Posted on 11/30/2020 10:44:52 AM PST by Kaslin
'The United States has reached a tipping point: The damage done to schoolchildren with scarce resources is likely to be irreparable.'
As report cards begin to roll out for fall, public schools across the nation are reporting a massive increase in children failing classes, due to the majority going online and the chaos of rolling COVID closures. In Fairfax, Virginia, one of the nation’s largest districts, “the percentage of middle school and high school students earning F’s in at least two classes jumped by 83 percent: from 6 percent to 11 percent,” the Washington Post reported Tuesday. That’s nearly 10,000 children.
Saint Paul, Minnesota, reported recently that 40 percent of high school students are failing, “about double what we might expect in a typical year,” said the large district’s superintendent. It’s even worse for younger children.
In Houston, Texas, the superintendent says 42 percent of students failed two or more classes this fall, up from 11 percent in a typical year. In Alabama, 5,000 children have never shown up for class this school year, either in-person or online.
In October, 79 percent of U.S. parents of school-age children told Pew their children were receiving either entirely or partially online instruction this school year. Only 20 percent of U.S. kids were reported as receiving fully in-person instruction this school year.
In-person instruction decreased further in November due to media panic over increasing COVID cases, even though research shows children are at lower risk of a bad case of COVID than from the seasonal flu, and most teachers are also young and in the low-risk category. Foreign countries that kept schools open found they did not significantly contribute to COVID spread. The United States is a first-world outlier in continuing to keep children online now for nearly an entire school year.
Data showing children are at low risk from COVID was available by early summer 2020, yet most public schools have kept or increased online activities after shutting down in the spring then providing chaotic, poor-quality instruction until the school year ended. Joe Biden’s plan would keep rolling school blackouts going indefinitely.
Ninety percent of parents whose children were getting exclusively in-person instruction were satisfied with it, while three-quarters of parents whose children had some or all online instruction told Pew they were satisfied. There is a clear disconnect between parents’ claims of satisfaction with online offerings and children’s actual performance.
Also, younger kids are experiencing more serious effects. F's for Fairfax high-schoolers are up by 50%.
But among middle-schoolers, F's are up by 300%:
* up 400% for middle-schoolers w/ disabilites
* up 400% for Hispanic middle-schoolers
* up 383% for English learners pic.twitter.com/TlGCZkXnka— Hannah Natanson (@hannah_natanson) November 24, 2020
Besides reinforcing that online instruction is clearly inferior to personal instruction, which was well-established long before COVID, all of these reports show that the children who are most harmed are the most at-risk: poor and struggling learners. This matches the large amount of other research that finds that the pre-COVID mediocrity of American public education handicaps all children and taxpayers, which is most visible in children whose families cannot or will not compensate for schooling failures.
Once children fall behind in school, they rarely ever recover. U.S. public schools are extremely poor at remediation, largely because the leftist ideology controlling it despises the core curriculum that most strongly propels achievement for all. The left’s war on norms, normality, and a common culture makes closing education gaps almost impossible — even though that’s precisely what America’s educationally abused COVID generation needs more than ever.
The Post says the spike in fail rates “confirm[s] fears about how the pandemic is driving an equity gap in American education that may prove impossible to close. Fairfax’s data shows that children who are engaged and care deeply about school — children in stable home situations, whose parents have sufficient resources — will stay engaged in an online environment, while children whose temperament, socioeconomic status or home situation have historically barred them from academic achievement will slip further and further behind.”
This is terrible news for taxpayers, as children like this graduate into economic dependence on their fellow citizens and the United States is facing the largest debt crisis in human history.
“More than 70% of Black students are learning entirely remotely right now, compared to about 40% of white students and about 60% Hispanic or Latinx students,” according to Marketplace Edison Research. The firm says this is partly because more black parents chose online learning because higher percentages of African Americans suffer from COVID infections.
