U.S. Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos was in Garland on Thursday, learning how some schools are teaching through COVID-19. She found positives in a year of negatives.
DeVos said she found several silver linings to the deadly pandemic that’s now killed more than 200,000 people in the U.S., even as flare-ups persist.
"I believe that one of the silver linings to this pandemic is going to be the much more rapid adoption of technology," DeVos said.
After COVID-19 shut schools down in March, online-learning took over, along with lots of problems. Teachers, students and families not only struggled with technology itself, but with long-distance learning.
DeVos also applauded variations on classrooms that maintain in-person learning.
"We’re seeing families across the country who are electing to start small home schools,” DeVos said, “or micro-schools or pods or some other definition of small schools with few students. And I think we’ll see a lot more of that."
Critics see those small-school options available mostly to families with money. Devos said they should be equally accessible to low-income families, but she didn’t mention a way to make that happen.
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