Public schools' response to the Covid pandemic badly damaged parents' faith in schools, writes Rick Hess in Law & Liberty. It may never recover.
Five years ago, schools closed to "slow the spread." When it became clear that two weeks wasn't going to be enough, districts began offering "Zoom school."
But most districts weren't "providing any instruction" three weeks after the doors closed, according to the Center on Reinventing Public Education, writes Hess. "Our local school district, Virginia’s wealthy Arlington Public Schools, ponderously explained it wouldn’t teach any new material that spring 'as part of our commitment to ensuring equity of access to new learning for all students'.”
Other districts also lowered expectations for teachers and students in the name of equity, he writes. "The Oregon Department of Education ordered all schools (including virtual schools!) to pause learning in March 2020," while Philadelphia told teachers "not to teach, take attendance, or evaluate student work, so as to ensure some students didn’t learn more than others."
When parents looked for alternatives, some states -- Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, and Oregon -- "barred families from enrolling in virtual charter schools," Hess writes. "Families scrambling to organize learning pods were impugned for perpetuating 'white supremacy' by the likes of NPR and the New York Times."
Education Secretary Betsy DeVos urged schools to reopen in fall 2020, after it became clear the risks were low. She was called a teacher killer.
In fall 2020, the Chicago Teachers Union charged that “the push to reopen schools is rooted in sexism, racism, and misogyny.”
"In early 2021, nearly a year after schools first closed their doors, most children were still not back in classrooms," writes Hess. At schools that did reopen, learning was far from "normal."
"Zoom in a room" students would sit in silent, masked, socially-distanced rows while watching their teacher deliver an online lecture from home. It’s as if schools were seeking to alienate students and dehumanize learning.
"Classrooms of students home" would be sent home for 10 days "if a single student tested positive for COVID, despite the limited rates of in-school spread and the frequency of false positives," Hess writes. "Open" schools weren't reliably open.
Most parents had seen schools as "reliable custodians" of their children, he writes. They trusted that curriculum and instruction were appropriate and apolitical. What they saw during remote learning made them question everything.
They were told that students would "bounce back" from Covid chaos. Instead, students have "lost between one-third and one-half of a year in reading, and between a half-year and a full year in math — with the largest losses associated with more remote learning," writes Hess.
The neediest "Covid kids" lost the most academic progress, and there's no sign they're catching up.
Public confidence in schools is down dramatically, Gallup reports. "Just 24 percent of adults said they were satisfied with public education, the lowest figure since the question was first asked in 2001," writers Hess.
Many parents no longer believe it's important for their children to go to school every day. In New York City, more than a third of students are "chronic" absentees, reports Carl Campanile in the New York Post.
"New York students’ test scores in math and reading remain mediocre, despite the state funneling more money into education than any other in the nation," he writes.
Absenteeism is even worse in Buffalo and Rochester, where a majority of students miss 10 or more days of school in a 180-day school year.