Teachers of children who have stable families with a non-working parent free to fill in instruction schools are refusing to provide also privately report many such children are also not doing well. They also have been forced into the constant chaos of changing school situations, high rates of isolation, the distractions of screen-centered interaction, and a lack of professional in-person instruction. Like America’s “good” school districts, the middle-class kids with stable families look better in comparison to the devastated children. But they’re being seriously hurt, too.
As researchers such as E.D. Hirsch and Jay P. Greene have demonstrated, America’s middle-class students and highly rated schools have been at best mediocre for decades when compared to peers in other highly developed nations. The United States’ free economy helps compensate for its academic decrepitude, but that advantage is narrowing. The U.S. economy is increasingly saddled with government and consumer debt, and the U.S.’s high numbers of unstable homes and schools that aren’t capable of compensating for them produce increasing numbers of adults unfit for work. COVID instability increases the pressure on this already weak social infrastructure.
It is already possible to see what the long-term consequences will be for the nation. It was possible to see that back in March when schools were first closed. As I wrote in April:
Since the typical public school is extremely poor at remedial education and lifting children above their demographics, it’s likely that millions of American children will never recover from the educational and thus economic setbacks of shutting down their schools this year. Kids who fall behind in U.S. public schools very rarely recover. Plus, the Common Core era has already seen a decline in U.S. education quality. As always, these compounded setbacks will be worst for the children who can least afford them.
The Post paraphrases Jack Schneider, an assistant professor of education at the University of Massachusetts at Lowell, as saying: “the United States has reached a tipping point: The damage done to schoolchildren with scarce resources is likely to be irreparable.” U.S. governors, school superintendents, legislatures who refused to check pandemic excesses, and other leaders who failed this generation cannot say they weren’t warned. But by the time the evils they have caused can no longer be hidden, they will be out of office with a nice retirement fund, still assuaging their guilt with the lie that lockdowns “saved lives.”
There are only a few strategies possible to help children overcome the damage our society has done to them. Most importantly, state legislatures must immediately grant parents the power to microtarget effective in-person instruction to their children through education savings accounts. The only schools that have a track record of overcoming education gaps as a sector are charter, Christian, and home schools.
Second, states must end the “college to nowhere” reality with drastically improved secondary trades apprenticeships. As Stanley Kurtz writes, the right must “build up a competing, quicker and cheaper apprenticeship sector that serves the upper-middle class as well as blue-collar workers.” Ideology has ruined K-16 education in America, and kids handicapped by COVID closures cannot afford that. They need paths to self-sufficiency that won’t make them mental and financial slaves.
Democrats aren’t going to do this — school closures were their demand in the first place, and education’s ideological corruption serves their interests by creating economic and mental dependents. If Republicans don’t stop sitting on their hands in their moms’ basements like Biden and start helping the kids and our nation effectively address this, they don’t deserve to exist. This is an existential crisis for America.
> “She is also the 2013-14 recipient of a Robert Novak journalism fellowship for in-depth reporting on ***Common Core*** national education standards.”
Pretty little thing. Too bad she’s stupid.
“Kids in well-run Digital Academies do much better than their Marxist indoctrinated brick and mortar peers. This piece looks as if it was written by lawyers aligned with socialist educational unions.”
See my post right above. Those academies do well because the students are cherry picked. People who send their kids to private aschools generally are ambitious, wealthier and have goals set for their kids and face it their kids are smarter-good genes.
Brick and mortar schools have every economic strata and that is where the poorer and dumber kids end up.
all by design
Our brother and his wife are teachers, and there is no teaching going on right now. ....That’s OK. They get their paycheck to pay their Union dues. Sheesh, priorities you know.
But see, the new mantra is “online schooling simply doesn’t work.” There is no other statement qualifying this very black and white thinking with zero evidence.
Everyone is falling for this statement.
Public online schooling with teachers who are ill equipped and discouraged from thinking outside of the box are struggling. They are struggling because the very nature of online schooling requires the educator to be a master in their fields. Today’s teachers are told what to present and how to present it. There is no deviation from the presentation or deep understanding of the material being presented. That is discouraged. That is why public virtual classes are failing the students. No school was prepared for their teachers to teach this way and I do believe now the negativity towards it is encouraged so not only can we go back to the horrible status quo that is public education, but drag those who enjoy the benefits of online private schools back in the door and erase their rights and freedoms to pursue education as best suits them.
