The real question is why they didn’t do worse
Today we have a new study out that shows kids fell way behind in math and slightly less so in reading during the first year of the pandemic. Naturally everyone’s blaming the schools and the teachers for not teaching in person, even though we had no vaccines and nobody knew in the first year how deadly it was going to end up being for kids. (We knew it would kill adults — it killed hundreds of thousands — but who cares about them?)
Josh Marshall has some thoughts:
Lot of write ups of new text results today, the first that gives apples to apples comparison nationwide. They show steep drops in reading and especially math over the pandemic. But most write ups – I’m looking especially at you Axios – leave one point mostly unmentioned.
The results show little correlation if any between test results and duration of school closures. The results are just out. And perhaps deeper analysis will show them. But at least on initial review they’re not there either on a state or school district basis. This doesn’t end the debate about school closure policy and remote. There are other measures of learning and there is also the psychological/cognitive development impact. But it’s an important check on a widespread and highly questionable assumption.
Every time we hear new details about the academic or emotional challenges kids are having today there’s a chorus of people who attack teachers unions, or school boards or blue states about closures. But there’s another possibility: that students are suffering because they lived through a chaotic and horrifying historical event that completely upended everyone’s life. The assumption that all the bad stuff was tied to excessively long closures isn’t just a thing on the right. It’s also pushed heavily by hordes of highly credentialed sociologists and economists. It may be less true than a lot of us think.
Chalkbeat looked at the data and did find some limited correlations. But if you look at their actual breakdown it looks very limited at best. Also notable that edu policy is often more by district than state.
https://www.chalkbeat.org/2022/10/24/23417139/naep-test-scores-pandemic-school-reopening
It wld actually be surprising to me, indeed, is surprising to me that there’s not more correlation. Kids I know in my social circle have examples where they took subject year 1 during remote and then took subject year 2 afterwards but they were lost in the second year because none of the year 1 class was retained and maybe was never learned. But again, the data here shows the correlation is very limited at best.
Originally tweeted by Josh Marshall (@joshtpm) on October 24, 2022.
I’m going to guess that even if they had kept the schools open, many teachers would have had to quit because they were living with illnesses and other co-morbidities or taking care of elderly or sick people. Many parents would have kept their kids out of school and tried to homeschool them themselves and a lot more teachers and staff would have been hospitalized and died. Everything would have been so disrupted (and frankly, horrifying) that kids would have lost much of that year anyway.
Everyone hated virtual but maybe we should be asking ourselves if we weren’t very lucky to have had it. The alternative might have actually been much worse for the kids.
And, as Josh says, kids were suffering from the same thing the rest of us were suffering from: a terrifying pandemic that turned the whole world upside down which none of us knew how to deal with. Of course children paid a price for that. They always do during major calamities. To blame teachers unions and school administrators for that is simply seeking a scapegoat for something over which none of us had any control.
And the fact that we had a miscreant running the country who was far more concerned with his re-election than saving lives certainly didn’t help. He’s personally responsible for much of the chaos and insecurity we all went through during that time.