An entire generation of students is at risk of forever being behind. And even those that always attended online class, did all the work, and excelled given the circumstances are still going to fall behind because so many of their peers in the classroom are behind that entire curriculums are changing to accommodate those students.
I feel terrible for everyone involved, but especially the kids that have been set back literally years. And what's more is that this is going to further the divide between lower income/high income families. Those that were able to afford private tutoring, have one parent stop working to help educate their children, or afford to transfer their kids to a private/prep school.
There may be nothing we take more for granted in this country than public education and the very foundations are crumbling beneath us.
The end product of career success seems to be much more nature than nurture
That ship sailed when Common Core was introduced. Teaching kids neat hacks instead of actual math will permanently stunt their progress.
They chose not to fail them.
My son reports that his math classes for the last two years "are the same thing over and over again".
In Europe this isnt even a possibility. If you pass students without teaching them your school gets audited by state commission.
The obvious culprit, to me, is teacher's unions. Why don't we fire bad teachers and hire good ones? Seems like the teacher's unions prevent that. Compensating teachers based on tenure rather than performance is another teacher's union problem.
I find the whole thing very discouraging. Society is allowing immense waste of time, effort, and potential over very obvious problems.
I think another obvious thing to do is make it easier for people to become full or part time teachers by removing requirements around licensing and education. If you can prove subject matter expertise - something that, frankly, current teachers should be required to do, and demonstrate an ability to teach then you shouldn't need the licensing and degree requirements that many public schools have.
In my mind this would more like person X is curious about teaching. Maybe they are retired or underemployed or considering a career change. X is reasonably smart, knows math/science/writing/whatever to a high standard, and likes teaching. In our current reality X must either commit serious time and effort to getting the credentials required to start teaching, or just not do it. In my imagination X could easily pick up a role helping an existing teacher (after passing some subject matter tests). Maybe X is grading homework, helping prepare lesson plans, whatever the teacher needs. As X demonstrates their ability the teacher lets X take on more and responsibilities until X is either a full teacher, decides they don't like teaching, or is bounced for some reason.
If it turns out we don't have enough people who want to be teachers then we can consider raising salaries - but, again, they are already higher than average and our current hiring practices are so bad we should try improving those first.
One final thought regarding salaries - I think it really throws things off that teacher pay increases with their tenure. This results in a system where new teachers really are severely underpaid and old teachers are well paid. This can result in attrition among new teachers. Likewise, when teachers are laid off it is by reverse seniority. Again, this is due to the teacher's unions. In my opinion - if a teacher quickly ramps up to leading high performance classes then they should quickly ramp up to the top of the teacher pay scales as well - with performance bonuses thrown in.
1 - https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d17/tables/dt17_211.60.a...
So 8% drop
It's really sad.
And it did not matter how they performed, if they showed up for class, we passed them and sent them along. Also if they didn't show up, we passed them and sent them along anyway.
We should be absolutely ashamed of the public school system in our country. It'd corruption and perverse incentives from the top all the way down. Disgusting.
And that was likely behind where I would have been had I not immigrated to Canada from Europe, where I had been into basic one-variable linear equation solving by the end of fourth grade, plus other topics like sets. For instance we used a kind of set partitioning method to convert numbers into binary.
When I came to Canada in the fifth grade, the teacher took me to a room and probed me on various arithmetic of increasing difficulty. She was blown away that I could do long division of like a five digit number by a three dight number, either leaving it with a remainder, or else continuing into the fraction.
The US school system may have its separate problems, but the wider issue is not just there.
We have a sizable number of people in western academia saying math is racist.
I'd be interested to see the numbers for other countries that implemented similar policies. It'd also be interesting comparing districts that were closed for a minimal amount of time vs districts that were closed the longest.
Although the previous numbers from 2019 show that there are much larger problems in education.
Remote learning does not work. It fundamentally does not provide necessary environmental aspects for the healthy development of a child, even if they can be cajoled into attending and focusing.
Note that losing a year is not as simple as simply being a year behind, either. Consider spending a year completely indoors from age 25-26, say. You don't come out the same as your doppelganger who spent 25-26 living a normal and balanced life.
Any chance this is conflated with lousy reading skills as all testing relies on that.
