The disparate impact of COVID‐19 remote learning on English learners in the United States

The March 2020 closure of most schools in the United States due to the COVID-19 pandemic marked a sudden and dramatic shift in how teaching and learning happened. All the 55 million K-12 students were deeply affected by the move from face-to-face to remote learning. However, the 4.9+ million English learners (ELs) and their families were disproportionately affected by the abrupt change from physical to virtual classrooms (Napolitano, 2020). We consider three main reasons why ELs were more disadvantaged than other students by the educational impacts of COVID-19. First, U.S. schools with more socioeconomically marginalized families, including a larger proportion of immigrant families, were less prepared to provide resources for the move to remote learning. Second, there were significant communication challenges with multilingual families while trying to organize and distribute resources; there was often a flood of information in English to students and parents with minimal accommodation for EL families. Third, even when online resources and remote learning were put in place for content-area learning, they often did not support students’ English acquisition, lacking meaningful social interactions needed to support second language (L2) learning. Finally, we consider some of the silver linings, namely opportunities for classroom teachers to connect with immigrant families in new ways and for students to learn to use language and technology for real-world problem solving. In most states the closures were announced in mid-March, and the immediate challenge for educators became to figure out how to teach remotely. In our state of Ohio, the school calendar runs from late August to early June, meaning that there were still three full months (about 275 hours) of instruction to fulfill, along with completion of grading and testing, including language proficiency assessments for ELs. For many urban school districts including ours, there was no existing virtual platform to replace the classroom. By contrast, a nearby suburban district already utilized Canvas, an established online learning management system. This system was already familiar to teachers and students and had integrated tools for turning in and grading assignments, connecting to other software used for online content-area tasks, and communicating between teacher and students. However, most underfunded urban districts had no platform and teachers therefore had to cobble together lessons from different sources. Because of the educational funding formula in the United States, suburban districts usually are much better funded than urban ones: city schools receive an average of US$2,100 per student less than suburban schools, and even within urban districts predominantly White schools receive US$1,321 more per student than schools with a majority of culturally and linguistically diverse students (Bellan, 2019). Among the many consequences of this resource gap is that districts with more ELs had far less technology infrastructure to manage the transition to online learning. Often EL teachers turned to Google Classroom and other open access resources, though most teachers simultaneously had to learn how to use the platform as they were also figuring out how to plan lessons for online delivery. Many secondary teachers struggled to find online content that included accommodations appropriate for ELs. Moreover, the interfaces of most sites were not designed with L2 English students in mind. The result was a patchwork of tools, sites, and platforms that was often frustrating for students and parents. Our local school system is a large, urban district of about 50,000 students, 13% of whom (about 8,300 students) are designated as English learners. Their home languages are mainly Spanish, Arabic, Somali, and Nepali, but also include over 100 other languages. Eighty percent of the students qualify for free or reduced lunch. Like many urban districts, schools in the district are designated as Title I, meaning that they receive federal funding based on serving a high percentage of low-income students. Across the United States, 79% of ELs attend Title I schools (U.S. Department of Education, 2015). The difficulties educators faced in lower income schools, therefore, disproportionately affected ELs. Initially, the priority for ELs trying to move to remote learning was internet access. Although over 98% of schools in the United States have broadband internet, Latina/o students in the United States are three times as likely as White students to have no internet access at home (34.6% to 12.1%, U.S. Department of Education, 2018). The Pew Research Center reports that 18% of Latino/a teenagers do not have access to a home computer, double the rate of White students at 9% (Little, 2020). For many families, smartphones are their only means of online access. Like many, our district arranged to distribute the schools’ laptops to families, and about 75% of EL families checked them out (King, 2020). However, this did not solve the connectivity problem. Some areas, like Dayton, Ohio, put the idle school buses to use by moving them to the parking lots of apartment complexes where their families live to create wifi hotspots (Nelson, 2020). In our district, schools closed mid-March; however, a May 5 poll found that only 35% of ELs were participating in remote learning (King, 2020). In some areas, local nonprofits such as the Arab Community Center for Economic and Social Services in Michigan collaborated with schools to obtain low free or affordable internet connectivity (Lazarín, 2020). The resources ELs’ immigrant families had access to and their ability to support their children in remote learning was also profoundly affected by their work situation. Many of our immigrant parents work in food processing factories or warehouse jobs such as Amazon fulfillment centers, and were thus designated essential workers by the state. They were, therefore, not affected by loss of income as those who were laid off, but it did increase their chances to be exposed to the virus and also made it more difficult for them to be home to watch over their children’s online learning (Lazarín, 2020). This also made it harder for teachers to reach parents to organize their children’s remote learning schedule. During the first weeks of the school closure, the initial challenge teachers faced was establishing reliable communication with students and families in order to organize the move to remote learning. The challenge was magnified with students and families whose home language is a language other than English. The announcements district administrators in our area made to families were usually translated into the five most common home languages (Spanish, Somali, Nepali, French, and Arabic). However, families with other home languages were unable to receive announcements and information in this manner. Moreover, the parents of students of limited or interrupted formal education (SLIFE) do not always have the type of literacy skills to fully interpret formal announcements (often translated through Google) from school; this was particularly an issue for some of our Nepali families. Educators took on the laborious task of personally reaching out to students and families to ensure they were connected to their teachers and had all the necessary information and technology available for remote learning. Much of this work fell to bilingual instructional assistants and teachers to make phone calls and track who was being contacted. Teachers in our district were supposed to log student contacts on the school student