Schools and students during the COVID-19 outbreak in America: A conversation with Allan Golston

Well, the foundation’s U.S. Program is focused on the needs of our education system, both within the context of COVID-19 and as we plan for recovery. We have already started moving roughly $4M in emergency aid focused on two areas:

In our work on higher education, we’re providing funding that will enable emergency aid to help reduce the impact of campus closings on students across the country—and particularly low-income students who could be losing their access to housing, food, and wages.

In our work with K-12 education, we’re supporting states and state education commissioners as they develop their online learning options, as they coordinate meals and support for students who rely on schools for day-to-day services, and as they advocate for the kind of federal assistance they need to meet this challenge.

This is just the first set of actions we’re taking. We’re also working with our partners, thinking about how this pandemic is going to impact the education system over the longer term. Specifically, exploring how this unprecedented situation will affect the long-term learning, growth, and prosperity of students—particularly for Black and Latinx students, as well as those experiencing poverty—and what can be done to address those issues.

Absolutely. I’ll give you a few examples.

We know, for instance, that high-quality digital learning has never been more important. Zearn Math is inviting parents to set up “teacher” accounts to allow them to access high-quality math content from home.

In this very fluid environment, a coalition of state education chiefs, Chiefs for Change, has created a web page that provides guidance for systems leaders from their state and district superintendent members.

Then there are other institutional partners, like Arizona State University. In addition to moving 55,000 students from on-campus learning to their digital platforms, ASU is finding ways to support the higher ed and K-12 fields more broadly. They’ve created a single landing page, ASU for You, that gives students and educators free access to their teaching and learning content.

Meanwhile, we’re seeing creative ways that other organizations are leveraging philanthropic and individual giving to help teachers and students. Donors Choose has set up a Keep Kids Learning fund to get essential resources out to the students and teachers who need them, and Bill and Melinda are personally matching individual donations today with the goal of providing $1,000 in funding to every teacher at schools where the majority of students receive free or reduced lunch.

After this crisis, we will have millions of students who were or will be behind in their learning journey—so part of our work going forward will have to involve innovation, acceleration, and catch-up supports deployed at a scale we’ve never seen before to help students get back on their grade level path.

But one thing to be hopeful about is that in order to take on this crisis, we’re also having to face down some of the inequities that our education system has been trying to address for years—whether that involves meals, or after school programs, or community resources, or even support for students who are facing basic need losses at home.

For example, some estimates say that nearly 20 percent of students don’t have at-home internet access. That’s a serious problem at the best of times—and when social distancing is critical, we’re seeing it rise to the level of the national conversation. Similarly, there has traditionally been very little talk at scale about distance and digital learning as a way to supplement and support traditional education models, but with schools and campuses closed across the country, we’re being forced to find ways to scale up effective distance learning in ways that could be effective long-term. And even before this crisis, there were hundreds of thousands of students who were behind on their learning journey without a clear strategy to bring them up to speed. As we think about how to accelerate learning for the millions of students who will need to catch up after this crisis is over, we can also apply those lessons to engage students who fall behind in more normal circumstances.

The truth is, we don’t know what the future will look like. But if we approach these challenges in the right way and use our resources effectively, our actions can result in innovations that help to ease inequities and strengthen our educational system overall.