I remember how it was -- JR
Conservatives warned about long-term negative results for children’s education, and The New York Times finally gets it.
In yet another instance of conservatives being able to say “we told you so,” the New York Times editorial board recently discovered that “The Startling Evidence on Learning Loss Is In.” The editorial observes, “The school closures that took 50 million children out of classrooms at the start of the pandemic may prove to be the most damaging disruption in the history of American education.”
Golly, who knew? (That was rhetorical.)
Meanwhile, back in the spring of 2021, the Times pushed the opposite position. In an op-ed published in April of that year originally titled “Parents, Stop Talking About the ‘Lost Year,’” author and Times columnist Judith Warner argued that concerns over months-long pandemic school closures and the negative impact on children’s education were overblown.
At some point, the Time updated and softened Warner’s title to “How to Help Your Adolescent Think About the Last Year,” but the teaser still expressed the original sentiment: “Hint: It’s not a ‘lost year.’ Also, the screen time with friends? It’s good for their mental health.”
The article went on to downplay the whole problem. “Experts say some of [parents’] worries are justified — but only up to a point,” Warner said. “There’s no doubt that the pandemic has taken a major toll on many adolescents’ emotional well-being. … And there’s no question that witnessing their loneliness, difficulties with online learning and seemingly endless hours on social media has been enormously stressful for the adults who care about them the most. …
Despite all of this, [therapist and school counselor Phyllis] Fagell, much like the dozen-plus other experts in adolescent development who were interviewed for this article, was adamant that parents should not panic — and that, furthermore, the spread of the ‘lost year’ narrative needed to stop. Getting a full picture of what’s going on with middle schoolers — and being ready to help them — they agreed, requires holding two seemingly contradictory ideas simultaneously in mind: The past year has been terrible. And most middle schoolers will be fine.”
Note that last sentence: “most middle schoolers will be fine.”
Evidently not. Indeed, the Times editorial board is now ringing the alarm bells over a generation of Americans behind in their education. School shutdowns have, the editors say, “set student progress in math and reading back by two decades and widened the achievement gap that separates poor and wealthy children.” So, which is it? Middle schoolers will be fine, or American educational progress has been set back 20 years?
As our own Mark Alexander observed early on: “The school shutdowns, which have enormous impact on families, are based in part on the lowest common denominator factor — the parent who is going to send their child to school sick because it was not convenient to keep him or her home. And when Americans begin to figure out the economic consequences of the state and local actions which have shuttered schools, events, and businesses, there will be political HELL to pay.”
The scribes at the Times and all over mainstream media were big proponents of shutting down schools for the entirety of 2020 and beyond as they perpetuated the flawed notion that protecting the most vulnerable — the elderly and immune-compromised — meant sacrificing the future development of the least vulnerable — school-age children.
Ironically but predictably, the Times is arguing for more government funding and intervention to fix the very problem the government caused.
Poor leadership was most clearly displayed in Democrat-run states, which opted for totalitarian, one-size-fits-all polices that maximized negative impacts across all of society rather than using a sensible conservative approach that used targeted actions aimed at protecting the most vulnerable while also seeking the least social disruption. Of course, the Times and other Leftmedia outlets decried the latter approach as equating to wishing death on others.
Three years on, and they’re acting like they have just been exposed to the notion that taking kids out of school would have seriously negative consequences down the road. And the most ridiculous thing about it is their call for more government “solutions” for America’s “learning loss crisis.” The Times editorial board geniuses write, “A collective sense of urgency by all Americans will be required to avert its most devastating effects on the nation’s children.”
Now they tell us.
https://patriotpost.us/articles/102420-nyt-revisionist-history-on-school-closings-2023-11-28
************************************************Christian School Sues State After Being Banned From Sports Over Transgender Policies
A Christian school in Vermont filed a lawsuit against state officials after it was banned from participating in the state’s sport leagues because over its stance on biological females competing against biological male “transgender” athletes.
As Townhall previously reported, Mid Vermont Christian School (MVCS) forfeited a basketball tournament after refusing to compete against a team that included a transgender player.
“We withdrew from the tournament because we believe playing against an opponent with a biological male jeopardizes the fairness of the game and the safety of our players,” Vicky Fogg, the head of MVCS, said in a statement at the time.
“Allowing biological males to participate in women’s sports sets a bad precedent for the future of women’s sports in general,” Fogg added.
Shortly after, the Vermont Principals’ Association, which oversees school sporting events, announced that MVCS would be ineligible to participate in sporting events and other activities done through the organization, which Townhall also covered.
“The VPA again reiterates its ongoing support of transgender student-athletes as not only a part of building an inclusive community for each student to grow and thrive, but also as a clear expectation by Vermont state law(s) in the Agency of Education Best Practices, and in VPA Policy regarding transgender student athletes,” the announcement said.
