Distance education in Chicago Public Schools in 1937

In September 1937, amid a polio outbreak in Chicago, Chicago Public Schools undertook a pioneering large-scale program that provided at-home distance education to the city's elementary school students through lessons transmitted by radio broadcasts and materials published in newspapers.

On August 31, the Chicago Board of Health, led by Herman Bundesen, ordered an indefinite postponement of the opening of schools, which had been scheduled to begin their fall semesters on September 7.

[1][3][4] President of the Chicago Board of Education James B. McCahey announced on September 2 that schools would remain "indefinitely closed".

In 1930, during a school closure in Marquette, Michigan, the station WBEO worked with the Daily Mining Journal to provide students with audible and textual instruction.

[10] Johnson cited a lack of enough radio air time as the reason that high school students were not part of the program either.

[3] In order to educate students who missed broadcasts, such as those who not have access to a radio or those who encountered poor reception, make-up work was created.

[8] The purpose of these tests was both to assess the effectiveness of the instruction,[13] as well as to decide what grade credit each student would receive for their work on the radio lessons.

[12] Superintendent Johnson gave the estimate that 315,000 students listened to the radio lessons, but also stated that it was "impossible to give an accurate check".

[3] Some educators and analysts proposed the possibility that "the pupils who benefited by the radio lessons" might have also been "those who need them least" and "who would suffer least by curtailment of their classroom instruction".

[8] Promptly following Chicago's lead, a number of other American communities that experienced polio outbreaks of their own, such as Rochester, New York and Cleveland, were quick to launch radio distance education programs.