Giving Compass' Take:

• Liz Willen, writing for the Hechinger Report, discusses how homeschooling will start to pick up as major cities close more school districts due to coronavirus. 

• How can donors help families in need that are not prepared for homeschooling? 

• Here are some basic questions and answers about school closures due to coronavirus.

Like it or not, we are suddenly a nation of home schoolers, with little preparation. The rapidly spreading coronavirus is instantly changing the way education is delivered, as school and home become the same place.

Millions more children and families are involuntarily joining the 1.7 million kids already home-schooled by choice. “How to homeschool” is trending on Google. For many families, the switch is a crippling inconvenience. For others, it’s an even bigger catastrophe: they may not be able to afford proper meals for their children, much less the technology and connectivity needed for online learning.

For some children hastily thrust into this new way of learning, school offers far more stability and predictability than their home lives. Shuttering schools in the face of coronavirus will shine a light on the many other roles schools provide beyond academics for fragile families, from caring adults, friendships and predictable routines to breakfast, lunch, music lessons and sports.

In addition, most schools and teachers are unprepared to take their lessons online, and the education they can offer over the internet, on the fly, could be rough and wildly uneven. In New York, officials admitted as much as they announced that schools would close Monday, and that they needed a few days to plan for new ways of instruction.

In the meantime, remote workers who are parents are fretting over how they’ll have time to oversee lessons and keep their children on top of Common Core math. Working parents wonder how they’ll arrange childcare so they don’t lose their jobs. Advocates and educators everywhere worry the poorest children will be hurt the most.

It is clear that families with the least resources are likely to feel the hardest impact — one reason why New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio delayed and struggled before deciding to close schools.  Some 70 percent of the city’s 1.1 million students come from low-income families, and thousands are homeless.

Read the full article about homeschooling by Liz Willen at The Hechinger Report.