Impacts of the COVID-19 Pandemic & Remote Instruction in a Low-Income, High-Diversity Urban Elementary School: NYKids Shares New Research at the Comparative and International Education Society
by Maria I. Khan and Kristen C. Wilcox
As the pandemic began in March 2020, millions of children around the world were shifted from in-person to remote instruction. Globally, education systems and structures changed dramatically. Pandemic-induced remote schooling was experienced differently by parents and caregivers from different backgrounds. While parents and caregivers with greater wealth and social networks were impacted in a variety of ways, they were also able to apply their resources to buffer against the most negative impacts on their children. However, low-income and more vulnerable parents and caregivers had fewer resources to compensate for the loss of in-person schooling for their children’s education and enrichment as well as for the essential childcare functions schools provide during the workday. As a recent World Bank research brief (2021) on the pandemic’s impacts on children explains, “Parent’s involvement has played an equalizing role mitigating some of the limitations of remote learning.”
In the fall of 2021, the NYKids team partnered with researchers from The Rockefeller College of Public Administration & Policy (Ashley Fox and Lucy Sorensen) and School of Public Health (Janine Jurkowski) to investigate the differential impacts of the pandemic. This research was possible through UAlbany’s Minority Health Disparities seed funding and included a focus on the relationships of pandemic-induced remote instruction and adverse childhood events. This blog presents preliminary findings from one component of this study highlighting the experiences of parents and caregivers as they sought to meet the needs of elementary-aged children in one low-income, high-diversity urban school.
The study, while seeking to contribute to the research literature (particularly with regard to performance adaptation in crises), was also designed to employ principles of community-based participatory research. In this way we approached our study as a research-practice collaboration with the aim of using community-informed recommendations to develop trauma-informed interventions in low-income, high-diversity schools like the one at the center of this study.
The Study
Our research team partnered with one urban elementary school serving a low-income, high-diversity population of students. The study was conducted at the elementary level as elementary schools had greater discrepancies in their reopening plans and elementary-aged students generally require more adult supervision and caregiver presence.
Our data consisted of interviews with the principal, instructional staff (n=4), and school support staff (n=3). To ensure that the voices of those most often invisible and marginalized are elevated in the research, low-income parents/caregivers from diverse backgrounds (n=11) were also interviewed to ensure that their perspectives on parenting and caregiving during the pandemic were included.
Challenges: Widening Academic Gaps, SEL Setbacks, Mental and Physical Health Concerns and Family-School Engagement
This element of the research focused on the challenges educators, parents, and caregivers experienced meeting the needs of children as a result of pandemic-induced remote instruction as well as the strategies they employed to mitigate those challenges.
The main themes from our analysis of interview and focus group transcripts resonated with other studies around the world: the most vulnerable children (living in poverty and marginalized for a variety of reasons) experienced the following challenges:
- widening academic gaps (e.g., students’ literacy and numeracy skills below grade level)
- constrained social-emotional learning opportunities (e.g., self-management; relationship skills; communication skills)
- declines in mental and physical health (e.g., stress, anxiety, reduced fitness, and fine motor skills).
- educators and parents/caregivers also experienced a shared challenge in two-way family-school communications (e.g., limited communication channels and access to resources)
These themes were apparent in interviews conducted with participants. Parents and caregivers, for instance, noted the consequential impacts of remote schooling on elementary aged students. One parent, for instance, shared how difficult it was to make young children understand what was going on after March 2020: “I guess it’s just difficult. Trying to explain this to young children is difficult when they don’t really understand what’s going [on].”
Educators similarly reported severe impacts on their students. A teacher explained how students’ anxiety and stress grew after a year of remote instruction and recounted an instance when the class was particularly upset:
My class cried for two and a half hours…. That’s because the amount of emotion that they had, and suddenly we’re all releasing at one time and there’s a lot more of that than just anger that we really have seen in the past. There’s just a lot more anxiety.
Another teacher, as an example of a pattern we identified in the educator data, shared how the pandemic exacerbated inequalities which had already been salient among students from low-income, high diversity backgrounds even before the pandemic began. The teacher said:
We were living in a pandemic prior to the pandemic, immense poverty, [an] immense amount of doors closed, obstacles in their [children’s] way to give them a chance in the future to compete with kids and families who have overwhelmingly more options.
Key Take-Aways for the Future of Remote Instruction
While schools are largely back to offering in-person instruction, remote learning is likely to have a place in schools well into the future. Understanding how remote offerings might be applied positively for low-income, high diversity school communities will be a key priority for educators moving forward. In closing, the World Bank’s research brief discussed above offers an implication and consideration for the future of remote instruction with “human interaction” as a focus of effort:
Education is an intense human interaction endeavor: For remote learning to be successful it needs to allow for meaningful two-way interaction between students and their teachers; such interactions can be enabled by using the most appropriate technology for the local context.
Sharing More Results at the Upcoming CIES Conference:
Maria I. Khan and Kristen C. Wilcox will be sharing highlights from this case study, titled, “Remote Schooling during the COVID-19 Pandemic: A Case Study of Impacts on Children in a High Poverty, High Diversity School” at The Comparative and International Education Society (CIES) Annual Conference; February 18th – 22nd in Washington D.C. (More on this study will be coming soon!)
We also have another paper accepted for presentation at CIES: “Improving Educational Equity through Research-Practice Partnerships and University-School Collaborations in the Post-Pandemic”.
Find us at CIES (access is available both remotely and in-person) and stay tuned to learn about strategies educators and parents/caregivers employed in this low-income, high-diversity school.
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