What
Happens to Students Who Were Already Behind?
Washington Monthly: 10.29.2020 by Jem Bartholomew
Candace
Spencer, a literacy tutor in Washington, D.C., logs onto her computer each
weekday morning, opens recording software, smiles at the camera, and begins
sounding out phonetics. The response is silence; in fact, there’s no one on the
other end at all.
“Mentally,
you picture your student in your head,” said Spencer, who works for The Literacy Lab, a non-profit focused
on tutoring low-income students. “Maybe even some of the things that they would
say in return.”
Before
the pandemic, Spencer would arrive at one of the organization’s partner schools
every morning to tutor kids one-on-one all day. Now, she pre-records literacy
lessons for more than fifteen K-3 students. Spencer conducts live virtual
sessions too, but the recorded videos are crucial; many of her students have
parents who work two jobs, and the video lessons can be viewed whenever fits
the family schedule.
“The
students that are going to fare best throughout all of this are coming from
households that have access to a lot of learning resources,” said Sarah Rose
Dorton, Literacy Lab’s D.C. regional director. Most parents can’t afford the
private tutors or live-in nannies that affluent families are splashing out for.
But
that means that many of the students most in need are being left behind. NWEA,
an education non-profit focused on learning assessments, estimated
that reading gains would drop by 30 percent after about a semester of remote-only
learning. According to an AP analysis of U.S. Census data, about one in
five schoolchildren in D.C. live in households without internet access. Almost
30 percent lack a computer in their household, making it the worst in the
nation for student technology access. The students who need literacy tutoring
the most often lack the resources to learn remotely.
The
long-term consequences could be stark. Poor literacy keeps people from
graduating from high school and prevents them from studying at college. As many
as 43 million adults in the U.S. have low literacy skills, according to a 2019 report from the National Center for Education Statistics. This cohort suffers a
raft of ostracizing repercussions—from low-confidence to difficulty finding
work. Adults with low literacy are over-represented within incarcerated
populations and among those receiving public assistance.
The pandemic has threatened the progress of adult literacy learners, too. “Not everybody even has internet, or has a computer, or knows how to use those things,” said Amy Goodman, executive director of Washtenaw Literacy, a non-profit in Michigan offering tutoring for adults. Around 90 percent of learners who come to the organization live below the poverty line, Goodman explained. Some are native English speakers who never learned to read; others are learning English as a second language.
Goodman’s
lessons look different now. Tutors work with whatever technology the learner
has access to. “In some cases that’s a cell phone, in some cases that’s WhatsApp, in some
cases that’s—God bless it—U.S. mail,” she said. Goodman’s organization
developed technology training sessions to bridge the digital skills divide.
“Anything from ‘What is a mouse?’ to ‘How do I use my cell phone for Zoom?’”
Like many literacy tutoring non-profits across the country, Reading Partners D.C. fast-tracked new digital resources to aid virtual tutoring. The organization offers free instruction for students in under-resourced schools, 79 percent of whom are low-income, and 90 percent of whom are students of color. The hope is that remote learning innovations, with the right investment, could enable tutors to coach more kids with fewer resources—“to expand our reach and work quickly to close the literacy divide,” said Shukurat Adamoh-Faniyan, executive director of Reading Partners D.C. But that dream is a long way off. READ MORE ➤➤
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