Kids are ‘failing’ online learning
How bad is the problem?
Los Angeles is hardly alone. Elsewhere in California, one San Diego superintendenttold the Los Angeles Timesthat failing grades have more than doubled during the pandemic, to more than 14% of all marks. An Oregon high schooltold The Associated Pressthat failing grades had jumped from 8% of all grades to 38% in October. One Bay Area districttold The Mercury Newsthat they’d seen the number of students with more than one failing grade expand by more than 10 percentage points, to 29%, nearly a third of all students. The stateis now facing a lawsuitclaiming it has let down Black and Latino families during the pandemic, failing to provideequal education opportunityunder the state constitution.
Around the United States, as grades trickle in, it’s become clear how devastating the switch to remote learning has been for many students. In Austin, early datareleased to local reportersnoted that failing grades had increased by 70%. (A spokesperson for the Austin Independent School District, Cristina Nguyen, said more recently updated data showed the district overall didn’t see a statistically significant increase in failing grades, although secondary schools did see an increase.)
Onenotably detailed reportfrom Fairfax, Va., on first-quarter grades found that F’s had increased from 6% the prior year to 11% this year.
The report concluded that there was a “widening gap” among students: Those “who performed well previously primarily performed slightly better than expected during Q1 of this year,” according to the report, while “students who were previously not performing well, performed considerably less well.”
What’s driving the increase?
It’s clear that many students are still struggling with the switch to remote learning, with some facing more barriers than others.
The problems were hardly a surprise. From the earliest days of the pandemic, when schools first closed, educators noted declining attendance rates, often with the poorest schools seeing the largest drops. In August, for example, The Markupanalyzed remote attendancefor 800 Florida schools and found that low-income schools saw the heaviest drops in participation. Other research hasproduced similar findingsfrom throughout the U.S.
While students aresuffering emotionally, they’re alsosuffering from technical hurdleswith remote technology, and those problems are disproportionately impacting students who already struggled the most with access to quality education.
Still, researchers and administrators don’t always have detailed enough data to track the specific things that are hurting grades the most. How many students fail to turn in an assignment, or are graded poorly, and how many never log in to the software at all?
“Clearly there’s some learning loss,” said Phyllis Jordan, editorial director at FutureEd, an education think tank at Georgetown University. “But we’re just not sure why they’re getting F’s.”
Attempts to fix the problem
Some districts, including New York City, are moving to bring some students back to class. But with infection ratescontinuing to shatter records,other districts are pushing backtheir reopening dates, some indefinitely.
“The simple fact is some students are struggling online,” Superintendent Beutner said in his address last month.
“The best solution for this is to get students back to schools as soon as possible in the safest way possible,” Beutner said. “We made a commitment to all in the school community to maintain the highest standard of safety at schools and we are taking all of the necessary steps to put this in place.” The districtannounced planslast month to bring some students back to school, but the most recent wave of COVID-19 cases haslikely stymiedany large-scale return.
In the meantime, some districts are changing what they can to reach students.
Fairfax County Public Schools spokesperson Lucy Caldwell said in an email to The Markup that the district has taken “some initial actions to support students during this very unusual school year” and will look for more ways to do so.
“Some examples include: we extended the first quarter, we enabled schools to offer ‘catch up days’ to their staff and students, we have issued ‘check in’ surveys to monitor how our students are doing, and we changed the expectation for workload outside of class,” Caldwell said.
And some schools, Jordan of FutureEd said, are simply forgoing grades in the meantime, turning to qualitative measures of success—giving broad feedback on a paper, say, without scoring it.
Arecent reportfrom Diliberti, the RAND Corporation researcher, and her colleagues found that as of fall of this year, only about 59% of teachers were giving students letter grades, while others had moved to a pass/fail system, providing feedback without a grade, or just checking assignments for completion. Even that was a dramatic increase from the spring, when only about 35% were assigning grades.
Some educators see the change in tactics as the most thoughtful way to help students through an unprecedented situation. As Jordan said one teacher put it at a recent FutureEd panel: “Grace over grades.”
This article wasoriginally published on The MarkupbyColin Lecherand was republished under theCreative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivativeslicense.
