Saturday, September 03, 2022



The Pandemic Erased Two Decades of Progress in Math and Reading in America

National test results released on Thursday showed in stark terms the pandemic’s devastating effects on American schoolchildren, with the performance of 9-year-olds in math and reading dropping to the levels from two decades ago.

This year, for the first time since the National Assessment of Educational Progress tests began tracking student achievement in the 1970s, 9-year-olds lost ground in math, and scores in reading fell by the largest margin in more than 30 years.

The declines spanned almost all races and income levels and were markedly worse for the lowest-performing students. While top performers in the 90th percentile showed a modest drop — three points in math — students in the bottom 10th percentile dropped by 12 points in math, four times the impact.

“I was taken aback by the scope and the magnitude of the decline,” said Peggy G. Carr, commissioner of the National Center for Education Statistics, the federal agency that administered the exam earlier this year. The tests were given to a national sample of 14,800 9-year-olds and were compared with the results of tests taken by the same age group in early 2020, just before the pandemic took hold in the United States.

High and low performers had been diverging even before the pandemic, but now, “the students at the bottom are dropping faster,” Dr. Carr said.

In math, Black students lost 13 points, compared with five points among white students, widening the gap between the two groups. Research has documented the profound effect school closures had on low-income students and on Black and Hispanic students, in part because their schools were more likely to continue remote learning for longer periods of time.

The declines in test scores mean that while many 9-year-olds can demonstrate partial understanding of what they are reading, fewer can infer a character’s feelings from what they have read. In math, students may know simple arithmetic facts, but fewer can add fractions with common denominators.

The setbacks could have powerful consequences for a generation of children who must move beyond basics in elementary school to thrive later on.

“Student test scores, even starting in first, second and third grade, are really quite predictive of their success later in school, and their educational trajectories overall,” said Susanna Loeb, the director of the Annenberg Institute at Brown University, which focuses on education inequality.

“The biggest reason to be concerned is the lower achievement of the lower-achieving kids,” she added. Being so far behind, she said, could lead to disengagement in school, making it less likely that they graduate from high school or attend college.

The National Assessment of Educational Progress is considered a gold standard in testing. Unlike state tests, it is standardized across the country, has remained consistent over time and makes no attempt to hold individual schools accountable for results, which experts believe makes it more reliable.

The test results offered a snapshot for just one age group: 9-year-olds, who are typically in third or fourth grade. (More results, for fourth graders and for eighth graders, will be released later this fall on a state-by-state level.)

“This is a test that can unabashedly speak to federal and state leaders in a cleareyed way about how much work we have to do,” said Andrew Ho, a professor of education at Harvard and an expert on education testing who previously served on the board that oversees the exam.

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Suspended Teacher Who Refused to Use ‘Preferred Pronouns’ Obtains $95K Settlement

In George Orwell’s dystopian and now-prescient work of fiction “Nineteen Eighty-Four,” the “Party” and its leader, “Big Brother,” devise a diabolically clever tactic to control the thoughts and actions of the proletariat: a new language. With this lexicon, “newspeak,” they can control the speech and actions of the masses, ensuring that both conform to the ideology of their ruling party.

This week, in the land of nonfiction, a teacher who was tired of her public school’s newspeak on gender identity just secured a $95,000 settlement against the school board that had suspended her for refusing to conform to its preferred gender pronoun policy.

Fort Riley, Kansas, middle school math teacher Pamela Ricard wasn’t looking to pick a fight. But when the Geary County School District suspended and disciplined the teacher with a 17-year history of teaching at the school, she sued.

Her offense? She addressed two students who considered themselves transgender by their legal names rather than their preferred names and pronouns, and she refused to hide their social transition from the students’ parents. Both actions were in contravention of the school district’s new communications policy.

Ricard is a Christian. She believes that God immutably creates each person as male or female, that there are only two anatomical sexes (except in very rare medical circumstances), and that the Bible prohibits dishonesty and lying.

