Gates Package — page 970

len twice as far kids, are already known as breeding grounds for the common cold and the flu--why would they be any different for another pathogen? On the other hand, when schools closed, students fell behind in their learning, and the achievement gap grew even bigger than it already was. The United Nations estimates that COVID robbed students of so much time with their teachers that 100 million of them have fallen below the minimum threshold for basic skills, and it will take years of remedial work to help them catch up.5 In the United States, Black and Latino third graders have fallen twice as far behind their classwork as white and Asian American students have. And third graders from highpoverty schools have lost three times more learning than their peers in wealthier schools.6 The pandemic also exposed one of the biggest myths about remote education--that it could ever replace classroom work for kids in the early grades. I'm a big fan of online learning, but I have always thought of it as a supplement to, not a substitute for, the work that young students and teachers do together in person. (In the United States, we mostly use the terms "remote learning" and "online learning" interchangeably, but many other countries provided lessons over the radio, television, and e-books as well as online.) Few teachers have been trained to develop remote lessons, though this will change over time, as online toolkits and curricula improve. There are still many people who don't have Internet access--in South Asia, more than a third of the students forced to stay home were unable to do remote learning--and many of those who do have access found the experience less than engaging. In short, online learning was put to a test that it was never designed to pass. I'm still optimistic about its future when used appropriately, though, and will have much more to say about it in the Afterword.