In yet another example of asteroid strikes earth, women and minorites affected most, New York City public schools will reopen, which, the New York Times reports, exacerbates the “racial divide.”
But as some school buildings reopen this week, the mayor has found himself presiding over a starkly unequal school system in which many white families have flocked back to classrooms while most families of color have chosen to learn from home indefinitely.
That gulf is illustrated in a startling statistic: There are nearly 12,000 more white children returning to public school buildings than Black students — even though there are many more Black students than white children in the system overall.
There is a well-worn list of problems arising from this, from the fact that remote learning is inadequate in itself, even though some teachers claim otherwise, to the problem of black students lacking computers or wifi access. But then, if schools are open, why then are these students who are otherwise denied an education not attending?
In New York and across the country, politicians and education officials have found that many nonwhite families are not ready to send their children back to classrooms — despite their struggles with remote learning — in part because of the disproportionately harsh impact the virus has had on their communities.
There’s no cite for this claim, and “in part” is doing an awful lot of work here. But there mere fact that black students are not choosing to go to school is sufficient to give rise to calls for extraordinary means to accommodate their choice not to return.
But the fact that so many students of color have chosen remote over in-person learning is raising alarms that existing disparities in the nation’s largest school system will widen, since remote learning has been far less effective, parents, educators and officials said in dozens of interviews. More than ever, they say, the city must quickly bolster online instruction — or risk having its neediest children fall irrevocably behind.
The risk that the “neediest children” will “fall irrevocably behind is certainly true, but what is the answer?
“It’s the perfect storm of marginalization,” said Jamila Newman of TNTP, a nonprofit that provides consulting services for districts on staffing and instruction. “That’s why there is the need to demand stronger instruction remotely.”
It’s not that black students can’t go to school. They can. They choose not to. The solution isn’t computers or wifi, which can be accommodated, but that remote learning, in itself, is inadequate. So the solution is to “demand stronger instruction remotely”? What does that mean?
Educators also said they were scrambling to make lessons more engaging for students without much helpful guidance from the city. So while individual teachers and schools have honed creative strategies to improve online instruction, there is no clear citywide plan to do the same, leaving a patchwork system of learning across the city’s 1,800 schools.
Is there some magic about which most NYC teachers are unaware that will make remote learning “engaging” and change this failed approach into a success? But more to the point, is the problem that black students are marginalized or that they are being provided with the opportunity to get an education and are choosing not to avail themselves of it?
How far must schools go to “fix” the problem of students who need an education but don’t take advantage of what’s available? And what does it mean a few years from now, when their absence in jobs and higher education becomes the next wave of disparate impact?
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