Can we take a pause on e-learning?

Let me paint a picture of what e-learning days in my house look like.
We found out last night that this will be an e-learning day because of cold weather. So this morning, the kids are on their second breakfast by 9 am and they’re keyed up and itching to get started.
By now they’ve caught on to the fact that e-learning actually means they’ll have a very small amount of work and then a full day of play. Both my sixth grader and my third grader see e-learning as a small hurdle to be jumped before reaching the promised land of unlimited Minecraft and movies.
Even though we have tight limits on screen time on normal days, e-learning days are not normal days. My partner and I will be working, so typical limits are suspended for everyone’s survival. The kids will be mostly on their own, not in a dangerous or negligent way, but in a get-your-own-snacks and keep-yourselves-busy and don’t-bug-us-when-we’re-working kind of way.
As I’m running out the door for the in-person component of my work, my partner, who works remotely from our home every day, is taking a work call on his cell phone. He’s hiding in the guest bedroom, trying to evade the voices of small children while on his call. My younger child is searching for him with the intensity of a heat-seeking-missile, loudly calling, “DADDY!!! I need help with my Chromebook! DADDY! HELP!!!”
I try to reassure this frantic child that Daddy will help her as soon as he can, and that I’ll be home around lunchtime to help as well.
“Bye!” I say as I exit the scene, relieved to be delivered from supervising e-learning for the morning while I do my own job. They’ll all be fine, I tell myself.
I return home around lunchtime to find that they are not, exactly, fine. The kitchen looks like the scene of a battle between Cocoa Puffs and goldfish crackers. My partner is at his computer working on a project he has to finish this morning, and my younger child is next to him resting her tear-stained cheeks in her hands. I gingerly make eye contact with my partner. His eyes are wild and his look says, just don’t even ask.
In the next room, I discover my other child still in pajamas doing a Wordle. “Mom, I need help,” he says in a voice dripping with frustration. I solve the Wordle — the word is tacit, one not yet in his vocabulary — and he whines that he couldn’t possibly figure that out if he’s never heard the word. He triumphantly declares himself done with his e-learning, and in record time — today it took him 20 minutes. The Wordle was the final bit, the finish line.
“Your language arts lesson was a Wordle?” I ask. His shoulder shrug says, I guess so?
Later that evening my partner and I sigh and collapse into the couch, celebrating victory after another day of e-learning. He tells me what precipitated the tears I had seen earlier on my daughter’s face. She’d needed to summarize a story and while he was patiently coaching her through it, she had yelled, “But I don’t know HOW to summarize! YOU DON’T UNDERSTAND!” through tears of exasperation. After that she’d spent an hour doing cartwheels in the living room.
I thank him for facilitating most of the e-learning, again, and acting as IT support. He had rebooted one of the Chromebooks four times, supported one child who could not find any of the assigned work, and dried each child’s tears of frustration. Even though the actual e-learning assignments were relatively brief and minor, the emotional distress experienced by all of them was enormous in comparison. My partner appreciates my gratitude but I can see he’s growing weary.
We all are.
My children have had at least one e-learning day each week for most of the winter, and some weeks it’s been two or three days. To be fair, January and February in the Midwest are snowy, cold, and foggy. But we’re getting sick of each other, and though we’re getting very good at Wordle, I’m questioning what we’re doing here.
I grew up having snow days occasionally, but I remember them being few and far between. They were celebrated and rare oases of hot cocoa and sledding with friends. These e-learning days I’m now experiencing alongside my own children are much more numerous, and, dare I say, frivolous. Some of the days when school has been shifted to e-learning have legitimately been for really difficult weather, but some have been marginal — by which I mean there was a solitary snowflake in the air so the school shifted to e-learning. There is a neighboring school district that has e-learning every other Monday all year long, because what started as a pandemic-related day for extra cleaning has been continued into this year as well.
I recognize, obviously, that technology has shifted our capacity to do e-learning in a way that clearly has potential benefits. If it’s truly impossible to get kids to school on a snowy day, or if we truly need a whole day during the week for cleaning, I see legitimate benefits to having some way to continue to engage them in learning.
What concerns me is the number of unnecessary e-learning days, and the ease with which we can now shift to e-learning with a false sense of security, without recognition that we might be careening down a slippery slope.
