Parents with low incomes were 10 times more likely to report that their children were doing little or no remote learning than those making upward of $100,000

See Are We Losing a Generation of Children to Remote Learning? Leaving children to teach themselves from a sofa might be the greatest untold tragedy of the pandemic by Ginia Bellafante 2020 The New York Times. Excerpt:

"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 incomes were 10 times more likely to report that their children were doing little or no remote learning than 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 developing literacy skills — will fare academically is the great uncertainty.

We know unequivocally that live school is better than the alternative, and that the least advantaged children are at the greatest 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 experience 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 happening in my den.”

What is known as “multi-sensoring instruction’’ turns out to be hugely important: being able to look at words and letters 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 University 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 extraordinary circumstances. Their projections 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 a third to a 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 standardized tests were waived in the spring. In Dr. Cruger’s view, the damage for a typically 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 Germany 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 transmission in schools to be minimal, we remain 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 backward as the city reneged on a promise it had made earlier to parents. Officials announced 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 opportunity 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 children, 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."