Children and Poverty in the Era of Covid-19: How Remote Learning Exacerbates Inequality in New York
On June 10th, 2020, ATD Fourth World, Equity for Children and The Center for New York City Affairs at The New School jointly sponsored a webinar entitled Children and Poverty in the Era of Covid-19: How Remote Learning Exacerbates Inequality in New York.
During the webinar, mothers and grandmothers with experience of poverty directly impacted by the ongoing health crisis discussed challenges with their children’s online learning - most of them having learning disabilities - with New York City educators and administrators. Such stakeholders included Alexandra Teitel, the Community School Director at The Gregory “Jocko” Jackson School; Tom Liam Lynch, Director of Education Policy at The Center for NYC Affairs and Editor-in-Chief of InsideSchools; Adrienne Austin, Acting Deputy Chancellor of Community Empowerment, Partnerships, and Communications at the NYC Department of Education, and Alberto Minujin, the Executive Director at Equity for Children, who facilitated the webinar. Those from the ATD Fourth World Movement included Maryann Broxton, Tina Lindsey, Rosetta Savanna, Kimberly Tyre, Virginie Charvon, and Cristina Diez.
The ATD Fourth World’s group of activists began the conversation by sharing a collective contribution written by a group of mothers and grandmothers. Facilitator Alberto Minujin then opened the conversation up to the participants.
Alexandra Teitel, Community School Director of an elementary school in Brownsville, Brooklyn, stated that many New Yorkers are just now realizing the difficulty of working in complicated circumstances, which her school has recognized for years. “Everyone right now, due to Covid-19, is experiencing this collective trauma,” Teitel said. “But the truth is that for so long, poverty and racism have been pandemics in our community, and those injustices that are coming from those pandemics are causing trauma for our students and families.”
Not only was the pandemic a shift in normalcy but the sudden switch to learning from home also exacerbated difficulties for families, Teitel said.
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Tom Liam Lynch echoed Teitel’s sentiments, stating that one of the things he noticed when the switch to remote learning occurred was the panic experienced by parents and teachers. “The unprecedented reality of the pandemic, along with the quick decision making needed to move 1.1 million public school students and 75,000 teachers from face to face instruction to online learning in a week, forced the administration into “emergency, or triage, mode,” he said.
This new reality allowed Adrienne Austin to reflect and attempt to find new ways to center equity and justice in her work at the Department of Education. Austin spoke about her own difficulties as a full-time working mother, calling it “an almost impossible juggling act” to manage work and a household along with the added challenge of remote learning for her seven- and ten-year-old children.
Many agreed that the switch from classroom education to remote learning exacerbated stress and pre-existing difficulties for parents, who had to assume the role of a teacher at home. “Parents are worried that their inability to properly teach could count against their child and initiate failing grades, which would result in children being left behind or penalized because of external difficulties that are out of parents’ control,” Maryann Broxton said.
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Kimberly Tyre, a parent of 5 children, several with special needs, emphasized that it is crucial to realize that every student has a different learning style. At home, children with special needs and learning differences lack the personalized resources available at a school, and parents may not be able to provide the same customized attention. Similarly, Tina Lindsey highlighted the fact that physical, speech and occupational therapy is very difficult to achieve through a screen.
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Tyre added that the plan for remote learning is very decentralized in New York City schools, as districts may hold different standards and provide mismatched lesson plans. This not only reinforces existing inequalities but can also create more confusion for parents. Thus, parents agree that it would be incredibly beneficial for the Department of Education to establish Digital Learning Advisors to assist parents with the hardships of online learning; transparency by the DOE as well as the inclusion of caretakers in discussions would help as well.
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The panelists also discussed how remote learning affects children’s mental health, as a majority of their time is spent staring at a computer screen. Furthermore, children, now forced to stay at home, miss their classmates and teachers they would normally be seeing every day, and they cannot establish the same interactions and friendships. “It is easier for children to learn around other children,” Rosetta Savanna argued, “and virtual classes are not helping students learn proficiently.”
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These issues are problems that many parents do not have the means to combat. “Parents are not educators – parents are parents,” Tyre said. “It was thrown upon us to be educators, and some people have no clue as to what’s going on, some are more educated than others, and it’s really difficult, and you didn’t supply any support; you just threw us in the water, and said swim, and we’re drowning.”
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All in all, the Covid-19 pandemic has highlighted inequalities faced by New York City families every day. The added difficulties of remote learning have seemed to enhance these problems for students and their families. However, opportunities like this webinar allow for meaningful conversations to occur between parents and educators to share solutions so that remote learning benefits all students and avoids leaving the ones who struggle the most even further behind. The discussion ended with facilitator Alberto Minujin stating that “these are very stressful times for all of us – the mothers, the parents, the teachers. But even though we are faced with uncertainty, I can listen during these conversations, and I see that there are possible alternatives. I hope that we are doing our best, but we need more than our best – we need to look for solutions and have more of these conversations.”