a lot of social and emotional learning that happened in a time of crisis, and this certainly can be characterized as a crisis. So there was an attendance crisis as a result. Let's talk about parents. You brought them up a little bit. They were put in an especially hard
place as well. Many parents aren't necessarily adept to teaching. Maybe life lessons, yes, but maybe not the book stuff. And they were kind of thrust into this position of having to be teacher and as you mentioned, having to reinforce everything, Hey make sure you log in, make sure you attend the class, all this stuff. So the parents are put in a really hard place with this. This whole process has made people appreciate teachers so much more.
I mean, there's a reason that teachers just go to college and even get paid more if they receive a master's degree, because it's not just about a parent's ability to understand and comprehend the material. A parent to step into a teacher's role effectively would need to understand the communication and interpersonal connection techniques that teachers use on a day to day basis to pull the best out of
their students. And in a class of thirty students, a lot of times there can be clusters of students who have different ways of learning, and it's the job of the teacher to read those students. You can have a relationship with your child and not really know how to connect to them in a classroom. And there are a lot of parents that were put under a tremendous amount of pressure because they had more than one child many times, and having to jump from child to child to help
each of them finish their work. And with the younger students, it's a much more challenging and it's actually much more critical because if you're dealing with an elementary student, that's a student who is learning fundamental skills related to math and reading, and if they missed these lessons at this stage, they could have severe problems in the future. And we were essentially relying on the parents to be teaching these skills.
It would be very, very hard, probably for anybody who doesn't have formal training as a teacher to figure out how to teach a third grader math and to answer questions in a way that that young person can comprehend it so it can connect on paper and in the mind. That's very difficult, and it's a special gift that teachers have,
which is the reason why teachers are teachers. So the school years ending, everybody's already looking ahead to, you know, as you mentioned earlier, summer school even and then what's beyond that going back to school in the fall. What's going to be the plan. I'm seeing a lot of things about a hybrid system which would basically be still some remote learning and then cycling kids in and out
of live school instruction as well. It's one of the hardest things that public policy experts and union representatives and politicians and education administrators have to do is to come together with the plan to get kids back to school safely. So that plan needs to include social distancing and imagine what it would be like to try to convince a kindergartener to keep their mask on, or to have classes that are normally thirty students be shrunk to fifteen students.
There's so many different considerations. Even in the way that the buildings are set up, there are problems with ventilation and all kinds of infrastructure issues that need to be addressed, and all of this they're trying to do before the fall. So it's very likely that there will be some kind of blended learning or how hybrid learning system that combine
remote learning with face to face instruction. In some cases, you're hearing that kids could be going to school on Monday, Wednesday, Fridays and then switch to remote learning and then allow the other group of kids to go on Tuesdays and Thursdays, and then they switched to remote learning. They are all kinds of different possible models and forms that this could take. But it's still being hashed out across cities across the country. And let's also remember that in some areas it's going
to be more challenging than others. The New York Public School system has one point one million students. In some rural areas, it may not be as daunting because they may be able to pull off the social distancing requirements just because of the fact that they don't have as many students. So all of this is still being decided, and we're going to see if schools starts as we know it in the fog. There's a high, high possibility that remote learning will be a permanent part of some
aspect of our future. Lee Hawkins, education reporter for The Wall Street Journal, thank you very much for joining us. Thank you very much, everybody. Stay safe. I'm Oscar Ramirez and this is reopening America. Don't forget that. For today's big news stories, you can check me out on the Daily Dive podcast every Monday to Friday. So follow us on our heart radio or wherever you get your podcast.