Hybrid learning was supposed to be an improvement.
When school buildings closed in the spring due to the pandemic, students, teachers, and families all struggled with remote classes. But come fall, the virus was still raging across much of America. So many districts — including the nation’s largest, New York City — struck a compromise.
They would bring kids into buildings, but only for part of the day or week. That way, they’d reduce the number of students in schools at any one time, limiting viral spread, while still giving students crucial in-person time with their teachers and peers.
That was the idea, anyway. In practice, however, hybrid models could turn out to be the worst of both worlds, as David Zweig predicted at Wired in July.
To begin with, hybrid schedules don’t really solve one of the pandemic’s biggest problems for parents: the lack of child care. While having kids in school a few days a week or a few hours a day might give parents a bit more flexibility to do their jobs, “the benefits of being able to work a little less part-time and a little less erratically are not going to be anything like what you’d be getting from full-time school,” Michael Madowitz, an economist at the Center for American Progress who studies the impact of child care, told Vox.
And while some parents may be able to stay home with their kids on the days they’re out of school, others will need outside child care. That means kids will spend part of the week in child CONTINUE READING: Hybrid school might be worse than remote or all in-person school - Vox