and 35
right:
Angie
Smith
for
The
New
York
Times
.
The ParticipantsSusana Cordova is the superintendent of the
Denver public schools. She has worked in the
district for more than 30 years, beginning her
career as a teacher at a bilingual middle school.
The Denver public schools serve about 94,000
students, 63 percent of whom are eligible for
free and reduced-price lunch and 75 percent of
whom are Latino, Black, Asian or Indigenous.Nikole Hannah-Jones is a staff writer at The
New York Times Magazine. She won the 2020
Pulitzer Prize for commentary for her essay
in The 1619 Project, which she helped con-
ceive. Her daughter goes to public school
in Brooklyn.John B. King Jr. is the president and chief
executive of the Education Trust, a national
nonprofi t organization that seeks to identify
and close opportunity and achievement gaps,
from preschool through college. In 2016 and
2017, King served as the U.S. Secretary of Edu-
cation in the Obama administration.Pedro Noguera, a former public-school teacher
and a sociologist, is the dean of the Rossier
School of Education at the University of South-
ern California. His most recent book, which he
wrote with Esa Syeed, is ‘‘City Schools and the
American Dream 2: The Enduring Promise of
Public Education.’’Shana V. White teaches computer science to
about 200 students at a public middle school
in Atlanta. In 2019, she was named a Diversity
and Inclusion fellow at Georgia Tech and an
Equity fellow for the Computer Science Teach-
ers Association.Th is discussion has been edited and condensed
for clarity, with material added from follow-up
interviews.What Do We Know About the
Loss of In-Person School?Emily Bazelon: Pedro, could you start us off
by explaining what we know about the eff ect
of missing or disrupting school?
Pedro Noguera: The research we have to
draw upon is about school attendance and
its correlation with academic performance.
On average, when children miss school, that
has a negative impact on their performance.
It’s most noticeable in the early grades, with
respect to reading, and in the older grades in
math. And for kids with learning disabilities,
it’s noticeable across the board, because those
kids require more intensive direct support.
Bazelon: The research you’re citing is about
chronic absenteeism, defined as missing
10 percent or more of the school year. Last
spring, many students either never logged on
or participated sporadically in remote learning
after schools closed because of the coronavi-
rus. ‘‘Two-thirds to three-quarters of teachers
said their students were less engaged during
remote instruction than before the pandemic,Shoshone-Bannock Junior-Senior High School, Fort Hall Reservation, Idaho
Kimberly Osborne, who teaches the Shoshone language, works behind a see-through screen.