> this is going to widen the achievement gap between students with high parental involvement and those with low parental involvement

How could it not? Volunteering in my kids' school since they were in kindergarten, it was sadly clear to me that some of the kids got dealt a pretty bad hand in terms of parental involvement (often out of conflicting demands on the parents, I'm sure). COVID-related home-schooling hasn't helped anything I'm sure.

If a child refuses to do anything when they were physically in school what was being done about it then?

You can’t physically force someone to learn then and you can’t now.

Not sure anything’s changed really.

All they did before was remove disruptive children and now I guess they remove themselves. Remains an unsolved problem!

They were less likely to refuse the work. For one, kids are herd animals and when other kids are doing work, it motivates the slacker. For the other, teachers actually make them - most kids just kinda don't want to do it and will if pushed by teacher or motivated by system of rewards.

Second, doing work at home alone all the time is much demotivating for even good kids. And parents are less fun to explain things then teacher, because most parents sux at it all. Some end in power struggle others just don't know what to do.

I can't say for sure but it was my impression that many of these students don't have parents at home during the day. The school system my gf works for is in an area with several meat processing plants, which I assume are considered essential. There are also many undocumented workers in that area. For those who were doing jobs that weren't considered essential, they probably can't rely on being able to collect unemployment and had to go find other work. It's a lot to ask of middle school age children to be self motivated especially if their friends around the neighborhood were outside playing or coming over to hangout, regardless of lockdown orders or not.

Teachers are so under appreciated. It takes a lot of knowledge, training, and some have years and years of experience on how to make kids pay attention to the class and study. I am trying really hard at home but there's no way I can even match any of the teachers my son has at his school on almost everything they do.

You'd send them to in-school expulsion (basically an empty room for 8 hours, no talking, no phones allowed.

Why would they do anything more there if they weren't willing to do anything in the classroom?

Most bad kids feed off an audience and distract the class. 8 hours in near silence, with no peers to feed off is a punishment.