In the United States, according to the National Center for Education Statistics, last year there were 56.6 million students attending K–12 schools, of whom 5.8 million are enrolled in private schools and 50.8 million attend public schools.
The nation’s 50.8 million public school students are a portrait of an emerging majority people-of-color America: 23.7 million (46.6 percent) are white, 13.9 million (27.4 percent) are Latinx, 7.7 million (15.2 percent) are Black, 2.9 million (5.7 percent) are Asian American or Pacific Islander, 2.1 million (4.1 percent) identify as mixed race, and 0.5 million (one percent) are Native American.
School reopening is a hot topic right now. Some school districts are reopening fully, others are using hybrid models, and some are providing all-remote instruction. But last spring, nearly all students found their school year disrupted, as the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic resulted in the shuttering of schools across the nation. Then, gradually, most of the schools reopened with remote instruction developed largely on the fly—an extraordinary social experiment involving over 50 million children.
The meaning of this collective experience will take years, perhaps decades, to sort out, but it is hard to believe that it won’t be formative in the worldviews of many young people currently nearing adulthood. To get at least a sense of how young people are responding, we reached out to students to ask what this moment means to them.
To do this, NPQ partnered with the Netter Center for Community Partnerships. The Netter Center, based at the University of Pennsylvania (Penn), has long been an advocate and practitioner of “university-assisted community schools,” meaning that university staff and students, working with public school teachers and staff, help develop and support school-day partnerships, afterschool programs, and wrap-around support services.
Despite the challenges, students are, to use an overused word, resilient. As the Sayre student put it, “We adapted. We got through it.” That said, the way teachers related to their students played a critical role in how effectively students were able to learn. And, while this is probably not surprising, personal contact was key.
A student at Robeson observed, “Honestly, it’s really all about management and how the teachers chose to manage giving us work. Some teachers were really flexible with us and really spent the time that we needed and gave us the bare minimum [workload], because we had to make a big adjustment, and they understood it really wasn’t that easy for us. Other teachers…spent more time on the work than the students, and they would just give it to us. It is harder for us to complete. We wouldn’t have that if we were in class. It was just all about how they managed it.”
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