GSV Virtual Summit (2/2): The Before Crisis and After Disease Worlds Of Pre-K12 And K12 Education
Channel 1 and 2 of the GSV Summit addressed the reactions and opinions of Edtech companies, schools and district leaders on how the Covid-19 response will change the pre-K-12 and K12 Learning.
The current situation
Around 55 million students are currently disconnected from school in the US, due to the Covid crisis. According to one conference’s panelists (superintendents of public school district), this situation is particularly calamitous for the most disadvantaged kids. In some districts, from 50% to 100% of the kids are fed by schools, which means that thousands of students are relying on the school for lunches.
For the very young children, it’s the same story. There is a wide divide in the access to technology, in the access to the resources and information, or when it comes to the parents’ availability to teach school etc.
The crisis highlights the massive unequal system in the US and the urgent need for solutions to address the gap between states and communities.
In channel 1 (Early Childhood Learning A.D), the speakers were unanimous: the early childhood system is clearly the most important step for the children’s development. There is an absolute necessity to ensure that the system addresses every children’s needs.
The panelists - from various Edtech companies, non-profit organizations, media/press actor - all agreed on the first must-priority to stay connected with the families to hear what their needs are and track-down any child that could be left aside with this crisis situation.
For instance, Khan Academy has developed various sets of schedules for children ranging from 2 to 4 and 5 to 7 years old to adapt to every family, preferring resources that didn’t need subscription, has switched to YouTube and has created an offline mode (where children can learn the fundamentals without being connected) to ensure a better access to learning.
Regarding the childcare aspect, Winnie, an intermediary company between parents and childcare, provides on a daily basis a list of the still-open providers that can immediately take children for care. This concept is win-win both for parents and business owners by ensuring them resources and preventing them to close-down after the Covid-19 crisis.
For older learners, the goal is the same i.e. to make sure that the students could access pedagogical resources most of the public schools have distributed devices and identified the household with no Wi-Fi access to distribute paper resources.
Tackling the Equity Gap
Although all the players take an important role in participating to the educational continuity, some findings are still hard to tackle and the equity gap is still at the forefront of the US, from one community to another.
Most kids with disadvantaged social origins do not speaking English as first language, which decreases the ability of the parents to follow and support their kids during this lockdown. These same kids come from families that are facing unemployment and are doing several jobs at the same time, giving them little time to take care of their children. Low income children cannot be fully ready when entering elementary school.
These findings altogether stress-out the call-to-actions addressed to schools and the need for sustainable public policies that will deal with the equity gap both from an economic and social standpoint. According to Tommy Sheridan (Deputy Director at National Head Start Association) the role of each player is to identify systemic barriers, to identify what is holding them back in order to break these very barriers.
Both conferences highlighted the great actions already taken by the schools to make sure that most of the kids stay connected with their classmates and teachers : taking attendance, hiring operators to visit some houses where they were no news of students, requesting regular feedbacks, developing customized toolbox, developing helplines for parents, office hours and so on…
To sum-up
Alongside each panelists’ discussions, many changes will arise from the Covid-19 both from an economic and social point of view. Each edtech leaders share a common vision about the future of edtech. According to them, the crisis has led to a sensitization on how we learn (increase of edtech tools, open-resources, databases…), and the importance of being engaged and having fun during the learning process has never been that important. CEOs of the edtechs Fiveable, Seesaw Learning and Clever see the sharp rise of a community spirit as evidenced by the development of communities and local initiatives to promote collaboration between teachers, parents and schools at every ladder of the education process.
Exchanges between each player of the educational process have grown and will continue to grow for the better of Education.