What does being "behind" even mean? The dirty truth of the US educational "system" is that there is no system. Different school districts offer vastly different levels of education, depending mainly on wealth (i.e., the property tax base, because schools are locally funded). When I was a kid, my family moved from one city to another within the same state, and suddenly I was way behind in my new school, especially in math, simply because my new school moved at a significantly faster pace and had higher expectations of students. But I eventually caught up, and it was fine. So I suspect that this problem is vastly overstated.<p>It's not like the US educational system was doing a great job before the pandemic. I used to teach in college, and a lot of student were not properly prepared. We rely a lot on "social promotion", where mere age and time spent in seats is taken as the standard for educational level.
I've heard from private school teachers that they expected exactly this to happen, and enrollment in private schools has boomed as parents that could used the schools that cared about staying open (and opened as soon as they could).<p>This was well supported and non-controversial pre-pandemic, where we had research results showing that simply having participation in remote schooling lowers high school graduation rate by a significant fraction. But during the pandemic, we still closed schools for most pupils in the developed world.<p>This was one more problem where the contemporary governance mechanism is "we pretend it won't/isn't/didn't happen because it's politically inconvenient as it contradicts high level leadership decisions (and we can't cause face loss to said leadership)".
My wife teaches 2nd grade in a public school. She has kids this year who had not been in school since kindergarten. It is difficult to cover such an achievement gap when other kids in the class are on level. It's worse yet when our state has outsourced federal pandemic education fund distribution to 3rd parties which allowed people to purchase Xboxes and TVs. And even worse yet as her district is focusing on putting AppleTVs in every room while buying curriculum that has no books. Last week we had a family emergency and had to leave town for 1 day, she spent all day Sunday working on a plan and preparing work for her class and the "substitute" played youtube videos and let them draw all day, did not even move the plan she put on the desk. I hope other districts are taking this seriously because there are lots of good teachers flooding away from this one and it directly relates to the actions taken by the district admin and it's not good for our kids even after the pandemic has subsided, mostly.
Especially in high school, an astounding amount of time, money, space, and personnel are dedicated to sports, and this does not just impact the athletes. In many schools the entire day is structured around the football team's practice schedule. Make school sports a truly after-hours extracurricular activity and remove their impact from non-participants, and I'd estimate you could see around 20% improvement time spent on classroom instruction on core subjects.
My oldest son started in secondary school last year, so his first two years were largely in lockdown. He's quite introverted (and by now extremely so), so he enjoyed not having to meet people, but his school discipline suffered enormously. I already caught him gaming instead of following classes during the lockdown, and he apparently never learned to finish his homework. He's got more failing than passing grades.<p>Still, he's smart, seems to understand all the material, and he still has a couple of years to work on his problems before his exams, so with enough work from him, school, us, and the extra tutoring we fortunately can afford for him, he'll probably be okay. But there are probably tons of kids far worse off than he is.
Any guesses what the long term consequences might be? I have a hard time imagining anything more dire than the immediate consequences of social isolation during the pandemic.<p>In other words, I think the kids that make it through are going to be okay.
At least in the US they're able to quantify the issue somewhat. In Norway they just canceled exams for multiple years in a row, and those students passed whether they were prepared or not.
Simply end social promotion. You shouldn't move up to the next level of a class until you've mastered the current level. (Levels can be much smaller than a year.) Being at a different pace isn't a problem if you can just make up the time. The side effect bonus is letting other students test out of levels they don't need, they can finish early while others end later.
Being 19 weeks behind doesn't sound that bad to me. It sounds like one of those things you can measure but you can't notice otherwise. Sure, still a thing to think about. But haven't you all had a friend who got sick and missed a lot of school? Can you tell from meeting adults that they were ill for half a year during their childhood? Maybe the numbers will capture it, but it doesn't seem like enough to worry about.<p>What I can say is I'm not surprised if people get lower scores after missing school, because a lot of exams benefit from freshness. You sit there and memorize things that are only useful for the exam, you do the exam, and then you flush the double angle formulas from your cache.<p>What really matters is that you have some tools, both intellectual and psychological, to keep learning new things for the rest of your life.
Well when you focus on activism and not academics, why would anyone be surprised that the academics suffer?<p>Easy fix though, lower standards! Lots of districts are already figuring that out. If you take away the primary means to hold the educational system accountable then you have teachers who are unaccountable. All of the sudden all of them are good at their jobs and the teacher mafia… I mean union… can continue to demand more money for the children and won’t even have to deliver anything measurable. It’s genius!
Why is the title missing "behind"? I get that the second "far" is perhaps sensationalistic, but without "behind" the meaning is lost and perhaps inverted.
One thing I don't think I've ever seen in my life and never expect to see is a statement along the following lines: "Yeah, those cranks and 'conspiracy theorists' were right again." And this will stay true no matter how many times they are right.<p>The credit will always go to some academic who discovers the obvious after the damage is done.
> In the districts that stayed remote for most of last year, the outcome was as if Black and Hispanic students had lost four to five more weeks of instruction than white students had.<p>Is this referring to differences b/w students in the same schools, but of different ethnicity? I don't really understand the racial implications this article is making.
