Ready or not, a new era of homeschooling has begun
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NEW YORK – Like it or not, we are suddenly a nation of home schoolers, with little preparation. The rapidly spreading coronavirus is instantly changing the way education is delivered, as school and home become the same place.
Millions more children and families are involuntarily joining the 1.7 million kids already home-schooled by choice. “How to homeschool” is trending on Google. For many families, the switch is a crippling inconvenience. For others, it’s an even bigger catastrophe: they may not be able to afford proper meals for their children, much less the technology and connectivity needed for online learning.
Some 70 percent of the city’s 1.1 million students come from low-income families, and thousands are homeless. In Los Angeles and Chicago, where schools closures were previously announced, the rates of poverty are even higher.
For some children hastily thrust into this new way of learning, school offers far more stability and predictability than their home lives. Shuttering schools in the face of coronavirus will shine a light on the many other roles schools provide beyond academics for fragile families, from caring adults, friendships and predictable routines to breakfast, lunch, music lessons and sports.
In addition, most schools and teachers are unprepared to take their lessons online, and the education they can offer over the internet, on the fly, could be rough and wildly uneven. In New York, officials admitted as much as they announced that schools would close, and that they needed a few days to plan for new ways of instruction.