The burdens on the students are ridiculous to teach themselves in this new system. I’ve seen it . I’ve also seen the material and it is weak and does not flow logically.
I have three college graduates and two high schoolers who have participated in virtual schools . The schools are excellent and so was the teaching.
Check out wilostar3D if you want to see what is available that the public school can’t duplicate or refuses to do so.
Parents should be given their tax dollars back to employ the teachers they want. Some parents are coordinating with others and grouping their children into small classes and hiring teachers they want. That is how it should work.
I took both my boys out of public school early on, and I can attest there was a large learning curve to switch to homeschooling.
The biggest problems we faced were that they were not taught to think in public school. They also did not trust me to be in charge of their learning.
I had a good friend who urged me to stick with it. After 6 months, things started to change. My boys learned to think for themselves and I became less of a teacher and more of a facilitator. By the time they were in middle school and high school, I had to do very little. They did school mostly online at that point and when they came to difficult concepts, they knew how to find answers themselves.
My older son aced the standardized tests and was accepted to every college to which he applied, but he chose a trade and loves it. He runs his own crew and is doing well. My youngest son also did well on standardized tests, started doing college work at 16 and is now on track to graduate with his bachelor’s at 19.
So, I know there are a lot of logistical problems with homeschooling with working parents and such, but I suspect that there are other issues as well. Trying to conform children to a mold when they are distance learning seems to me to be an impossible hurdle. Also, one on one really does highlight learning issues and gaps in their knowledge which I suspect were there already, but easier to hide in a group setting.
One of the joys of homeschooling was that my boys could learn at their own pace, in their own way. One of my sons would learn spelling while jumping on a trampoline, and the other could spend hours in front of a book or computer. They both struggled in school before I pulled them out, but they quickly caught up and surpassed their peers. My younger son is tutoring his younger friends who are going through the online experience now.
I didn’t mean to write so much, but I believe that what makes homeschooling work is exactly the reason it is not working in these online setups by public schools. Kids are natural learners, and too often that ability gets trained out of them in formal education and groupthink.
Socially, we kept them involved in sports, church, community activities, field trips with friends and other activities. They are socially well-adjusted. The kids right now being kept from group activities, I believe is not helping their emotional well-being.
How pathetic watching so-called “conservatives” cry and whine over the closing of public schools.
Apparently, Republicans like socialism, too, just a smaller degree of it.
exactly what the libtard socialists want
- even dumber kids
- teachers find a way to work even LESS hard
- while still gett ing full salaries
- and the unions still get full dues
- and they can prep the school buildings for internment and death camp for their enemies, because after the scare tactics for school shootings these places are now fortress prisons with metal detectors all over
Oh no. Kids are missing their screwels. Rest assured all families who care are making sure their kids are getting an education. The rest of them were getting state edukation and indoctrination. I doubt society is any worse off for it.
They can be deemed educated.
Washington Connections Academy (WACA)
Top rated, tuition-free, hundreds of extracurricular activities and events, parent message boards, live video lessons with fully credentialed certified teachers, great curriculum.
Connections Academy is nationwide with an Academy in each state. They've been operating for years, well-run, established, recently doubled, tripled enrollment due to the covid.
But something strange just now happened. When I went to go grab the link for ya, I noticed it came back blank with "The request is blocked". Is ghoulgle blocking WACA traffic?
Anyways, if you're a skool teecher then I can unnerstan you taking that opinionated Pavlov jerky response.
Me, I'm just a lowly PhD in theoretical sciences. But hey, I'm improving! I used to look at myself in the mirror every 5 minutes or so, now I got it down to once every other day. It helps that I'm older now and frighten myself when I look in the mirror. But not all is moving in the right direction. I used to be just an SOB, now I'm a mean SOB. Why Trump Admin won't hire me. Democrats will though, but they're too stupid for my tastes.