It's the ratio of (sane, emotionally mature) adults to children that's important. A decent ratio is no greater than 6:1. Most of our schools are more like 30:1. In other words the "dosage" of tutoring (to use the article's bizarre metaphor) is ~5x too low.<p>- - - -<p>The second major problem, after chronic and extreme under-staffing, is that our didactic methods are designed (inadvertently but surely) to be slow and ineffective. If you teach children <i>well</i> they learn happily and rapidly. What we do instead is teach poorly and so "eduction" is slow, boring, uncool, and ephemeral (i.e. people forget what they "learned".)
Was interesting to see the variance between US states and countries with the various lockdowns and even quite a big variance between schools in the same region. In the UK aside from a couple of terms my kids were generally in school full time. Fortunately both kids were in early stages of primary school. My son has been hitting some good milestones with his maths and english, especially reading although perhaps understandably the teachers are reluctant to compare their abilities based on previous years.<p>Conversely my friends in Asia and California saw their kids out of school for very extended periods.
Wild speculation: interestingly, school's often underrated original function "to keep children off the streets" rephrased as "protecting against harmful influence of the world until your frontal lobe develops" means they might be reinvented to be digital limiting structures instead of physical limiting structures.
I don't know how it's in other countries but in Spain school is glorified children care to ensure kids below 12 are kept occupied until at least 5 and even 6 with additional after school activities.<p>The reason we moved to a private school. Kids under 12 should not be 9 hours at school everyday.
Doesn't this just prove the fact that the US education system was never good in the first place (especially for the lower and middle class)? There's absolutely nothing scientific or moral about forcing a kid from age 6 to sit in a classroom for 8 hours straight twiddling their thumbs longingly looking outside the window. Forcing them from a young age to do regimented work that is clearly meant to be done at a later developmental stage will just cause them to hate it and zone out, which is what caused the problem the author is describing. If you're not truly engaging with kids, how will you get the results you want?<p>None of those suggestions will solve the fact that the education system itself is incredibly flawed and near collapse.
Pre pandemic the US educational system was behind compared to most other developed countries. Now it's just sad. People don't seem to care. And those that do put their kids in private schools that provide better education.<p>I remember feeling smart for the first time in my life when I went to a public high school. My peers were not dumb but the average level of knowledge was pretty shallow and not so wide. This was a smallish high school in a small state (2000ish kids in new england) in the early 2000s. I know its worse now.
The author lost me with their mention of 'achievement loss' ... how can you lose something that you haven't 'achieved'?<p>Consider that the primary goal of marketing is to create the perception of a need/want on the part of the target segment.<p>I would be more interested in seeing a survey on what students have actually learned and done over the past two years (both inside and outside the standard curriculum) instead of this pervasive whining by the educational industry.
I'd like to see how well the knowledge is retained in kids after let's say 3 years.<p>I believe most of the knowledge the kids were taught that long ago is not present in their memory anymore as if it was never taught.<p>I remember happily forgetting all information I learned and it took me just summer vacation to do that.
> High-dosage tutoring—which educators define as involving a trained tutor working with one to four students at a time, three times a week for a whole year—is one of the few interventions with a demonstrated benefit that comes close, producing an average gain equivalent to 19 weeks of instruction<p>Yes, more anxiety inducing pointless education is what kids need. I like how they're trying to sell the idea of measuring students in 'weeks of instruction' as if they're mechanical objects.<p>More hours of education doesn't make kids smarter. It might make them more knowledgeable in certain subject areas (many of which are completely useless to both children and adults), but it definitely gives them anxiety. The education establishment is trying to encroach on ever more of our kids and young adult's lives, and to what end?<p>Let's get back to being human. Let's go outside for 7 hours a day, we can probably limit education instruction to just 3-4 hours 3 or 4 days per week, and we'll have more functional adults.
Interesting that it can be quantified somewhat… but the suggested interventions (extra tutoring, summer school, longer days) are just not going to happen. That education is gone. If they happen anywhere, it’ll only be rich kids.
Most universities in Canada were completely online for almost 2 years. Was it the same for grade schools in the states? I have no idea what level of restrictions this article is about
These kids will grow up remembering that a very specific group of people of a certain ideology kept them out of school, masked, and plugged into a zoom monitor for as long as possible.
... and they will absolutely be fine. Learning is not being done only on schools. Also schools aren't as efficient every day of the week. Some years or semesters are a lot more important than others.<p>In any case, I have no doubt kids will catch up.
There is a meaning issue here: school in Democracies, in substantial ones, are the tool to spread a certain level of culture needed to be Citizens, those who <i>intellectually</i> can get opportunities to going further, those less smart can still acquire a minimum culture to be Citizens peers between peers. In <i>formal</i> BUT not substantial democracies witch means in wannabe dictatorships school means just indoctrination so they are the same "entity" formally, but with different substantial targets.<p>Oh, I forget to say that actually we humans live or in dictatorships of in only-formal democracies.......................