Language and technological barriers significantly affected the quality of education parents feel their children received during the COVID-19 pandemic, a recent MassINC Polling Group survey showed.
The statewide poll — conducted throughout the month of June — asked more than 1,500 Black, white, Latinx, and Asian parents of school-age children a number of questions centered around their experience going from in-person to remote learning during the coronavirus health crisis.
“There are so many different experiences that parents had,” said MassINC Polling Group president Steve Koczela during a Wednesday Zoom conference. “Every family, every district, every school was going through something that was unique to them.”
One of the survey’s most notable takeaways, Koczela said, was a correlation between the frequency of engagement and assistance parents reported receiving from schools, and their reported satisfaction with the online schooling experience.
Hindering engagement were technological barriers, such as access to internet, devices, and email, with lower-income families more frequently reporting they were missing one, two, or all three — even by the end of the school year.
Among households whose incomes totaled less than $75,000 per year, 18 percent of white families, 25 percent of Black families, 26 percent of Latinx families, and 33 percent of Asian families all reported missing at least two technological necessities that would have otherwise aided in their child’s online learning experience.
It was also found that different schools — parents surveyed had children in K-12 who attended charter or district public schools — offered different levels of activity and assistance to both students and parents, with parents of charter school students reporting higher levels of satisfaction.
Frequent engagement levels appeared to be a key element in this: 58 percent of charter parents reported one-on-one check-ins with teachers at least a few times a week, compared to 34 percent of district public school parents.
Families who described themselves as speaking “no English at home” were among the most vulnerable when it came to the quality of their children’s online learning, reporting much lower levels of engagement with their students’ schools.
Non-English speaking households were less likely to report getting the “right amount” of assistance with remote learning, with only 33 percent of non-English speaking parents saying they’d received adequate resources to help their children, compared to 54 percent of English-speaking parents.
Non-English speaking households also reported less frequent contact with teachers, with 35 percent saying they’d received any kind of feedback from their teachers — much lower than the 54 percent reported by their English-speaking counterparts.
“It clearly shows through the data that language barriers continue to be an issue in terms of engagement and even in terms of trust,” said MassINC Chief Operating Officer Juana Matias.
“We could speculate that this lack of trust we’re seeing with Latino parents could be due to the fact that they aren’t communicating effectively with their school district.”
Ultimately, Koczela said the data collected by MassINC Polling Group could inform state policies as districts look into remote learning possibilities for the 2020-2021 school year.
“With this poll, we set out to document in as many ways as we could how Massachusetts school and families coped with a truly unprecedented situation, and what they want to see going forward,” he said. “This kind of data could be used by policymakers to understand what parents have been going through, what kind of challenges exist, and what the shape of those challenges are, to build an informed response.”