Public schools face a long, tough road to recover from school closures and pandemic chaos, writes Fordham's Dale Chu. Post-pandemic learning loss is huge, recovery efforts are inadequate and education officials want the public to think everything's fine and dandy.
"Just as schools and districts have gotten into the bad habit of withholding honest feedback from students and parents — through rampant grade inflation and social promotion among other academic gimmicks —state education departments are doing a disservice to local communities when they downplay the bad news and cheerlead mediocrity," he writes.
Chu summarizes the rose-colored spin from states with poor test scores: California's scores are "promising," Oregon is "stabilizing," Connecticut students aren't quite as likely to be chronically absent, Delaware has a successful school district, Georgia finds "evidence of growth," Massachusetts "signs of recovery," Michigan boasts "gradual improvements" and stability and Washington finds "learning recovery."
"Never mind the compelling evidence to the contrary," he writes. It's like the old joke about the optimistic boy who gets a load of manure for Christmas: “There’s got to be a pony in here somewhere!”
In Colorado and Indiana, state education leaders are trying to build a sense of urgency about the need to do better, writes Chu. Jacob Oliva, education secretary in Arkansas, is the most forthright. The press release admits that state test results "show little to no rebound from pre-pandemic levels," calls it a "wake-up call" and urges the state to move forward with evidence-based approaches to increase student learning.
Happy talk and spin won't help students.
When there are no consequences for poor performance, what do you expect? A company can hire a new CEO to do some housecleaning; a government entity, not so much. Ages ago, my father worked as a school district administrator. They had a shop teacher who was worse than incompetent, he was unsafe. Fire him? Don't be silly. The union staunchly protected him until he retired.
It won't improve until we tear it all down and rebuild it. The public school system must be destroyed.
I'm afraid the pony left the building, a couple decades ago. A better analogy might be the Monty Python pet shop parrot.
I thought it was just California. Our state and local education bureaucrats have been telling us that the public K-12 school kids are bouncing back from the Covid-inspired idiotic long term closure of the schools. These CA apologists have been lying.
But as this article points out, it turns out that this blatant dishonesty is pretty much nationwide.
This article doesn't mention private schools -- schools which often reopened their classrooms up to a year before public schools, so I suspect a more mixed result there. One major advantage private schools have is motivated parents who see to it that their kids GO to school and get the superior education the parents are paying for.
The only group of kids…