K THE NEW YORK TIMES, SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 8, 2020 MB 3SARAH BLESENER FOR THE NEW YORK TIMESEARLY IN THE YEAR,before the pandemic
subjected millions of children to a precari-
ous but necessary experiment, Wendy
Poveda, the principal of P.S 132, an ele-
mentary school in Washington Heights,
realized that some of her students were
absent a lot because they didn’t have clean
clothes. Living in shelters or overcrowded
apartments with little access to major
appliances, they felt ashamed. Ms. Poveda
quickly came up with a simple but novel
solution — she installed a laundry room
outside the cafeteria.
This was just another example of her
flexibility. Where other administrators
might founder, Ms. Poveda would meet
her students where their needs were
greatest. During classes disrupted by the
pandemic, she got them Chromebooks and
other supplies quickly, but she also paired
aides to check in with children and their
families every day; she sent whiteboards
home and arranged the day around a lot of
instruction and teacher contact so that the
experience of distance learning would not
feel like a joyless trip to a strange place,
without an itinerary.
“Asynchronous learning,” a common
experience of the Covid era in which chil-
dren are left to this or that unsupervised
assignment, too often choosing Mario Kart
over spelling workbooks, was de-empha-
sized at P.S. 132. Although 90 percent of
Ms. Poveda’s students are enrolled re-
motely full time, the school has consis-
tently achieved a 92 percent attendance
rate.
That figure turns out to be quite re-
markable. Toward the end of the last
school year, a survey of close to 1,600
families around the country conducted by
ParentsTogether, a national advocacy
group, found that parents with low in-
comes were 10 times as likely to report
that their children were doing little or no
remote learning compared with those
making upward of $100,000.
Of all the tragedies emerging from the
pandemic, a generation of children left to
teach themselves on sofas and bunk beds
may be the most insidious. How these
children — crucially the young ones devel-
oping literacy skills — will fare academ-
ically is the great uncertainty.
We know unequivocally that live school
is better than the alternative, and that the
least advantaged children are at the great-
est risk of falling further behind when
they cannot attend in person. And yet we
have allowed the scales to tip at all too
familiar angles.
In New York City, only a quarter of the
system’s 1.1 million public-school children
have returned to the classroom for any
instruction, while most private-school
students are receiving some form of live
classroom experience, many of them five
days a week. In San Francisco and other
cities marked by grievous inequity, a
similar dynamic has played out.
The value of the physical classroom,
especially for children learning to read
and write, cannot be overstated. “There
are things that are central — being able to
decode words and getting feedback — but
the thing that enhances the learning expe-
rience is having the letters around,”
Matthew Cruger, a neuropsychologist at
the Child Mind Institute in Manhattan,
told me. “And I know that that is not hap-
pening in my den.”
What is known as “multi-sensoring
instruction” turns out to be hugely impor-
tant: being able to look at words and let-
ters on chalkboards, on the walls; to have
constant, direct physical contact with
books, to stand up and make utterances
and watch other children do the same
thing. “This is obviously much more
muted on a computer,’’ Dr. Cruger said.
In May, researchers at Brown Univer-
sity looked at existing data on learning
loss related to traditional types of school
closure — absenteeism and summer
breaks, for example — to estimate the
impact of school closure under these ex-
traordinary circumstances. Their projec-
tions found that students would return to
school this fall with approximately two-
thirds of the reading gains relative to a
regular school year and about one-third to
one-half of the learning gains in math. The
top third of students, though, those with
houses full of books and hyperengaged
parents, were likely to return with reading
gains.
The assessment of student progress
under these strange conditions is another
extremely difficult prospect. Many stand-
ardized tests were waived in the spring. In
Dr. Cruger’s view, the damage for a typi-cally developing child whose education is
disrupted for, say, three months is unlikely
to be extreme.
“But a year, we just don’t know,” he said.
“For atypically developing kids, it is a
very big deal.”
In Europe these truths seem to have
been internalized in a way that has failed
to grip the political culture in this country.
Very recently, leaders in France and Ger-
many announced broad restrictions amid
rising rates of infection — bars and gyms
would be forced to close. But schools
would remain open despite lockdowns and
worsening outbreaks.
In New York, the logic has worked in
reverse. Even as the virus seems well
contained and research has shown trans-
mission in schools to be minimal, we re-
main free to eat thin-crust pizza under a
heat lamp while children are sequestered
at home — socially isolated and less able
to distinguish an isosceles triangle from
an equilateral than they ought to be.
This week saw a further step backwardas the city reneged on a promise it had
made earlier to parents. Officials an-
nounced that they would now give them
only one chance — set to expire on Nov. 15
— to opt into programs of hybrid learning
(a mixture of remote and live school) for
the rest of the year. Previously the city
had said it would give families that oppor-
tunity every few months so that they
could recalibrate their decisions according
to the shifting realities of the pandemic.
Over the summer, when the city offered
parents the chance to send their children
to school or keep them home in front of
the computer, they were provided what
was in many cases a false choice. Some
principals encouraged families to choose
remote learning when, at least, students
would get extended contact with actual
teachers online. In the case of older chil-
dren, if they selected a hybrid program,
they might be in front of an actual teacher
only a few hours a week. As one parent of
a teenager put it to me, “the schedule was
so lame no one would choose it.” This is in
large part why the number of distance
learners in the system is so high.
