Teachers have long noticed that breaks from school seem to affect rich and poor students vastly differently, with lower-income students starting from behind at the start of the school year-a pattern dubbed the “summer slide.” Watching the story unfold from both sides of the tracks, it’s obvious to me that we haven’t begun to reckon with how uniquely harsh the effects of the pandemic will be for economically disadvantaged students. In our community (where the median household income is $162,500, and less than 5 percent of families live in poverty), networks of parent volunteers have banded together to offer classes in core subjects, and almost all of our neighbors continue to supplement their kids’ education with tutoring and other forms of enrichment. My own public-school district, Manhasset, has embraced Zoom only tepidly, but parents with means will find a way to support their children no matter what. Indeed, our neighboring private schools moved online almost instantly. Higher-wealth school districts have quickly been able to move to “synchronous instruction”-online formats that allow students to interact with one another live and lend structure to their days. Near my home in northern Long Island, it’s a different story. Even in the best of times, there isn’t much money for education. The median annual family income is $41,900. At John Jay, 23 percent of our students come from families making less than $20,000 per year. Privately, my students tell me they don’t know what they’ll do if the economy doesn’t get better. He’s among the lucky-or less unlucky-ones. Brian, a computer science major who scored 1450 on his SAT, works 40 hours per week at a Sprint store in Jamaica, Queens, that’s getting ready to reopen to customers. Almost all of my students have at least one parent working a job that requires face-to-face contact. Of the 23 students in my undergraduate death penalty course at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, 11 of them-roughly half-either have an immediate family member with the virus or have it themselves. Truth is, almost none of my students live in a physical environment where learning can occur. Beatrice is the most optimistic student I’ve ever taught, but she’s on the verge of despair. She says it’s almost impossible to study at home. Her mother, who has taken over as the principal breadwinner since her father was laid off as a subcontractor, telemarkets mobile phone plans from the kitchen table. When she speaks, one often hears her siblings shouting in the background. One night, she showed us the toddler bed that she shares with her 17-year-old sister. Beatrice, who asked me to use that pseudonym to protect her privacy, lives with seven family members in a two-bedroom apartment. Moving classes onto Zoom has opened a window into my students’ lives and homes that is normally closed. These days, I see a lot more than I usually do. She laughed, but I often see things in my students that they don’t see in themselves. I once told Beatrice that when she becomes the first Latina senator from New York, she’ll have to buy me lunch. The premise is that players vote on which member of the group is best described by a character-revealing question, such as, “Who regularly orders delivery from less than five blocks away?” The class voted to award three extraordinarily different superlatives to a student named Beatrice: top dancer, most likely to rescue a drowning child, and best future lawyer. Since the start of the pandemic, I’ve been holding a weekly virtual game night for the students in my research group at the City University of New York.
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