Part of a four-week series: 'Live and Learn: Education in a COVID-19 World'
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PHILADELPHIA (KYW Newsradio) -- As the pandemic pushes schools across the country to move to online curricula, experts say they expect to see academic achievement gaps widen between students from high-income and low-income families, putting an entire generation at risk for learning loss.
“We are in a state of rapid, rapid, quick-fire triage,” Karen Aronian, Ed.D, says.
She says students in remote areas or from low-income households don’t have access to the same resources that wealthy families do.
“That was exacerbated in our brown and Black communities, where we just did not have a system in place with regard to broadband, with regard to digital devices, in our public schools that were accessible to these communities, and therein we could not reach them," she said.
Aronian says parents need support.
"When schools send out curriculum to parents, that curriculum must also be delivered with instruction on how to teach," Jim Cowen, executive director of the nonprofit Collaborative for Student Success, said.
“There’s a group of families that are more wealthy, that have more resources to their benefit, and they’re finding ways to get by,” Cowan says -- like paying for private school, learning pods and tutors.
“For the families that don’t have that, they are stuck,” he says. “In many cases, they were already behind going into this current environment.”
Many white-collar parents are able to work from home and can help facilitate their child’s learning. But blue-collar jobs can’t be done from home. Cowan says only about 60% of low-income students are regularly logging in for online instruction.
“So there’s worry also that a lot of these kids are just dropping out altogether and being lost,” Cowan said.
"We’re going to be in a steep decline for some time," Aronian says. "There’s a tremendous amount -- months -- of academic growth loss that must be made up."
Some towns have opened parent support centers, and some schools have started developing their own learning pods. But Aronian and Cowan say that’s not enough.
“We need some go-to, centralized curriculum that’s delivered through local, state and federal means,” says Aronian.
“The districts should not be on their own on this. There needs to be significant support from the highest levels to get through this problem,” says Cowan.
But the silver lining, according to Aronian, is that many parents are now more involved in their children’s education than they had been.
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The coronavirus pandemic has altered life in many ways for most of us, including the way students are learning. Over the next few weeks, KYW Newsradio is taking a look at the impact of COVID-19 on education with "Live and Learn: Education in a COVID-19 World."