What worries me is that all the rectification steps like tutors and special consideration only help children who are visibly falling behind and objectively behind the 8 ball. What happens to a child who previously was, say, in the 99th percentile of her class but due to the lockdown, remote learning and poor familial circumstances has now fallen to 90th percentile? Her deficit will never even be detected, let alone compensated, and she may have lost a lot of academic momentum for any future endeavour.
That's the problem we have here in Australia. We try to make sure no one falls behind, lagging terribly, but we forget that even people who are not objectively "behind" may still have fallen behind in relative terms - relative either to the rest of the cohort or to their former selves - and we forget that that is a terrible price to pay, too.
All students, bright and dumb, will have been hurt by the school closures. You can't learn remotely as efficiently as you can in a classroom with other students of the same level. You can't expand your mind if you don't have access to a library (unless you have a kindle and the money to buy books). The effects on our children will never be quantified but they are grave.
Yeah, so...here are my random thoughts on that.
Who really cares? I mean, someone in the 99th percentile dropping to the 90th...is still most likely going to be JUST FINE at the end of all this. They are NOT the students we REALLY have to worry about.
I don't mean to be mean - because of course I care. This pandemic is a literal pandemic, and most students and families are going to be affected negatively by this.
My own new high school student is a straight A, 99th percentile student. Starting HS remote has been almost a literal shit show for us. He went from straight-As to A, A+, A, C- on his first set of grades. WTAF?
It turns out, he relies HEAVILY on being able to ask questions during class when he has questions. This is MUCH harder to do remote. He's not used to the idea of "office hours" once a week yet, because he's new to HS. He doesn't email the teachers because one of them complains about getting emails (that's the C-). He only gets 60 minutes a day of class time per class, instead of what would be 80 minutes. That means an extra 20 minutes of "independent learning" on top of homework. He's also heavily influenced by competition, and being in person with other classmates. He's way more social than his parents.
So now he's managed to pull it to 2 A's and 2 B's (the B's are both of the AP classes). He's learning to be better organized, and he's learning to study more, and he's learning (slowly, very slowly, to take notes - but his handwriting is horrendous). In the end, he's learning good life skills, all the while being 100% isolated from his in person friends since March, going through crazy puberty hormones, and being stuck 24/7 in a 1100 sf house with the same 3 people and a dog.
I think we need to give our kids (and teachers, and ourselves) a bit of grace here. We cannot expect all kids to advance like it's a normal year. It's just not a normal year.
One of my son's friends is on the spectrum. He is doing AMAZINGLY well per his mom. He LOVES distance learning. He's got straight A's, and this method is really making him SHINE. Distance learning works super well for him.
TBH, trying to keep the kids who are behind to keep up while teaching all the other kids...at this point, I almost feel like I should just go all distance with the 3rd grader to let the other kids get full time in person learning (assuming we ever go back this year). Sure, with mom and dad working FT at home, he won't get as much direct or correct teaching as he would at school. OTOH, he'll be fine either way. Some of this kids in his class REALLY need to be at school.