Many parents remember the misery of remote learning during the dark days of COVID-19 school shutdowns.
Hours spent sitting alongside your child, listening in on lessons and urging them to stay focused on a screen for hours at a time. Tears shed by frustrated children, burned out and exhausted. Tears shed by parents, too, trying to hold down jobs and pay the bills while also serving as their child’s primary teacher.
Looking back, it’s hard to imagine this was life for so many of us for so long.
We should not go back. Not even for a day.
Yet by Thursday morning, ABC affiliate WLS-Ch. 7 was publishing comprehensive lists of Chicago-area school closures — including districts announcing shifts to remote learning for Friday.
Suburban public schools in Joliet, Orland Park, Franklin Park, Glen Ellyn and many other communities announced closures in favor of remote learning. The list grew longer by the minute.
To those running our schools, we say: Give the kids a snow day if you must (although the bar should be high), but don’t send us back to the horrors of remote learning.
Either students are in school or they are not. “Remote learning” is no substitute for in-person instruction.
Kids and parents alike detest remote learning, but teachers aren’t fond of it, either. We’ve heard from educators who speak with genuine dread about the prospect of trying to replicate real school online.
The shortcomings of remote learning are by now well documented. COVID-19-era decisions inflicted real harm on a generation of students — harm that was not felt equally. Many families with means fled districts that kept children out of classrooms for extended periods, enrolling in private schools that found ways to remain open safely. Others left the system entirely. For some parents, forced into becoming full-time learning monitors, homeschooling began to look like the more honest option.
We forget the lessons learned during COVID-19 at our own peril. When it comes to our kids, the primary lesson was there’s no place like the classroom. A day behind a screen is a day lost.
We won’t argue that little ones should be trudging around outside when in extreme cold. With wind chills expected to dip as low as minus-30 degrees in many parts of the Chicago area, we’d say Friday’s weather qualifies as justifiable conditions to keep kids home, warm, safe and snug. But they shouldn’t be expected to log on to the computer for a day of screen school.
If it’s really impossible and unsafe for schools to be open, have a snow day. We object to this remote learning creep playing out in many districts, which quietly reintroduces the worst aspect of COVID-19-era education into the baseline expectations of public schooling. What began as an emergency measure cannot become a convenient default whenever there is snow on the ground or temperatures drop precipitously.
Remote learning should no longer be tolerated or normalized as a stand-in for real school.
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