Giving Compass' Take:

• Jennifer Rainey Marquez describes how the pandemic has revealed and increased persistent learning gaps for kids of color.

• How does the pandemic expose huge disparities in funding for schools with larger numbers of students of color? How do those funding gaps create learning gaps? What can we do to support students in under-funded school districts during the pandemic?

• Locate resources to help guide your giving during the pandemic.

A recent analysis from the research firm McKinsey & Company found the pandemic has led to disproportionate losses in learning for students of color, exacerbating existing achievement gaps and potentially increasing the odds those students may drop out.

The report estimates that, on average, students could lose seven months of learning during the pandemic, compared to 10 months for Black students and nine months for Hispanic students.

Tomeka Davis, associate professor of sociology at Georgia State University, studies race and class stratification in education. Here, she discusses how the pandemic affects these issues:

Q: How are disparities showing up again as schools consider how and whether to reopen in the fall?

A: One of the biggest barriers to in-person learning is large class sizes. If you go to a public school that, because of a lack of funding, has 30 or 35 students in a class, you can’t put those kids six feet apart.

Private schools especially can manage better because they often have much smaller class sizes. Even if there’s a hybrid model with at-home learning, students are going to have better access to their teachers if they only have 12 kids per class compared to 35 kids per class.

Other districts are talking about part-time schooling. My mother grew up during Jim Crow and she went to segregated schools. Back then, the government wasn’t interested in building schools for Black kids, so she and her brother went to school for only half a day because the school was so overcrowded that the kids essentially had to attend school in shifts. And this is what it sounds like again. It’s going to set kids back years.

Read the full article about learning gaps for kids of color by Jennifer Rainey Marquez at Futurity.