spreadsheet, and the campus teacher portal, and an ESL-specific spreadsheet created by the district to track EL students. The result was that the information was inconsistently collected (e.g., even though many content teachers work with ELs, they did not have access or even know about the district ESL spreadsheet), making it hard to know if reliable communication had been established with individual students and families. In our district, most of our bilingual instructional assistants and social workers are Spanish speakers, so they were able to reach those families relatively well; however, communication with many families from other language backgrounds proved much more difficult. The site Colorín Colorado stresses the importance of using family liaisons and community partners to connect with hard-to-reach students (Breiseth, 2020). The priority in initial contact with families was to document whether their children had access to food, internet, and a device to make remote learning possible (Rani, 2020). In our district, high school EL teachers had particular difficulties getting their students to consistently engage. Since they were not physically in class during the day, many high schoolers took jobs (often in the same warehouses where their parents work), and ended up working long hours. Also, we found that the students who were most in need of resources to get set up with remote learning—checking out a laptop, contacting the internet provider to sign up for the 60-day free service being offered—were the ones who had most difficulty figuring out how to access what they needed. For our teachers, the transition from regular to remote learning was complicated by the fact that when the school initially closed most of us believed it would be temporarily; it was spring break time anyway and we thought we would be back in two or three weeks. Therefore, the first few weeks were not spent organizing the transition, and it wasn’t until April that the district announced that school would be moved online for the rest of the school year that most teachers realized the implication of what was happening and had three days to pack up their classrooms and prepare learning packets for students. Research in second language acquisition has established that meaningful opportunities for social interaction with sustained comprehensible input are key to L2 learning (Cummins, 2007). In typical school settings, ELs benefit from rich language interaction with their peers for both social and academic purposes. As schools moved to emergency remote learning, the main strategies for making input comprehensible such as the use of verbal and nonverbal cues and physical objects were largely lost. This was exacerbated at the secondary level where remote learning activities are designed for content instruction, very rarely sheltered for ELs. Although some online programs include translation tools and read-aloud texts, they still lack appropriate accommodations to make content instruction effective for ELs, particularly for SLIFE. The transition to remote learning also resulted in a shift in the L2 skills students were practicing. During regular classes, students routinely engage in listening and speaking, whereas the hastily assembled learning packets focused almost entirely on reading and writing. This affected ELs at the primary level who were emergent readers, since they could not receive the one-to-one or small group instruction required to build early fundamental skills of reading through scaffolded oral interactions. Early grade ELs often receive literacy instruction from a combination of the classroom teacher, bilingual instructional aides, and the ESL teacher or literacy coach. They often use level-based reading groups and running records (Wright, 2019) to support early literacy learning. Online instruction meant the loss of this type of differentiated learning supported through oral interactions. At the secondary level, the heavy emphasis on reading in remote learning made it even more difficult for ELs because reading skills in particular take much more time to develop before they can be used solely as the means of content instruction. Many teachers reported that it was only near the end of the school year that they were able to reliably hold synchronous real-time small group sessions using tools like Google Meet. The unexpected change to emergency remote learning was stressful and frustrating for students and their teachers. ELs were affected even more than most of their peers because of the socioeconomic marginalization of many immigrant families, the additional challenges of communicating with L2 students and families, and the diminished conditions for second language acquisition. Nevertheless, the radical changes in teaching and learning brought about by the pandemic did have at least two positive aspects. One silver lining was the connections wrought between teachers and parents. While much TESOL professional development stresses the important of making home–school connections, the pandemic was a true exercise in building a line of communication between classroom teachers and the families of their students. Parents gained more insights into the actual content and processes of their children’s learning, which for many immigrant families likely helped them better understanding the “inner workings” of U.S. classrooms. For teachers it helped us grasp what sort of real-world challenges our students face in trying to complete academic tasks, from not having a quiet, individual space at home to do schoolwork to the very real need of many families to work long hours to put food on the table. The connections forged between families and EL educators this spring will likely pay dividends for students down the road. The second positive outcome that we observed from remote learning was our EL students’ ability to use different technologies and platforms to do creative problem solving in the actual challenges they encountered. While we often preach about the importance both of having students become more proficient in technology and promoting higher-order thinking skills, the change in learning modality forced them to put it into practice. For example, many of my (Derek) high school ELs had never used email. To facilitate online instruction the district provided students with an email address which presented the opportunity for students to become familiar with using email to communicate with teachers and counselors. In order to submit written work, students had to complete the assignment, take a picture of it with their phone, create a portfolio by exporting photos of their work to a Google Slides presentation, and then submit it as an email attachment to me. The students, although already proficient users of smart phones and social media apps, were forced to learn additional real-world applications of technology. Peter Sayer is an associate professor of language education studies at the Ohio State University (OSU). Derek Braun is a doctoral student in foreign/second and multilingual language education at the Ohio State University and a sheltered science teacher at Beechcroft High School in Columbus, where he teaches students from many different language backgrounds. We would like to acknowledge the tremendous efforts of teachers, students, and families to continue to support teaching and learning during what has been an unprecedented event in our lifetimes. Peter would like to thank the teachers in his endorsement courses at OSU for sharing their experiences and contributing ideas to this paper. Derek thanks the district’s ESL office for their support and leadership navigating all the challenges encountered from distance learning.