A recent GSV Ventures virtual panel discussion on the future of education brought together leaders of some of the country’s biggest online education providers to discuss how to ensure equity in the new world of home learning.
One key concern raised by the panel was how the extended closing of schools would add to the already existing inequities resulting from summer slide.
“It’s likely that we’re not going to be going back to physical school over the next two months,” said Sal Khan, Founder & CEO of Khan Academy, who pointed out that the lost time would compound the longstanding issues with the summer slide.
“It could easily lead to about a year of lost learning when the kids show up (back in school),” he predicted. “The variance between the students who might have engaged in online learning over the next few months and over the summer versus the ones that have not, the variance between the districts that had a plan to engage in some form of virtualization versus not and then obviously it can get even worse if we go into October or November. It seems pretty clear that the virus will likely come back in some seasonal way and so you have to virtualize again and so that can exacerbate things especially if folks don’t even have a plan by that point.
“The summer has always been this gap in learning,” he added. “It has always been this time that inequity between our kids who could go to an enrichment summer program or keep learning versus a lot of other kids. Summer isn’t just a time of three months of not learning it’s also a time of three months of forgetting so the damage is more than just that gap.”
Kahn said he was seeing some hopeful signs in the way teachers were frantically innovating to create a new, meaningful learning process for kids stuck at home. He said that if we can address the access to equipment issues, then the lessons learned right now can help to counteract the summer slide issue in future years.
“I hope that districts realize that they need some form of virtualization plan and that virtualization plan can’t be completely different than what they do during the school year,” he said. “It has to be fundamentally the same tools, the same processes. I think districts we’re talking to are saying, ‘hey yeah these tools that are strategic supplements during the regular school year we can now lean pretty heavily on them when school is out of session.'”
Khan also said that he hoped the current pandemic-forced distance learning might lead to a larger discussion about school calendars and schedules
Arne Duncan, Former Secretary of Education, agreed saying that the current system of summer breaks and school hours are based on an outdated agrarian economy.
“The fact that our academic calendars based upon the agrarian calendar doesn’t make any sense, hasn’t made sense for a century,” he said. “We should be thinking about having no more summer breaks. Fundamentally rethinking everything there’s no better time than now to do that.”
Kahn pointed out that we should also rethink the length of the school day and potential afterschool learning time.
“The fact that school ends at three in the afternoon is designed around one parent working and one parent at home,” he said. “I think after school and summer are the biggest sources of inequity.
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