The Classroom-COVID Conundrum
Last Year's Battles Over Closures Are This Year's Political Talking Points
The hand wringing these past weeks over the impact of COVID and public health measures involving school age children is a good place to start when it comes to understanding the ways in which our perceptions are curated.
You have to start any such analysis by realizing the poles around which affect political outlooks. Broadly speaking, we’re influenced by those whose core agendas involve individualism versus collectivism.
Most people’s outlooks are nowhere near the extremes of these belief systems, but the overall concepts represent the yin and yang of politics. One side advocates for “personal responsibility” and the other wants “collaborative efforts.”
There should be no surprise in learning that the people making the most noise about school closures, vaccines, and masking find themselves in the camp that believes public education is inherently some form of evil. They use the term “government schools,” spitting out the descriptor as if it were a rotten piece of meat.
You don’t have to look very hard to find anti-union sentiments, fear of the “other,” and theocratic tendencies in the leadership of those who’ve opposed most public health measures.
The characterization of lockdowns and masking mandates as things “taken away” has worked as a siren call for reactionary organizers.
The disruptors of Board of Supervisors meetings last year are among the featured speakers of this weekend’s “Freedom Revival” outside the County Building. Joining them are a host of forced birthers, conspiracy theorists, and spreaders of misinformation. Local right wing candidates like Sup. Jim Desmond and Amy Reichert will be paraded on stage as champions of these causes.
The release of test scores of school kids, both nationwide and in California, has been interpreted in such a manner as to vindicate the grievances expressed by the right. Pundits from all over have accepted as truth the notion that school closures were responsible for test score declines.
Let me pause for a second here to acknowledge that there is a kernel of truth in this assumption, namely that the various manifestations of the pandemic impacted kids. Hell, they impacted just about everybody. More than a quarter million school aged kids lost a parent/care giver to the disease. The coronavirus was and is a profound marker in societies worldwide.
There’s a big problem with the closures vs test scores argument is that the results show differing correlations between test results and duration of school closures.
Students in Florida, which opened schools early, actually did the same as their peers in California, where closures lasted longer. There were other areas in the US that did worse or better. And minority students took the biggest hit everywhere. The point is that we need to look deeper.
Maybe a problem in Florida is the overhaul of their education system to promote white Christian Nationalism and fascism. Maybe the (partial) solution in California was the tens of billions of dollars the state allocated to facilitate remote education. Maybe Florida shouldn’t have used millions of COVID aid dollars to ship immigrants to Martha’s Vineyard to “own the libs.”
From the Washington Post:
Some argued that more federal and state funding will be needed to help children catch up while others said the troubling data makes clear that districts need to spend the money they already have more quickly. Several called for an all-hands reaction to support teachers as they work to climb back.
“There could not be a more urgent time for strong family-school partnerships,” said National PTA President Anna King.
Advocates for school choice policies that send tax dollars to support private schools used the data to argue the existing system has failed. Former Education Secretary Betsy DeVos said in a statement that children should no longer be “hostages” in a “one-size-fits-none system that isn’t meeting their needs."
Advocates for individual responsibility would have us accept the fall in test scores as a collective marker for the failure of government. The Big Clue here is what gets said when they’re asked for what to do moving forward.
When the “solutions” involve more reliance on test scores, reining in unions, eliminating Critical Race Theory, and protecting the patriarchy, you can take it to the bank that the welfare of children is less important to them than the resulting understanding of the world.
New details about the academic or emotional challenges kids face bring on a chorus of people who are missing the obvious; students 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 may be less true than a lot of us think.
This is NOT to say closing schools was a perfect option; it’s just a commentary on how full of it righties are. What we knew about COVID at the time was limited, and many public officials did what they should do: act to protect the public.
Now it turns out there are a host of other reasons to shutter classrooms we didn’t know at the time.
Kids missed out on a lot. They lost relationships with friends and teachers. They lost two years of school musicals, art shows, plays, recitals, marching band shows, football games, debates, dance recitals, sleep overs, pool parties, pizza parties, book clubs, field trips, band/chorus/orchestra trips; essentially all the things that make school engaging, interesting, and worth going to everyday.
They can "catch up" on learning stuff, but a couple of years of relationship building is gone forever. This is what the educational testing complex calls the 70+% of the curriculum that isn't tested with standardized exams.
“Learning loss” are the buzzwords used by those political candidates now demanding a return to "the basics," which is a not-so-subtle proxy for no more art, music, or any of the "non-tested subjects.”
Am I the only one who finds it pretty ironic that the people complaining about "learning loss" never uttered a peep about schools cutting music, art, PE, and other subjects out of the curriculum in favor of more testing and "test prep"?
Then there were the repeated assertions about school lockdowns causing a “mental health crisis.” Here again, real numbers tell a different story. Mental health should be an everyday issue, not one used as a bludgeon or an excuse (in the case of homeless humans).
According to the CDC, ER mental health visits in 2020 for boys and girls were down. (There were two individual categories in girls showing a significant increase: tics and eating disorders.)
The predicted “tsunami of suicides” also didn’t happen. After a steady rise in suicides spanning two decades, 2020 saw rates drop by a significant amount. For the first time in decades – when the pandemic hit– kids died of suicide during school months (mar-jun 2020) at the same rate as summer months.
Education is a fundamental institution of democracy. It’s as much an art as it is a science, and subject to changes in methodology and content influenced by the expectations and needs of society.
What worked in the 1960s when we hid under our desks during “air raid” drills and what works today in an era of swift technological changes are different. What doesn’t work is eliminating or regimenting the socialization part of education.
We can “catch up” in learning the basics. We can’t catch up on anything if communicable diseases are wiping out the population because some paranoia-addled individuals think it’s a George Soros plot. (I’m assuming you’ve heard about the latest anti-vaxxer tale about polio shots….)
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