The first day of school in Miami-Dade County, Florida, was brought to you by the numbers 4, 0, and 4.
On Monday morning, 275,000 students and 19,200 teachers settled in for the start of remote learning for the semester, only to encounter widespread crashes on the school system’s education platform. Many students couldn’t join virtual classrooms; teachers were locked out of attendance portals and grading systems. All morning, parents and students sent tweets like these:
School still happened—but lots of teachers had to scramble to relocate the morning’s lessons to Zoom. In a news conference, Miami-Dade County Public Schools Superintendent Alberto Carvalho attributed the debacle to “a slowdown of access related to an external connectivity to the internet between our data center and the internet provider.” So … too many students logging on at once? Not so, said Carvalho, who attributed the failure to a third-party switch provided by Cisco that connects Miami-Dade’s system to the internet, and that it was probably not a capacity issue. “We know what the problem is, but we do not have as of yet … a solution,” he said. School officials and IT personnel were still looking into how to resolve the issues as of Monday evening. Unless the problem gets resolved overnight, students in Miami-Dade should once again expect to again rely on Zoom on Tuesday.
Teachers had been raising concerns about Miami-Dade’s remote learning plan in the weeks leading up to the first day of classes. In July, the district finalized plans to spend $15 million of funds from the CARES Act on a no-bid contract for My School Online, a platform that’s supposed to allow teachers to virtually administer lessons. When the pandemic forced Miami-Dade to shut down schools at the tail end of the last academic year, the district gave teachers the choice over which online platforms to use for at-home learning. That quickly became too unwieldly for students to navigate between all of them, so school officials decided to invest in a single platform for the fall. While Florida is requiring most schools to offer in-person instruction, it carved out an exception for Miami-Dade because of the severity of the pandemic in the county, which has 156,910 cases. The district plans to reassess the possibility of reopening facilities on Sept. 30, so the earliest Miami-Dade students could return to school buildings is Oct. 5.
Until then, it’s remote learning. But teachers reportedly didn’t have much time to get acquainted with My School Online. The district didn’t integrate its data with the platform until August 17. It then set up a weeklong orientation period starting on August 24 to allow instructors to learn how to use the tools, which didn’t go smoothly: The system crashed on the first day of orientation and teachers continued to have problems accessing the platform and uploading learning materials. Teachers also criticized the training for focusing more on pedagogy than hands-on practice with the new online tools.
While Miami-Dade Schools’ start to the school year back seems to have been worse than most, the district is far from the only one to experience tech glitches as classes come back into session. Students in neighboring Broward County’s public schools were also met with slow connection speeds, crashing dashboards, and log-in issues on their first day of school last week due to capacity limits. Similar tech snafus have been reported in districts in Maryland, North Carolina, Indiana, and California.
Education officials have spent the last few months agonizing over how to weigh the risks of holding in-person classes during the coronavirus pandemic against the degradation in quality of education that tends to come with remote learning. Teachers have struggled to keep students engaged, interact with them on a personal level, and issue grades fairly. In addition, increased reliance on virtual teaching tools threatens to exacerbate pre-existing educational disparities that result from unequal access to internet and digital devices. But you can’t even begin to fret over those problems—or get in a lesson or two—if you can’t even get the tech to work.
Future Tense is a partnership of Slate, New America, and Arizona State University that examines emerging technologies, public policy, and society.
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