Yang's preaching notwithstanding.
The Texas Ed Agency is pushing to reopen schools in Texas. They're getting pushback.
At the same time, they have data. Don't know that it's high-quality data, but "I've been told that this person over there probably thinks ..." has been cited as high-quality standard in some discussions, so let's ignore quality (and quantity) for now.
The data consisted of teachers in every school district evaluating their students' availability and engagedness. Could the be reached early on after school closures? Later? Did they participate early on? Did they participate later? Each student in a "core class" had a datum for that core class; non-core classes were less important. All that information went to the state for analysis.
My data confirmed my biases. If you were poor, non-native in English; if you were black or Latino; then you had lower engagement rates. Note that in my school every student has a tablet computer and software, lots of businesses offer students free wifi (even in the parking lot) and the school set up wifi hotspots so nearly every school parking lot, whether it was "your" high school or the elementary school 2 blocks away was computer-capable. They also had tech services set up on line for software problems and a socially-distanced drop-off/repair process. Overall, about 20% of my students never logged in, and while some were white and privileged more were poor or black or Latino; about 40% didn't actually do a large chunk of the work. I'm including in the other 60% those who learned nothing because all they did was open each assignemnt so it was marked as "viewed" so they could log in to take the quiz, googling the answers. (Which some overachiever lickspittles promptly posted within 30-40 minutes of the quizzes' going live.)
Schools are hard put to be honest with this. If we failed these kids, disproportionately poor and of color, then we'd have our accountability ratings dinged harshly. At the same time, passing them is social injustice. And there was no way to contact each and every one using every means necessary--you can only leave so many voice mails or hear single mothers with 4 kids say that she's trying to work and can't navigate all the software and plus she never these classes and it's it *our* job to teach? "Yes, ma'am, but if your kid never logs in ..."
In other words, dispose of digital divide to a large extent, and the racial/linguistic/class/social divides sprang to life. Except for those who were so not bought-into the system that wholesale cheating was their norm.
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