LOS ANGELES — In Elissa Elder-Aga’s 25 years of teaching elementary school, reading aloud has always been her favorite classroom activity, a chance to captivate her audience and impart all sorts of lessons — from grammar to morals.

But after many tries in the fall, she reached a sobering conclusion: No matter how hard she tried, how many voices she used, she could not hold the attention of kindergartners while reading to them on Zoom.

“When it didn’t transfer, I was shocked,” she said. “I am used to 25 pairs of eyes on me.”

None of Ms. Elder-Aga’s kindergarten students have spent a day inside a classroom this school year, like a vast majority of the roughly 600,000 students in the Los Angeles Unified School District, the nation’s second-largest after New York City. And her struggles echo those voiced by teachers nationwide: Will all-remote instruction cause lower-income students and students of color to fall further behind their more affluent peers?

Los Angeles, California

San Francisco

CALIFORNIA

Los Angeles

San Francisco

CALIFORNIA

Los Angeles

By The New York Times

Los Angeles Unified School District

600,000 students

Demographics

74 percent Latino, 10 percent white, 8 percent Black, 4 percent Asian

Type of Learning

Remote

The data is sparse, but early surveys are worrisome. In November, Austin Beutner, the Los Angeles superintendent, said the district had seen a 15 percent increase in D’s and F’s among high school students this school year compared with the last, and a 10 percent drop in reading proficiency among elementary school students.

A few weeks later, the district announced that it would defer any F grades until the end of January in an attempt to give students more time to catch up on their work.

“If you’re a first or second grader, and someone at home is not helping you, you’re probably not making a ton of progress,” Mr. Beutner said. “There is just no question this is disproportionately hurting students who can least afford it.”

Chicago, San Diego, Philadelphia and many other big city systems have also relied heavily on remote learning this school year. Those policies have been shaped in part by concerns about the disproportionately deadly impact of the coronavirus on Black and Latino communities. Powerful teachers’ unions alarmed about possible in-school transmission of the disease have also had a major influence.

But while some large districts, most notably New York, have tried a mixture of in-person and remote instruction, Los Angeles has resolutely kept its classrooms closed to all but a very small number of special needs students. All indications are that it will continue to keep them closed well into 2021.

Schools in the Pandemic: A Report Card What does it mean to go to public school during the coronavirus? We examined districts across the United States to find out.

• 13,000 School Districts, 13,000 Approaches to Teaching During Covid
• In Los Angeles, Teachers and Students Struggle With ‘No Human Contact’
• A School District Vowed to Stay Open, Until Its Staffing Ran Out
• ‘The Word of the Year Is Fluid’: The Pandemic Brings a New Teaching Style
• With Students Missing Online Classes, Teachers Are Going to Students
• Providence Kept Classrooms Open, and the Students Came Back
• The Board Voted to Keep Schools Closed. Parents Revolted.
• What One District Did to Prevent Students From Failing

Experts have found that remote instruction falls far short of classroom learning. But surveys have shown that a majority of Black and Latino parents in Los Angeles are still hesitant about sending their children back into schools. The district is roughly 74 percent Latino, 10 percent white, 8 percent African-American and 4 percent Asian-American. Roughly 80 percent of students live in poverty, according to the district.

“The teachers have really been trying, going out of their way to communicate, but there’s been virtually no human contact for months and months,” said Julie Regalado, whose daughter is a high school freshman. “Studying virtually is nobody’s dream. But I cannot imagine my daughter going back at all this year, since we’re seeing a rise in cases every day.”

Before the academic year began in August, Los Angeles school officials distributed hundreds of thousands of laptops, iPads and internet hot spots. But there have been holes in the system.

In November, a group of parents sued the state, asserting that officials were failing to live up to their constitutional duty to provide a free public education to every child. There were children without working computers, others with no access to the internet, and others who were not receiving the number of hours of instruction that the state required.

The district has tried to provide some classroom instruction to its neediest students. In October, it opened about 200 schools to provide in-person instruction to roughly 2,500 students who were either homeless, in foster care or had disabilities.

But shortly after Thanksgiving, Mr. Beutner closed even these small classrooms, citing the increasing number of coronavirus cases and deaths throughout Los Angeles County.

The district has been widely praised for continuing to distribute free meals — some 85 million and counting — to poor students and their families, even though their school buildings have remained closed.

Teachers, meanwhile, rely on frequent experimenting: Many say that their decades of experience inside classrooms are rendered moot and that distance learning has returned everyone to the trials and errors of their rookie years.

Ms. Elder-Aga has set up her classroom at her kitchen table, the bright books and illustrated alphabet that would normally line her classroom walls behind her. Instead of a whiteboard, she relies on computer slides to show students the sentence of the day. “I see the red fox,” she intoned one recent morning, coaxing them to read it aloud.

As she conducts class, she wonders what her students are getting from the lessons. Many of them struggle to find a quiet place in their home; she sees them wiggling on top of their beds or next to a brother or sister. Often, she asks students to mute themselves so that the voice of a sibling’s teacher doesn’t interrupt her.

“In a classroom, we would be closer to kids, kind of nudging their progress,” she said. “You could do the mom look and get every kid to give you eye contact — that’s just not happening now.”

Students, too, miss the casual, helpful interactions that come in classrooms and hallways.

Nefer Garcia, a 17-year-old senior at Ánimo Pat Brown High Charter School in South Los Angeles, said she longed for the days when she could greet a former teacher between classes. And when she began completing college applications and financial aid forms, she grew frustrated because “you can’t just go down the hall to ask for help.”

Though she has managed to keep her grades up, Ms. Garcia is suddenly more skeptical that her ambitions will work out. “It is not as easy to have this clear plan in mind and think all these goals are within reach, because I don’t know what tomorrow is going to bring. I don’t know what today is going to bring.”

To help, many schools are offering voluntary lessons on Saturdays to students who are among the furthest behind. But, as school officials understand acutely, those tutorials cannot totally take the place of in-person instruction.

This is especially true for the district’s youngest students, who would ordinarily pick up social skills by interacting with their teachers and peers in a lively classroom.

Ms. Elder-Aga worries that this year will dampen their enthusiasm for school next year.

“I am your first or second teacher, I am teaching you to love learning, but can I teach kids to attend school as well?” she asks herself. “It’s a puzzle.”

When Ms. Elder-Aga paused recently to consider whether her students were learning to read at an appropriate pace, she struggled to answer.

“I want to say yes, because it makes my heart ache to think we cannot rise to the occasion,” she said, noting that many children started further behind than usual this year because they were all-remote last spring as well.

“I want to think that we can provide enough ways to close that gap.”

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