See #30. It’s informative until I tried injecting some self-exalting/deprecating humor. Just read the first parts.
Doesn’t much matter, you don’t have to be able to do much as a peasant in a communist dictatorship anyway.
I enjoyed the post, thanks! We used Alpha Omega and my boys enjoyed it. We also have a large hs community in my area with their own sports program, they didn’t miss a thing - sports, dances, homecoming, prom, JROTC, clubs, etc.
My granddaughter is so far behind now, we are going to try and get her held back a year in a new school. I kept her during the virtual learning disaster. It had less than 45 minutes a day of actual face to face teaching, the rest was filling out pages on the Chromebook. Poor kid had to stay at the computer for nearly 6 hours a day. They finally went back and still have no textbooks “because of Covid”. They are talking about shutting down again. God help us all. She was an A, B Honor Roll student before this.
Heard an interesting interview with some fellow on Bannon’s War Room. Forgot his name but he wrote an article: “Logos, Davos, Soros” was a publisher for The Remnant..
He said that Bill Gates (NWO) player’s desired outcome was to get everyone dependent on operating via computers. Thus his take on PANDEMIC-online learning was the bridge away from in person learning.
That sounds about right. These well-oiled online public schools have to lay low though. The school districts see them as revenue poachers Lol!
Seriously, many of the brick and mortar commie schools have had to switch to online this year and they don’t know WTF they’re doing.
And now I find google appears to be blocking traffic to the established tuition-free online academies. Yes, Virginia, I think that’s deliberate.
The brick and mortar public school Teacher’s Unions need a major smack down. They truly are nauseating. Of course, their young teachers are all idealistic and smiley face until they learn the whole thing is a mess by design and can only be fixed by higher taxes or Nasty Pelooosi sending billions in stimulus so their pension fund managers can play the stock market enriching their hedge fund buddies who sit poised to short whatever is bought on their behalf.
Damn I wish there was a Rubicon I could cross.
But see, the new mantra is “online schooling simply doesn’t work.”
Half the parents are not pushing their own kids, 1/3 right off the top do not have computers at home or slow internet making the process intolerable.
A conservative teacher friend of mine said only a 1/3 of his students are doing all the work.
As I said I work with business owners every day. Nearlly all can’t wait to bring back their employees. It’s a big fail for most companies. I have tried zoom and skype with my buisness clients..it is darn tough. Way easier to show a proposal in real life.
WFH and online schooling takes discipline and most parents do not have the skills or even want to do it.
1/2 the parents out there are totally worthless to begin with. Only the wealthy, educated parents are making it work.
This has n othing to do with sticking up for public schools which I hate with a passion
already colleges are saying they just won’t use the SAT or ACT any more. So the kids won’t have to take them. And I expect the online teachers will just pass everybody along like the inner city schools have done for generations now. After all, it’s not their problem - the teachers are getting paid.
Sadly he is not alone. I have heard similar stories from otherwise good students. They hate the phoney online learning and are just skimming by or have checked out. Mark my words, most schools will just figure out a way to move kids along. Extra credit, a little fake summer school, it will be something.
> “WFH and online schooling takes discipline and most parents do not have the skills or even want to do it.”
You are carrying the narrative of public school unions.
The superior performance of digital academies is no longer even arguable.
Parents that stay home find that everything is all done for them, online schedules and assignments, online office hours, classes, online homework, calendars, progress tracking, contact time tracking, everything.
It’s so easy for a parent.
For parents that must work, they can designate a ‘Learning Coach’ in their community to sit with kids while they attend online.
These online schools are awesome. ask yourself why you haven’t heard about them?
Democrats control the public school unions, they control the media and the message. They are not about to give parents a superior independent alternative.
The public brick and mortar schools have a business model that demands there must always be a crisis of some sort and the only answer is more money.
But it never gets fixed and never will. There are too many hands in it that rely on its teetering failure.
The online public academies are a counterexample to their constant crisis business model.
That’s why you don’t know about them.
But I’ve given you a link so you can be informed and share with others. And note that Google is blocking access to it when searched.
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