Posted on by Californiacontrarian

Sweden … Primary Education

From the very beginning of Covid, I have been interested in Sweden’s approach to the virus. Their approach was markedly different from almost all other countries in that it was a much less restrictive approach that depended much more on individual responsibility and much less on mandates. In the beginning they made an error in that they did not try to seal off their nursing homes, and thus their mortality statistics suffered in comparison to those of their Scandinavian neighbors.

Today I saw something that exemplified the difference between the U.S. and Sweden in how each country handled young school children. As a point of reference educating young school children in the U.S. this year was an enormous challenge. The children in grades 1-3 started off this school year way behind and in general did not totally recover to where these grade levels had been in past years. (This info is from a teacher who teaches in a  large city grade school.)

When Covid first hit Sweden, the country’s public health authorities made it clear that daycare centers and primary schools, which serve students in grades 1 through 3, must stay open. Swedish government held on to that policy early on even after its COVID-19 death rates surpassed those of its Nordic neighbors.

In a study published in the International Journal of Educational Research, a team of researchers at Stockholm’s Karolinska University analyzed data from 97,073 primary school students across Sweden. The goal was to investigate whether Swedish children suffered any potential learning loss during the 2020-2021 school year.

The researchers compared average LegiLexi test scores from the four school years from 2017–2018 to 2020–2021 in two aspects: word decoding and reading comprehension. The result shows that test-takers in the 2020–2021 “pandemic year” performed just as well as those in previous school years in both areas of language.

“We conclude that there is no evidence of a learning loss regarding early reading skills in Swedish primary school students,” the researchers wrote.

The finding comes amid numerous reports on loss of literacy skills among American children in the aftermath of pandemic lockdowns and widespread school closures.

According to a report (pdf) published this February by curriculum and testing company Amplify, in the U.S. the percentage of students at highest risk for not learning to read jumped by 8 percent during the pandemic, from 29 percent in the 2019–2020 school year to 37 percent in the 2021–22 school year.

Another study (pdf), conducted by the University of Virginia, found that about 35 percent of Virginia’s children in kindergarten through 2nd grade scored below their expected levels of literacy in the fall of 2021.

So young children who do very very with Covid were kept out of school in the U.S. at the behest of the Teacher’s Unions, and not surprisingly, it is the children who are suffering.

7/11/22

californiacontrarian

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