Right: Erika Larsen for The New York Times 41
no one. Kids are left to do this on their own. On
top of that, you have districts that don’t have
good relationships with the parents.
Bazelon: Last week, I interviewed Keri
Rodrigues, the head of the National Parents
Union. Speaking for parents, she said: ‘‘Now
we are facilitators of education, especially for
K-6. Education doesn’t really happen remotely
without parents doing it. There are a lot of
responsibilities on us.’’
Hannah-Jones: At the end of the school year,
I got a list from my daughter’s teacher about
every assignment she had missed. I thought
she was up in her room on her computer doing
her assignments. She clearly was not, even
though she was logged in.
Noguera: I think many of our teachers have
not been prepared on how to entice kids into
learning remotely, how to get kids engaged
so they want to show up. That’s a whole other
level of preparation that a lot of districts have
not, I think, focused on. There are resources
out there. Yet in a lot of districts, I’ve spoken to
teachers who aren’t getting them. We’ve been
much more focused on the logistics than on
the substance.What Will Remote Learning
Be Like This Year?Hannah-Jones: Now students are going into
the next grade with brand-new teachers that
many of them have never met before and
vastly disparate starting points. That has
existed in the past, but this year it seems
far worse.
Bazelon: Shana, what does the beginning of
the year look like in your district?
White: Some of our elementary schools are
looping — having teachers stay with the group
of kids they had last year into the new year.
Bazelon: I’ve been thinking about how going
to school every day levels the playing field
among students. They come from different
kinds of homes, yes, but once they arrive,
they share the classroom, and the teacher can
control the environment. Over the summer,
my 17-year-old worked at a program that was
half in-person and half remote. The remote
part was really hard. Kids were frequently
distracted by what was going on at home, like
if someone was watching TV nearby.Cordova: Last spring, I did a pop-in visit to a
special-ed class. It was a small class of six or
seven students in fi fth grade. They were doing
a math lesson. The girls all had their bedrooms
set up, and you could see them sitting at their
computers. One of the boys was literally under
the kitchen table, and you could hear his lit-
tle brother crying in the background, and the
teacher was saying to him: ‘‘How many tabs
do you have open? Close those other tabs, let’s
make sure you’re in the right place.’’
We have tried to emphasize the power of
relationship-building for the start of this school
year. At the end of August, the only work the
teachers did for a week was outreach to par-
ents, so that every family could get a contact.
We didn’t complete it, because of all the missed
connections or disconnected phone numbers,
so we’re continuing. We’re also monitoring
attendance on a daily basis, because when we
surveyed students, teachers and parents last
spring, overwhelmingly the people who had
the best experience with virtual learning had
regular live contact with their teachers. Teach-
ers have told me they had some kids who came
to their online offi ce hours in the spring whoCrystal Lakes Elementary School, Boynton Beach, Fla.
Jailen Cumberlander, a fifth grader, does his physical education class in his
kitchen while his sister, Tyra, participates remotely with her third-grade class.