COVID-19 is the scapegoat for failing test scores. It has been going down for years.
Our school district has 4% math proficiency 11% reading proficiency. Handwriting is illegible.
Public schools are not teaching the foundations of reading, writing, and arithmetic, and majoring on the minors.
Oh, I forgot to add that students speak 17 different languages. How did that happen? /s
Its the end of public sector education as the catch all, the spending is not worth the results. Class sizes have been reduced as asked over the past 3 decades and the performance is worse. The quicker the money can be distributed to students to buy a publicly financed al la cart education from private vendors the better. If public schools remain they have to compete in a system with a dashboard that should be done quarterly. If a student is failing standarized testing monitoring from outsiders should step up. Making the student accept they have to actualy take the test instead of presenting answers quickly might bring a ton of schools go from failing back to the mean.
As a young man, I went to a private education “night school” add on to public school, it took less than a year of 2 hours a week of private tutoring to correct my shortfall back to way above the public school mean. My parents spent about 10% of what it would have cost just to send me to private school for customized education in late 70s. Every failing school student should have some account to pull 10%-20% of per student spending to correct problems privately. The results of that spending should be shared publicly.