Giving Compass' Take:

• Alex Zimmerman explains the various factors - from technical difficulties to trauma related to the coronavirus - that made NYC's virtual summer school a failure.

• Many of the challenges listed here will apply to schools across the country when the school year starts in the fall. What role can philanthropists play in helping too close these gaps and ensure that students, especially the most vulnerable, get a quality education? 

• Find funds to support K-12 education during COVID-19. 

After the coronavirus threw more than 1 million children out of their school buildings, Mayor Bill de Blasio made a bold promise: Those who struggled most would experience “unprecedented learning” during summer school to help them catch up for fall.

The education department scrambled to scale up a centralized online platform called iLearn, which contained pre-packaged digital lessons. At the same time, it began requiring that educators conduct live meetings with students — a break from the spring when no such mandate existed. Officials hoped to use the summer as a testing ground for iLearn as well as for its live instruction requirements.

But summer school was hobbled from the start and never bounced back, according to interviews with over a dozen students, teachers, administrators, and experts. By the final week of the program, at least 23% summer school students who were required or recommended to attend have not logged on a single time, representing almost 27,000 students, according to internal data obtained by Chalkbeat. (This does not include students with disabilities who are entitled to attend school year round.)

From the moment summer school launched in July, iLearn did not work properly. Widespread technical glitches prevented many students from accessing their classes or assignments, problems that stretched over several weeks of the six-week program. Many students received little direction on how to sign on with usernames and passwords newly mandated from the education department’s central offices.

The very students sent to attend the online courses were the ones who struggled the most with remote learning. Many of these children suffered from trauma related to the coronavirus, or suddenly had to pick up other responsibilities such as caring for a sibling — circumstances that persisted for many students over the summer even as the pandemic began to subside in New York.

Read the full article about NYC’s virtual summer school by Alex Zimmerman at Chalkbeat.