Back to School or Back to Remote Learning? Depends on Where You Live | PK-12 - EdSurge

This article is part of the guide What’s the Plan? How K-12 School Districts Are Preparing to Resume and Reopen.

This story is part of an EdSurge series about how districts are responding to COVID-19. It is made publicly available with support from the Michael &Susan Dell Foundation. All stories are editorially independent. (Read our ethics statement here.) This work is licensed under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0.

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It’s back-to-school season. But with the COVID-19 pandemic still raging in the U.S., classes are shaping up to look very different this year, as Rachel Burstein, Research Associate at EdSurge reports.

Photo: Zoran Milic / Shutterstock

For starters, many students won’t actually go into a school building. Instead, they will participate in fully remote instruction.

That’s a key finding from an EdSurge/Social Context Labs analysis of 375 school district reopening plans from around the country and across a diversity of geographies, COVID-19 infection rates and poverty levels. As of Sept. 3, we found that 356 districts (95%) planned to offer remote instruction. Meanwhile, just 137 planned in-person instruction. Fewer still—104 (28%)—planned to offer hybrid instruction in which students split time learning remotely and in-person. (See Figure 1).

These findings are reflected in other analyses of district plans, such as that from the Center for Reinventing Public Education (CRPE) at the University of Washington at Bothell. A CRPE report from last month that examined a nationally representative sample of 477 school districts found a similar breakdown, with 85% of districts planning to offer remote instruction. As in our analysis, the CRPE report found a minority of districts are planning to offer in-person or hybrid options.

Figure 1: Attendance structures based on an EdSurge/Social Context Labs analysis of 375 plans published by U.S. K-12 school districts.

Most of the districts in our analysis that plan to offer remote instruction also have in-person and hybrid options available for students.
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Source: EdSurge