According to Catholic News Agency, in the lawsuit, MVCS argues that the ban is a violation of the school’s First Amendment rights. The lawsuit reportedly asks the court to readmit the school into the sports league and allow the school to participate in the tuition program.
“Vermont has an infamous record of discriminating against religious schools and families, whether it be withholding generally available public funding or denying them membership in the state’s sports league because they hold religious beliefs that differ from the state’s preferred views,” Alliance Defending Freedom senior counsel Ryan Tucker, who is representing the school in the lawsuit, said in a statement to CNA.
Tucker added: “the state’s unlawful exclusion of Mid Vermont Christian from participating in the tuition program and athletic association is the latest example of state officials trampling on constitutionally protected rights.”
Reportedly, two families whose children attend the school have joined the lawsuit, claiming that their children have been negatively affected by the state’s policies.
“Vermont, through its education agency and sports association, has engaged in unconstitutional discrimination by requiring a Christian school and its students to surrender their religious beliefs and practices in order to receive public funds and compete in sports,” ADF counsel Jake Reed told CNA, adding that the students who attend MVCS are “losing out on valuable tuition reimbursement and being excluded from playing competitive sports and participating in academic competitions.”
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How Can We Stop Serving Students So Poorly?
In 1942, there were 108,579 public school districts in the United States. By the 2020-21 school year, there were only 13,187.
That massive consolidation of school districts was propelled by the belief that economies of scale created by larger school districts would lower costs and serve students better. Those presumed efficiencies have not, however, been demonstrated in practice. As Stephen Coffin summarized, “Large urban school districts generally have not been accountable for improving school and student performance...they have been constrained by their overly large scale...The typical large urban school district needs to be right-sized or disaggregated.”
Why has school district consolidation failed to perform as advertised? Because centralized administration creates more adverse incentives that overwhelm any advantages they might have.
One important reason is that teaching is an idiosyncratic art, practiced differently by people with different capabilities and approaches. One such difference is that younger teachers are closer in age to their students, but know fewer relevant illustrations than older teachers, who have often accumulated larger stores of knowledge over time, which faces them with a different issue: determining what works best for a particular class. Further, some seem to be far better story-tellers than others.
As with other differences, these imply that there is no single set of teaching guidelines that can be imposed from above by a centralized decision-making authority, and attempting to do so will serve students poorly.
Centralized bureaucratic systems also tend to undermine teachers’ accountability to those for whom it is most important. They make teachers accountable to administrators rather than students and their parents.
Noting the incentives created by large, centralized school districts, not to mention the many controversies that have arisen in public education helps us understand the increasing support for breaking up some of the largest school districts, which would reduce the “monopoly power” of their school boards. At issue? What is taught and how. Merely breaking larger monopolies into smaller monopolies, however, does not necessarily mean parents and students will end up with any more power over policies.
That inherent difficulty helps explain the growing support for charter schools, which are not subject to the same rules of traditional public schools. But as Thomas Sowell documents in Charter Schools and Their Enemies, even the far superior performance of charter schools in apples to apples comparisons may not be enough to withstand the increasing political dangers threatening charter schools under the flag of “reform,” which threatens to undermine “the urgent task of educating young people in the skills that will determine what kind of future they will have available as adults.”
Sowell illustrates both the “remarkable success” of charter schools and the hostility they face at the hands of public school teachers and administrators, their unions, schools of education, and politicians seeking union backing. For all of this there is one simple explanation: “It is successful charter schools that are the real threat to the traditional unionized public schools.”
With charter schools so heavily opposed by the public school establishment, producing far too few spaces for those who wish to enroll in them, voucher programs may serve parents better. The portability of those resources could powerfully invigorate accountability by letting money move along with students when they leave poor teachers and schools for better ones. When resources don’t accompany students, financial punishment is visited upon more effective schools who must teach more people without more funds to do so. When resources do accompany those students, parents have far greater incentive to be involved, as their ability to redirect resources allows them to benefit from superior academic performance on behalf of their children.
Very large school districts have failed to serve parents and students, but have increased the rewards given to those responsible for that failure. Efforts to break them up have faced resistance, and even when break-ups are achieved, top-down policy making often undermines the potential payoffs. Efforts to improve things with charter schools have shown some great results, and vouchers are attractive as a means to make educators more responsible to parents than to administrators. But we are still in the early stages of a very long struggle, and there are no quick, easy fixes.
With the powerful opposition every effort at effective educational reform faces, what we need are ways to decisively sever control of schools from the hands of special interests. And that effort faces the wild card of a sharply declining population of school age students, which can provide yet another excuse to further consolidate educational provision that is already too centralized. It is a daunting task, but our children’s future justifies facing it head on.
https://www.independent.org/news/article.asp?id=14747&omhide=true&trk=title
******************************************************My other blogs: Main ones below
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com/ (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)
http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs
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