How Did Rural School Districts Fare Providing Access to Remote Learning During School Closures?

• In Event: Provision of Curriculum and Remote Instruction in the United States During COVID

Abstract

Objective. We examine how rural school districts addressed internet access gaps to provide remote instruction during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Perspectives. Internet connectivity was a barrier for student access to remote instruction during school closures. In April 2020, 20% of all parents reported they did not have reliable home internet access, with both urban and rural parents reporting even lower rates of access (Vogels et al., 2020). Many school districts distributed devices and hotspots to students to support access to remote instruction. But in rural school districts, the problem was compounded by uneven access to broadband infrastructure (Tomer, Kneebone, & Shrivaram, 2020). In these cases, distributing hotspots could not fully solve the problem.

In this study, we assessed the level of remote instruction that rural school districts were able to provide to students, how this differed from urban and suburban school districts, and the strategies that rural districts used to overcome internet connectivity gaps.

Methods and Data Sources. To understand the national landscape of remote instruction during spring 2020, we analyzed data from a nationally representative sample of 477 school districts collected by the Center on Reinventing Public Education and RAND Corporation. This involved coding available information about districts’ responses to the COVID-19 pandemic, and then merging the coded data with descriptive information, such as the percentage of students receiving free or reduced-price lunch and racial demographic data, from the National Center on Education Statistics’ Common Core of Data.

We supplemented the national data with qualitative information from semi-structured interviews that the National Center for Rural Education Research Networks conducted with 40 rural school district leaders from Ohio and New York. Interviews took place in April 2020—approximately one month into COVID-19 closures—and asked leaders about the shift to remote learning in their district. These two data sources help us to understand how remote instruction in rural districts compared with urban and suburban districts, as well as what barriers rural school districts faced and the ways that they were or were not able to solve them.

Results. As in urban school districts, internet connectivity was a significant challenge for rural districts. But, rural districts were less likely to provide devices and hotspots than urban districts. Although this is related to a number of factors, rural district leaders consistently reported that inadequate broadband infrastructure was the key obstacle hindering students’ access to remote learning. Despite these limitations, rural school districts found creative ways to provide access to instruction, including provision of paper packets, directing students to community-based hotspots, offering asynchronous instruction via videos loaded onto USB drives, and teaching students over the phone.

Significance. Our findings show that rural broadband access was a barrier to providing equitable education access during school closures amidst the COVID-19 pandemic. And it is clear that the public health crisis is not over yet. School districts will need to prepare to provide continued remote education if necessary. These examples of rural district innovation show that even in the absence of universal internet access, learning can continue.

Authors

• Jennifer Ash, Harvard University

• Alexis Gable, Harvard University

• Betheny Gross, University of Washington

• Tara Patricia Nicola, Harvard University

• Alice Opalka, University of Washington - Bothell