More bits and bytes
Every so often we devote a post to items of interest that have come up recently but don’t merit an entire post, but are worth a quick review. Three of these are below.
Did Online School Drive Down Cyberbullying?
The opening to this article answers the question (according to one study, at least):
“When the pandemic first struck, many child well-being advocates worried that the massive shift to remote school would spur an uptick in a troubling behavior: online bullying.
According to new research from Boston University, however, virtual learning may have had precisely the opposite effect.
During online school, “there’s no increase in cyberbullying, and in fact, there appears to be a decrease,” co-author Andrew Bacher-Hicks told The 74.
He and his colleagues’ working paper, published through Brown University’s Annenberg Institute for School Reform, used Google search trends to track rates of bullying and cyberbullying through the pandemic. Google search intensity for those two terms, the authors found, represents a strong proxy for actual rates of bullying in school and online.”
Why might this be? The authors have two theories. The first is that online bullying is linked to and may often start with in-person bullying, and the decrease in f2f bullying (because of schools being closed) reduced online bullying. Or, it may be that online learning was more structured than typical online time pre-pandemic, leaving bullies less unsupervised time online.
I don’t see this study as suggesting a major advantage to online learning, but it should help counter the view that students learning online may be subject to greater rates of online bullying.
Ah, Texas
According to the Houston Chronicle,
Schools may offer up to 20 days of remote instruction for students who are sick with COVID-19, the Texas Education Agency announced Thursday, offering school districts across the state some much-sought flexibility amid rising infections that have area parents and staff nervous about the start of school in the coming weeks.
The change, included in new guidelines for the upcoming school year, comes after TEA previously said districts could not offer virtual learning because the Texas Legislature failed to pass a bill that would have funded it in the 2021-22 school year. The new guidance now allows up to 20 days of remote instruction to be counted as attendance for funding purposes. Schools can apply for a waiver for additional distance learning time if needed in certain circumstances.
Wouldn’t it just be easier to allow districts to offer online learning generally instead of only for sick students?
Almost certainly yes. But we have to keep in mind that TEA is doing its best to address the failure of the Texas legislature.
Since we first saw this article, the Texas Legislature has gone into special session, and is looking at remote/online learning issues among others. We hear there is a lively debate in Austin and are hopeful that the situation will improve for schools and students.
Did someone say “data”?
Although the pandemic is global, we all experience it primarily in our region. That can easily lead us to believe that if our school has been 100% remote, that’s been the experience for everyone, or conversely, if our school has returned to 100% in-person, that must be the trend everywhere.
Therefore, it’s always valuable to look for national data, and IES has stepped up with its school survey dashboard. The current numbers, back through January, are shown below.
That’s just one snapshot, for 8th grade. The site is user-friendly and easily allows visitors to search by state and other demographic factors. The sample size is about 5,000 schools, which is larger than most surveys.
School re-openings, remote learning, and the Delta variant
While the data set immediately above looks back at the recent past, the recent surge in new COVID-19 cases is feeling like deja-vu all over again to many school and district leaders as they try to predict—and act on—the next phase of the pandemic.
Will the Delta Variant Upend Another School Year? It’s a good question, although to me the column mostly argues that it shouldn’t, rather than answering the question of whether it will. Whether it should or not comes down to how each person evaluates risk and reward. It’s one thing to show, as the article does, that a child’s risk of dying from COVID-19 is about 1/10 the chance of dying from cancer. But death isn’t the only bad outcome, and in any case “lower risk than these other deadly things” doesn’t feel like the most persuasive argument.
What is clear though is that for now at least, we’re going into another school year of uncertainty. Perhaps the US wave will subside as appears to be occurring in the U.K. But even if it does, the current resurgence is, if nothing else, a reminder that all the issues related to remote learning are likely to stick with us for at least another semester, and quite possibly the