It is going to be a few years before we realize just how badly remote learning is hurting kids.
The social and emotional problems are coming, be sure of that, but the academic losses are going to be staggering.
Simply put, online learning doesn’t work for most kids. It doesn’t work the worst for low income kids. And it is 100% ruinous for kids with learning disabilities or special needs.
But yet we push on, with more schools opting for online-only classes for the next two weeks or until mid-January.
That means many school kids, just look at Milwaukee, won’t have been in a classroom since last March. That is nearly one full calendar year. It is parts of two school years.
The evidence is mounting that kids are failing and being left behind.
From Joy Pullman at The Federalist:
“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.”
And that’s just the kids who get an F. That doesn’t take into account the kids who have figured out how to do their work without really learning anything.
In Wisconsin we won’t know the true impact of all of this remote learning for years. The state didn’t test kids last spring, and likely won’t test kids next spring either.
By the time last year’s high school sophomores are seniors, someone may bother to see if they learned anything.
Colleges are changing their admission standards to account for this increase in failure. But hey, they’ve always been more than willing to let students pay to take high school classes again.
The point of public schools is not to get kids into college. It’s not to produce welders or store clerks either. The point of public education is to produce young people who can be productive, contributing members of society at 18, 19, or 20-years-old. We are clearly failing at that. Online-only learning is simply making things much worse.
And why? Why are we failing kids? Not because of safety, the numbers show the coronavirus is not a threat to them. We are failing yet another class of kids because teachers unions want to flex their muscle and get their people paid to stay at home.
If report cards came out today, we certainly know who the biggest F (and maybe a You too) should go to.
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