Posted on by Californiacontrarian

Ahem! I Told You So

Those of you who have been reading my blogs for a while are cognizant of three things:

  1. I am oftentimes not a fan of the New York Times.
  2. Many, many times I have pointed out that Democrats do things which  are the most detrimental to those among us who are the least fortunate.
  3. School closures made little, if any sense, and the detrimental consequences of the switch over to on-line learning would affect children for years to come.

Those of you who are long time readers will be familiar with my solution to #3 … For the general population, in Sept. 2021, have all children restart in the same grade that they were in back in 2020 when the in-person schooling stopped. Would some children be relearning some things? Absolutely! But for children who are less fortunate … a big win, as they would not lose an entire year of education. What would be the downside of my plan? … kids would then graduate high school being one year older. In other words, there would have been no significant downside. (Part and parcel of my plan was that any child, vis-à-vis any parent, for whatever reason, could choose to advance to the next grade, but this advance would not be the norm.)

Did anybody listen to my plan? Did anybody have the foresight to predict that the so-called Zoom learning would be a complete disaster? Did anybody comprehend that online teaching would only benefit the teachers, and not the students? Did anyone realize the extent that the nonsensical education strategy that was used in mostly Democratic states would hurt the least fortunate, the most?  Hmmm!

On 5/5/22, David Leonhardt had an awesome article in the New York Times entitled, “New research is showing the high costs of long school closures in some communities.”

Mea culpa … David Leonhardt is right on! 

(Note that there are many graphs in his article. Graphs which I cannot reproduce.)

The following are quotes from his article:

“Academic researchers have since been studying the subject, and they have come to a consistent conclusion: Remote learning was a failure.”

“On average, students who attended in-person school for nearly all of 2020-21 lost about 20 percent worth of a typical school year’s math learning during the study’s two-year window.

“But students who stayed home for most of 2020-21 fared much worse. On average, they lost the equivalent of about 50 percent of a typical school year’s math learning during the study’s two-year window.”

“One of the most alarming findings is that school closures widened both economic and racial inequality in learning.”

“Low-income students, as well as Black and Latino students, fell further behind over the past two years, relative to students who are high-income, white or Asian. ‘This will probably be the largest increase in educational inequity in a generation,’ said Thomas Kane, an author of the Harvard study.”

“… school closures were what economists call a regressive policy, widening inequality by doing the most harm to groups that were already vulnerable.”

In addition schools that were located in the higher poverty areas had the greater number of remote weeks of school (another graph).

“Many of these schools are in major cities, which tend to be run by Democratic officials, and Republicans were generally quicker to reopen schools. High-poverty schools are also more likely to have unionized teachers, and some unions lobbied for remote schooling.”

Like I already said, in this article there are many graphs to emphasize what a mistake the prolonged closing down of in-person schooling was. Since I cannot reproduce these graphs, I urge everyone to read this article. 

This David Leonhardt piece closes with:

“Were many of these problems avoidable? The evidence suggests that they were. Extended school closures appear to have done much more harm than good, and many school administrators probably could have recognized as much by the fall of 2020.”

Ahem! I told you so!

5/7/22

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