Pandemic Exposes the Limitations of Online Education
Schools are closed for the rest of the school year in most places, and despite herculean efforts of school teachers to transform school activities online, there are widespread problems. What are the challenges for the nation’s over 90,000 public schools and 50 million public school students?
Schools everywhere are trying to adapt but are handicapped by the limitations of online education and vastly unequal access to broadband internet.
Learning online, whatever the platform, isn’t the same going to school. Spontaneity and personal connection are harder to achieve, however skilled and imaginative the teacher. The Washington Post‘s Valerie Strauss quotes Jack Schneider, Assistant Professor of Leadership in Education at the University of Massachusetts Lowell and Director of Research for the Massachusetts Consortium for Innovative Education, commenting on overall problems children have with remote learning: “Face-to-face interactions, personal relationships and human cues matter tremendously in the education of young people…. While virtual schools may be cheaper to operate—a major attraction for those looking to wring a profit out of public education—they are hardly an adequate replacement for their brick-and-mortar counterparts… Across time… the public has valued a broad range of outcomes—from the nurturing of creativity to the fostering of interracial friendships—that go well beyond content standards. Mindsets, dispositions, social skills and the like are simply much harder to teach online.”
Even more daunting is children’s unequal access to the technology that makes online schooling possible. As online learning was launched in New York City two weeks ago, NY Times reporter Nikita Steward profiled a child discovering that she couldn’t use her iPad because the homeless shelter where she lives entirely lacks broadband access: “Shuttering the vast system, which includes 1,800 schools, was a serious challenge for the city, and the large- CONTINUE READING: Pandemic Exposes the Limitations of Online Education | janresseger