The two main things I’m concerned about with respect to e-learning are efficacy and equitability. Does e-learning work, and does it work for everyone? I’m not sure we can answer these questions yet, and therefore, we need to take a pause.
During the pandemic, we forged full-speed ahead on e-learning because we had no other options. We went into emergency mode, and in emergency mode, we’re just trying to keep things afloat. As schools closed for Covid cases and quarantines, e-learning was better than the alternative at that time, which was no school at all. However, our landscape of alternatives looks different now, at least from where I’m sitting. Our alternative now is having kids in school. Now, we need to be asking if e-learning is better than having kids in school.
My partner and I are exhausted after a day of e-learning because we’ve rearranged our work schedules to try to accommodate the need for constant supervision and support as our kids navigate their assignments on their Chromebooks. And our friends who have kids in the neighboring district with e-learning every other Monday have used all their vacation time for the year to stay home with their kids on those days. Instead of visiting the national parks or going to Disney this year, they’re doing e-learning every other Monday with a third-grader and a first-grader.
We’re extremely privileged, though, to have those choices. What about the kids whose caregivers can’t afford to take that time off, or will lose their jobs if they need regular time off during the week to supervise e-learning? I’m suspecting those kids are home alone on e-learning days. I’m guessing those kids do not have someone acting as IT support to help them operate their Chromebooks. Because equity issues are not just about access — giving kids Chromebooks does not make e-learning equitable. It takes more than that.
We should have amassed a great deal of evidence by now on the efficacy and equitability of e-learning, and we do have some that points to loss of learning during virtual instruction and cascading effects of e-learning on society. We should be using that evidence as a system of checkpoints, speed bumps, much like cells in our bodies have a series of checkpoints governing whether or not they continue to proliferate. In cells when those checkpoints are not functioning or are ignored, the result is their uncontrolled proliferation, which can give rise to cancer.
I’m not directly comparing e-learning to cancer in the education system, but I am looking around for the checkpoints, the speed bumps, the data being used to decide whether this model should continue to be employed. I fear that continuing along this path of uncontrolled proliferation of e-learning is, at best, supremely irresponsible.
Could we assume that e-learning is probably acceptable, and just go with it? Yes, we could. We do that fairly often in many aspects of our society. We also have glaring equity problems in all of our systems.
It’s worth pointing out that our existing education system is deeply inequitable. I’m making no assumption that our status quo is working. The question, then, is whether our current model for e-learning makes existing inequities worse, or better. Does it shrink the gap or widen it?
There is some evidence that e-learning can be beneficial by distancing kids from racism in their schools. In these cases, I think e-learning and other forms of distance learning should be supported as components of a more equitable system.
A lot of the other evidence, though, is pointing the opposite direction, showing the loss of learning that disproportionately affects historically less privileged groups. Perhaps the disparities seen with e-learning are simply more visible manifestations of more hidden and long-standing disparities. Or, perhaps e-learning widens the equity gap. Do we really know yet?
If we’re going to continue adding e-learning days to the calendar, we need to be sure it’s not piling more learning losses or inequities on top of existing ones. There’s too much at stake for us to passively adopt an innocent until proven guilty mindset toward e-learning.
We need to adopt a guilty until proven innocent mindset instead. Our first iterations of new ideas and processes will likely be inequitable because they are part of a self-fulfilling system that reproduces the same inequities ad infinitum. We will only interrupt the cycle by intention, and by challenging our assumptions.. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
We moved toward e-learning rapidly during the pandemic, under duress. Now, though, we have the time to really evaluate it. We need more data, more analyses, more focus on equity, and significant improvements to the way e-learning is happening.
Then, perhaps, e-learning could be a vital component of a transformed, more equitable, and more culturally relevant K-12 education system.
In the meantime, my kids continue to cry their way through their e-learning, and they’re well-adjusted fully able kids who like school and learn easily. If this is what it looks like for some of the most privileged kids, something is wrong.
E-learning has potential, but we’re not there yet. We need to pause and take a good, hard, evidence-based look at our current model of e-learning and how it fits in the larger context of our educational system. If we don’t, we might slip all the way down that slope. We might make things worse.