Consistent attendance has dropped by 15% statewide.https://t.co/clTqWoIpw7
pic.twitter.com/E5ApAz4aSa
— Alpha News (@AlphaNewsMN) August 30, 2023
Posted on 08/30/2023 9:46:06 PM PDT by SeekAndFind
Some on the Left, such as Mehdi Hassan, are still on a crusade to convince Americans that the shutdowns and mandates during COVID were great for everybody.
Last week he did a show focused on how closing schools down during COVID was a good idea (although, in a fascinating twist, he sometimes seemed to imply that time in school itself is bad for kids). You can watch his idiocy here:
Mehdi Hassan is such a political shill that he would rather twist logic and reason to justify school closures, rather than accept the simple fact that this position pushed by the Democrats was deeply harmful. Luckily he is on MSNBC where no one watches. https://t.co/jW0S4yJV0e
— Vinay Prasad MD MPH (@VPrasadMDMPH) August 25, 2023
I’ve written before about the missing students–millions of students have just disappeared off of school rolls since COVID, and haven’t shown up in private school or home school rolls either. They just disappeared, and I am willing to bet a million dollars that much of our crime wave is related to those missing students who now roam the streets as predators.
But there is another cohort that doesn’t get enough attention: students who are on the books, but who attend school quite irregularly now.
As I was reading Alpha News, the excellent local news source that tells the stories that the MSM ignores, I ran across this depressing story:
Consistent attendance has dropped by 15% statewide.https://t.co/clTqWoIpw7
pic.twitter.com/E5ApAz4aSa— Alpha News (@AlphaNewsMN) August 30, 2023
You read that headline right: the majority of students in Minneapolis, Minnesota’s largest school district, no longer consistently attend school. And throughout the state large numbers of students have become part-time students in essence, as they no longer go to school with sufficient regularity.
Since 2019, the last time attendance data was released, the number of students with consistent attendance records has dropped from 85% to 69.8%, according to data for the 2021-22 school year.
In Minneapolis, the number of students consistently attending school that year was just 45.8%.
The data also found that, based on 2023 statewide assessments, 50.3% of students are not proficient in reading and 54.7% are not proficient in math.
Minnesota prides itself on its education system. In fact, a persistent myth in our state is about the “Minnesota Miracle,” which refers to the state taking over the primary responsibility for funding schools, ensuring their enduring quality.
What crap. Half of all students in the state can’t read or do math at grade level, and in the urban districts, the stats are worse.
Public schools get far too much slack. Because we remember those teachers we loved as kids–I certainly do, and can still name a few a half-century later–we don’t give a hard-headed look at what the schools are doing right here and right now. Far too many kids are getting cheated out of a decent education, and it shows.
Bad teachers should be fired, good teachers rewarded, most administrators should be cut from the payroll, and money should follow the students to whatever school serves them best.
It’s time to drop our nostalgia for what was; what is there today is corrupt and should be transformed or abolished. Period.
In many cases, public schools do more harm than good, and in most cases, even the good they do doesn’t reach the bare minimum we should be allowed to expect.
I would happily see every good teacher make twice as much money. I would even more happily see every mediocre teacher or bad teacher let go.
Yes, I know that the parents are often the problem. I know that the rules make being a teacher nearly a fool’s errand. At least we can do something about the latter. The former? The minimum is getting the disruptive kids out of the classroom.
No more talk about the “school-to-jail pipeline” or other nonsense. Get the schools under control, kids attending, and real learning happening. That comes first. Then find a way to save the kids going down the wrong path and help as many as possible. That comes second. And for the rest? They will likely wind up in jail–which is no worse than what happens now. At least we are helping the other two groups, instead of ruining schools for everybody in a vain attempt to salvage the unsalvageable.
COVID shutdowns made everything worse, and the George Floyd/BLM riots and the coddling of the rioters made things infinitely worse. The one good thing they did was lay bare how indifferent school officials and the teachers’ unions are to student well-being.
And here we see the result: millions of children have simply given up on school.
ARTH ping!
More winning.
One important result of the stupid COVID lockdowns is that they convinced many people that attending school simply isn’t very important after all.
Some people think that getting a piece of paper is more valuable then getting a true education.
This ping list is for the other articles of interest to homeschoolers about education and public school. This can occasionally be a fairly high volume list. Articles pinged to the Another Reason to Homeschool List will be given the keyword of ARTH. (If I remember. If I forget, please feel free to add it yourself)
The main Homeschool Ping List handles the homeschool-specific articles. I hold both the Homeschool Ping List and the Another Reason to Homeschool Ping list. Please freepmail me to let me know if you would like to be added to or removed from either list, or both.
I suspect there were some things the left never expected to happen because of their tyrannical lock policies and this was one of them.
The end result will be that there will be fewer kids for them to indoctrinate and infect against normal Christian values. The more kids who can be saved this way, by not attending the public so-called schools, the better.
Other side of this...maybe we should ask...if they aren’t at school, where are they and what are they doing?
we just need to pay the teachers more money and give them more time off..../s/
Public schools are paid on a per pupil basis. The number of teachers hired is dictated by enrollment. The million missing ,kids are like fake voters. They never existed. The rolls were padded.
Government schools are just democrat party indoctrination centers.
The online Kahn Academy teaches far more than any public school.
Immigration is job security for public school/government conglomerates. Home school or home school pods or private schools are the way to go. Public schools , for the most part, are garbage.
The country should make a focused effort to end government schools and any sort of teachers union.
School choice is a better idea.
Home schooling is the best idea.
One of the big “selling points” of public schools has been the importance of “socialization” when kids gets together. Well, anyone who has been paying attention understands that one of the worst aspects of public schools is the socialization. It’s all indoctrination and bullying and violence.
Yep. This is our Department of Education’s way of controlling public education. They get the schools hooked on easy Fed Money and then threaten them they’ll take if away if they don’t comply with essentially illegal Federal mandates.
Sometimes I think they learned it from drug dealers. Free samples to kids to get them hooked on drugs they’ll eventually end up doing anything for....
What does ‘consistently attend’ mean? Does this statistic cover all grades?
The City States suffer from loss of students, not America
Good! Now abolish the public indoctrination centers!!
Admins in Fairfax County are responding to low test scores by going absolutely control-freak. Teachers have to write out their lesson plans, including what practically amounts to scripting their lessons. Gone are the days when you can say 11:10- 11:25 Chapter 4 pages 37-41; Nope! You have to script out all your interactions. Do you have any idea how much time that takes? So all the teachers are quitting (also because students are now allowed to sexually assault and beat teachers unconscious).
So they’re combining classes because they are HUNDREDS of teachers short. So there’s still MORE work.
School and education is acting white. It is not cool.
Again, it’s past time for America to dissolve our govt indoctrination centers and let individual communities dictate what is taught and who teaches it. Teacher’s unions have got to go.
The pandemic spurred many parents to try homeschooling. It’s booming now so they must have like it.
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