[Some people] are pushing back against the concept of “learning loss,” especially on behalf of the Black, Hispanic and low-income children who, research shows, have fallen further behind over the past year. They fear that a focus on what’s been lost could incite a moral panic that paints an entire generation as broken....
Jesse Hagopian, a Seattle high school teacher and writer, said testing to measure the impact of the pandemic misses what students have learned outside of physical classrooms during a year of overlapping crises in health, politics and police violence. “They are learning about how our society works, how racism is used to divide,” he said. “They are learning about the failure of government to respond to the pandemic.”
Mr. Hagopian said he believed that “learning loss” research was being used to “prop up the multi-billion-dollar industry of standardized testing” and “rush educators back into classrooms before it’s safe to do so.”
Is this a fear of learning the truth, a questioning whether standardized tests reveal the truth, or dedication to the more important truth that knowing the truth discourages people. But is that true — does knowing that your 5th grader reads at a 2nd-grade level make it harder to move him forward in his reading skills? Does knowing that black and Hispanic students are further back than ever undermine the education efforts? We ought to at least be truth-focused as we try to understand whether knowing the truth helps.
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5 comments:
Michael writes:
""What is stigmatizing for children is not measuring learning loss but allowing it to happen in the first place, and especially for poor and minority students. The teachers' unions and edu-crats forced the schools to close (or remain closed) in the face of "the Science" for their own reasons and now are trying to suppress the evidence of the consequences.
"In the book of John (according to Mr. Google) it says "You shall know the truth, and the truth shall set you free." In the Progressive narrative that morphs into "You shall know and think what we want you to know and think, and you shall be good little sheep about it." Not for much longer, most likely."
Birches writes:
Being offended isn't going to help your child succeed.
Progressive education theories often look toward some kind of societal utopia as their end game but rarely worry about the kids living in the fallen world right now. This prospective comes out when opposing school choice and it's here in the ideas of systemic racism. If we stop having standards black children won't be behind! Even if I believed their "doctrine," it won't help the kids three reading grades behind.
Instead of coddling mothers and students, play it straight. I homeschooled my kids this year. When I started, I realized my 4th grader didn't know her times tables, even though they had spent a long time on it in third grade. We went to work and now my kids is probably ahead for her grade. Now what if my kids show up next year and instead of being ahead like I imagine, the school tells me they're all behind? Who am I going to be mad at? It's pointless to be mad at anyone including myself. We all did the best we could in crappy circumstances. But I certainly will be trying to catch my kids up. Because it's going to matter later. It just will. It cannot be magic wanded away.
Lucien writes:
Giving a student reading at the second grade level fifth grade material to read is an accelerated, grotesque version of the mismatch problem that comes when students are admitted to law schools that are more demanding than they can handle. It’s a recipe for disaster. It is now a firing offense for a law school professor to notice and mention the existence of a racial performance gap among law students — which will make it just about impossible to ameliorate that (unmentionable) gap. Making it taboo to measure a student’s actual progress and educate her accordingly is not doing anyone any favors. (I realize that the issue is not explicitly radicalized in the text you posted about, but the idea of learning loss falling disproportionately on minority students is there.)
There is nothing soft about the bigotry of lowered expectations. These fools think they’re helping, by infantilizing others and refusing to look at reality. Reality is so objective-y, and there’s supposed to be no such thing as objectivity — only “your truth” and “lived experience”. (Funny how so many who say each is entitled to their own truth performed such outrage over a single use of the term “alternative facts”).
Paul writes:
While I agree with commenter Michael that those who closed schools "now are trying to suppress the evidence of the consequences," there is a broader issue here which goes beyond the behavior of teachers' unions: older generations trying to cover up the lasting harm that they've inflicted on younger generations in order to save their own asses from Covid.
It was clear, early on in the pandemic, that Covid did not pose a great threat to the young. So the school closures, business closures, enforced social isolation, etc., were basically all for the benefit of the old. But few have admitted that or come to terms with that. There's been no societal reckoning with the fact that the young were thrown under the bus and forced to sacrifice for the old. (There's a word for "forced sacrifice": exploitation.)
A year of lost learning, lost dating, lost networking, lost career advancement...It adds up. Not to mention little kids being forced to wear masks outdoors at summer camp, which is simply sadistic.
Had this forced sacrifice been accompanied with gratitude from the old, that would be one thing. But instead, the young have been mocked for Florida beach parties and generally cast as selfish covidiots during the pandemic. When really they've been victims.
And now to add further insult to injury, some people are saying we shouldn't even measure the toll of the sacrifice.
To be sure, there is something wicked about younger generations failing to sacrifice for older generations in a time of need. But there is also something wicked, and perverse, and disturbing, and decadent, and dystopian about the old eating the young and then denying they did so and trying to cover it up.
This image comes to mind. Goya's Saturn Devouring His Son.
Thanks as always for your great posts.
Ozymandias writes:
A mother is *offended* at being provided information on her son’s loss in reading-skill? A teacher objects to schools’ measuring student learning losses during the pandemic, claiming the research was being used to “prop up” the standardized testing industry, and that students’ education had been enhanced during the lockdowns by observation of government failure and “racism”?
A message from Parents and Teachers United Against Information:
“Don’t tell us anything that may upset us! You're dissing our hard work. We’d rather not know that our kids' reading level is three grades below grade level. We might feel as though we needed to, ya know, do something about it, like, ya know, keep up the effort, or try harder and stuff. We’d rather feel stigmatized. After all, it’s the government failure and racism, right? Even that teacher in Seattle said so, and Seattle’s been doing fine lately, right?”
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