Remote learning during the pandemic has hit vulnerable students the hardest
Schools had wildly different attendance rates for online learning
In contrast to many districts around the country, most of which stopped taking attendance after the switch to distance learning, Florida tracked log-in and digital participation rates during the pandemic. The exact units of measurement varied, but generally, districts tallied the percentage of students who interacted with e-learning software during the school week.
The Markup asked the 10 largest counties in the state for the data and obtained usably detailed participation and attendance statistics from more than 800 schools in three districts—Broward, Miami-Dade, and Hillsborough — through public records requests. Broward provided the most detailed data and was the only district to provide daily attendance and enrollment counts for each school.
We compared the average remote attendance for each school in Broward County to attendance rates during the previous school year. We also looked at each school’s demographic information and the letter grades Florida gives to schools in evaluating academic achievement.
Often, schools with a high number of low-income students also had a high number of minority students — a2017 Florida State University studydescribed double segregation, or segregation by both race and poverty, as “a strikingly notable trend in Florida” and noted that Black and Latino students “are far more likely to be segregated in schools with low achieving students.”
The Markup’s analysis found that, overwhelmingly, those already struggling schools fared the worst, seeing the largest drops in attendance after the switch to online learning.
Schools that were already on improvement plans because of low academic achievement had the biggest drops.
Andalternative schools—which in Florida are places where students with behavioral or academic problemsmight be sent—consistently showed the lowest participation rates.
One alternative school, Dave Thomas Education Center, lost 42 students over the course of two weeks, according to enrollment numbers—the equivalent of 7.6% of the original student body.
In an interview, Daniel Gohl, Broward County’s chief academic officer, did not dispute The Markup’s analysis but said the county’s own data did not find a significant correlation between a school’s historical academic achievement and online participation. The county did not share or detail its analysis.
Gohl did say that alternative schools, where students may have a unique disability or behavioral issues, presented new challenges during the switch to remote learning and that there was a notable link between those schools and lower attendance.
“We have a responsibility,” he said of alternative schools. “All school districts have a responsibility to having those needs addressed.”
Schools in other parts of the state also showed stark disparities
The Markup also looked at schools in other Florida counties and found wide gaps in attendance
Every single one of the 2,414 students atSickles High Schoolin Tampa participated in schooling during the week of April 10, according to the district’s count. But just six miles away, at Gaither High School, which has a lower student achievementgradeand where the rate of economically disadvantaged students is about 20 points higher, the situation was very different. That week at Gaither, 922 students never interacted with the distance learning system — 45% of the entire student body.
“We leveraged teachers, administrators, school counselors, social workers, and school psychologists to reach out to students who had not engaged in eLearning,” Tanya Arja, a spokesperson for Hillsborough County Public Schools, said in an emailed statement to The Markup. The district also lent 40,000 laptops to families and provided about 1,500 Wi-Fi hotspots to give students internet access.
Arja said 98% of students in the district connected with teachers through the remote process. But data shows the students who didn’t participate weren’t evenly distributed. At three charter schools in the district, less than 50% of students participated in some weeks, even as other schools hit nearly 100% attendance.
In Miami-Dade County, some days only half the kids at some schools were counted for remote learning in April —while other schools saw 100% attendance.
On average, in Miami-Dade County, according to data analyzed by The Markup, high-poverty schools showed a nearly 10% drop in attendance, while the wealthiest schools experienced a less than one percent drop.
A spokesperson for the Miami-Dade County school district, Natalia Zea, said in an emailed statement that the district tracked statistics on subgroups of students, including English-language learners and the “economically disadvantaged.”
Zea said “student attendance by subgroup within the district as a whole was similar to that of students overall” but that “additional analysis on the performance of students within subgroups has not been completed.”
The pandemic didn’t start educational disparities—but it has made them worse
Marie Generazio of Coral Springs, Fla., has two children in Broward County public schools. One will be heading into fourth grade in the fall, and the other into first. Generazio, meanwhile, has been taking online college classes to become a paralegal. She’s been taking care of her kids and occasionally letting them use her computer if their school-issued laptops aren’t working.
But keeping up with the kids’ assignments, especially if they have strict time requirements, isn’t always easy. The past year, she said, has been trying, as the family does “lots of shuffling” to make it all work. They didn’t always meet time requirements for assignments and log-in deadlines for attendance.
“You have two kids here that you have to play teacher for,” she said.
Phyllis Jordan, editorial director at FutureEd, an education think tank at George Washington University, said lots of families are having a similar experience.
Students may not have the equipment at home to log in to class, she said, or their parents might be essential workers, unable to watch them during the day to ensure they sign in for school.
It’s often “the same populations” of students who had trouble before the pandemic hit, she said, frequently those from lower-income families. The pandemic didn’t create educational gaps, she said, but “it definitely has exacerbated the problem.”
And those gaps are becoming even harder to measure. Broward County’s detailed records are an exception, not the norm, nationwide.
“If we’re not tracking their attendance,” superintendent of the Broward County school district Robert Runcie recentlytold Reuters, “then in some ways, we are neglecting our responsibility to make sure those kids are safe.” He told the publication that the district had sent Wi-Fi hot spots to some students after noticing they hadn’t logged in to the system.
The new school year and continuing repercussions
In June, state officials presented a plan for schools to re-open with in-person instruction in the fall, citing both ongoing achievement gaps in education and damage to the wider economy,according to the Tampa Bay Times. They’ve since given leeway for schools to begin the year with remote instruction.
“Getting back to the school year is going to be really, really important to the well-being of our kids,” the governor said, according to the outlet. Broward County is set to resume online classes this month.
In response to the state’s push for schools to resume in-person learning, theFlorida Education Association, a statewide federation of teachers’ and education workers’ unions, hasfiled a lawsuitasking a judge to block the return of in-person schooling until additional protective measures are put in place. The NAACP also joined the suit, saying as difficult as online learning is, schools should open only once it’s safe.
However Florida schools reopen this month, in an attempt to contain the immediate economic fallout of low attendance due to remote learning or pandemic-related factors, the state has also temporarily untethered funding from attendance for the year and is insteadrelying on projectionsfrom past attendance. Otherstateshave taken similar measures.
With distance learning staying around for the foreseeable future, districts need to make sure students aren’t left behind, said Hedy Chang, director of Attendance Works, a group dedicated to improving attendance.
“You have redefined, ‘What is school?’ ” Chang said. “And what having equitable access to learning resources looks like.”
This article wasoriginally published on The Markupand was republished under theCreative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivativeslicense.