In one high school in Queens, where
most students come from low-income
immigrant families, an administrator told
me, children are disappearing — quietly
dropping out of school and going to work
instead.
What children ultimately need, and
what the deadening constraints of Zoom
learning cannot adequately transmit, is
exuberance; children need to feel champi-
oned. “They need people to see what they
are doing, to cheer them on, to rally them
to care and respond,” Lucy Calkins, a
professor at Columbia University’s Teach-
ers College and one of the country’s best-
known experts on literacy told me.
“The real worry is that at an early age
they develop a concept that they are be-
hind,” she said.
“None of us likes to do something we
think we’re failing at. It doesn’t matter if
you learn to ride a bike at age 5 or 6. It
matters that you learn to ride with confi-
dence,” she continued.
“But I think it’s a mistake to think of
these kids as the lost generation, as if no
learning is happening. There are profound
lessons to be learned in a time of crisis.
Hope is really important.”The Pandemic Widens the Learning Gap
P.S. 102 in Elmhurst, Queens. Only a quarter of New York’s 1.1 million public-school children have
returned to the classroom, while most private-school students receive some live instruction.Low-income children
run the greatest risk of
falling further behind.[email protected]; follow
Ginia Bellafante on Twitter: @GiniaNYT
GINIA BELLAFANTE BIG CITYFirst, 40 Deaths. Now, 40 Layoffs.
Readers responded at nytimes.com to John
Leland’s article last Sunday about a Staten
Island nursing home that was hit hard by
Covid-19 in the spring. Comments have
been edited.
I WORK AS ANoccupational therapist in a
154-bed nursing home in Washington State,
and this article made me cry. This is the
same experience I have had, though we
had 18 deaths, not 40. I am now in danger
of losing my job and have been told the
building might be closing, since we are
losing money being locked down with no
new admits. I have worked every part of
the building to help during the outbreak. I
worked in the kitchen and helped the main-
tenance department, as well as being fur-
loughed for a month. But in the end, I am
expendable, as we all know health care is
about profit. I’m very scared for my future.
MS6709, SEATTLE
IT TOOK THE AIDS EPIDEMICto finally bring
L.G.B.T.Q. rights to the forefront. If any
good comes from this pandemic, I hope it’s
our cultural reckoning with how we view
aging and elders. We finally need to face up
to the fact that as a society, we want older
people to be out of sight and out of mind. To
die quickly, quietly and cheaply at home,
leaving wealth behind — that has somehow
become the expectation. Becoming frail,
needing assistance from family or care-
givers, or needing to live in a nursing home
are viewed as “failures,” not just the normal
course of aging.
CHRIS38, KANSAS
IN MARCH AND APRIL,we were shocked
and horrified at the new concept of essen-
tial workers — underpaid, with no work-
place protections — who were keeping our
whole world going, while we stayed home,
trying our best to keep the numbers down.
Since then, we have gotten used to the idea
that some people are essential workers and
have to bear greater risks (hopefully with
better workplace protections in place, but
that’s not guaranteed or obligatory). We
have gotten used to it, but the essential
workers are still underpaid, still at greater
risk, and still keeping our whole world
going. For them, nothing has changed since
April. If we have a new government, we
can push for a new emergency support bill
targeted especially at helping and protect-
ing essential workers. The present govern-
ment has made it clear that they can all die
or starve to death for all it cares. This has
to be top priority.EVE S., MANHATTANI JUST ACHE READING THIS.I worked in and
with nursing homes for 40 years. There is
nobody that cares more than the low-paid
staff at a nursing home. There is a connec-
tion with residents of the home that is hard
to comprehend if you haven’t been a part of
it. These people are pure gold.
PAMELA GUYER, ST. LOUISAS WE FEEL “PANDEMIC FATIGUE,”we need
to learn through reporting like this — the
crisis is serious and intense and nowhere
over. Shame on us for ever complainingabout wearing a mask or not being able to
live life “as normal.” The folks profiled in
this story are our true heroes. I am in awe
of their courage.
JUANITA KINGSLEY, DEDHAM, MASS.COVID EXPOSED HOW WE CAREfor the
elderly in nursing homes. Capitalism may
work for tangible goods, but it kills when it
comes to health care when human life is
involved. As people are living longer, this
nursing home/elderly care issue will keep
coming back to us, and each time it does, it
is at a cost.
WI, EARTHI’M CRYING AS I READ THISbecause my
87-year-old mother died in a nursing home
in September, not due to the virus itself but
because of the exceptional conditions im-
posed on her facility because of the pan-
demic. While the administration and staff
did an amazing job of preventing serious
cases or deaths, the isolation and depriva-
tion my mother had to endure was proba-
bly a major factor in her demise. The facili-
ty took expert care of her many health
needs, and in better times we could take
her shopping and to lunch, and she would
be happy to return to where she was safe.
But by March a great situation turned into
an excruciating dilemma: if she ever left,
she couldn’t come back; no one could visit
except for a brief outdoor meeting from six
feet away, everyone masked, and no physi-
cal contact; and many daily social pro-
grams were halted. The people at the nurs-
ing home, who were already like her family,
were now all she had. Since March, I called
her every night and tried to bolster her
spirits, but the uncertainty of a future in a
pandemic was too much for her. The dedi-
cation and sacrifice of health care profes-
sionals is something that humbles me.
Thank you all for what you do, every day,
no matter what the risks.
JOHN W, BOSTONREADER COMMENTS
CHRISTOPHER OCCHICONE
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