In her federal lawsuit, Ricard stated that the school district both violated her constitutional rights and failed to accommodate her Christian beliefs when it suspended her. She brought claims alleging that the school district violated her free speech, free exercise of religion, and due process rights.

In her May decision to let the case proceed, U.S. District Court Judge Holly Teeter recognized that Ricard was likely to succeed on her First Amendment free exercise of religion claim against the school district and granted her motion to suspend enforcement of the school’s communication policy.

Among other authorities, Teeter cited Meriwether v. Hartop, which I’ve written about here, in which the 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals held that a Christian professor at a public university was not required to use a student’s preferred pronouns.

The court in that case explained that professor Nicholas Meriwether’s First Amendment interest in not using his students’ preferred gender pronouns was “especially strong … because [his] speech also relates to his core religious and philosophical beliefs” and because requiring the professor to use students’ preferred gender pronouns “potentially compelled speech on a matter of public concern.”

Teeter stated that because Ricard’s transgender students had not authorized the school to disclose their preferred names and pronouns, the teacher would face the Hobson’s choice of “complying with the District’s policy and violating her religious beliefs, or abiding by her religious beliefs and facing discipline.”

Shortly after Teeter’s ruling, the school board voted to revoke the communications policy altogether. After a brief period of continued litigation on the separate student preferred pronoun policy, the school district offered to settle.

As part of the settlement, school officials have agreed to issue a statement that Ricard was a teacher in good standing without any disciplinary actions against her at the time of her retirement in May.

Attorneys with Alliance Defending Freedom and Kriegshauser Ney Law Group represented Ricard in her lawsuit against school officials, and after settlement, filed a motion to have the case dismissed.

Joshua Ney, the lawyer who represented Ricard in the case, said:

This case provides straightforward lessons for Kansas school boards: Schools shouldn’t lie to parents and teachers don’t forfeit their constitutional rights at the schoolhouse door. The Geary County School District unsuccessfully tried to convince a federal court that a teacher should completely avoid using a child’s name during a parent teacher conference in order to hide new names and genders being used by the school for a child in a classroom. Absurdity and deception has its limits, especially in federal court. I’m glad the case clarifies the financial stakes for school boards if they attempt to force teachers to lie to parents about their students.

As recently as last term, the Supreme Court reinforced the rights of public school teachers to communicate on matters of public concern—particularly when such speech relates to a teacher’s religious convictions—and said that such speech is protected by the First Amendment.

In 2016, the Oxford Dictionaries chose “post-truth” as the international word of the year. The definition: “relating to or denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief.”

While Orwell’s fictional totalitarian state of Oceania and modern America may both be suffering the ramifications of a post-truth era, at least in the case of Pamela Ricard and the Geary County School District, the score is encouraging:

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Education Dept. Student Loan Projections Off By $311B

Bad assumptions on the part of the Department of Education led to federal student loans costing the government $197 billion since 1997 — instead of making $114 billion.

That’s according to a new report from the U.S. Government Accountability Office, which found that the $311 billion difference was due to “faulty assumptions.”

Federal student loans were “originally estimated to generate $6 in income per every $100 disbursed” but they’re actually “expected to cost the government almost $9 for every $100 disbursed.”

That’s quite a miscalculation.

The GAO found by looking through the Department of Education’s budgets over the years that about 61 percent of the bad accounting was due to these faulty assumptions, like incorrect estimates on the economic standing of borrowers, underestimating the likelihood of borrower default, and underestimating the percentage of borrowers who would enter income-driven repayment plans.

The Direct Student loan program, which is the largest federal student loan program, accounts for about $1.4 trillion of the $1.7 trillion in outstanding student loans, The Daily Signal reported.

About half of all loans issued in that program are being repaid through IDR plans, which cap monthly loan payments based on income.

The Congressional Budget Office reported in February 2020, “borrowers who enroll in IDR plans tend to borrow more and earn less than borrowers in fixed-payment plans.”

That means the student loan program is not only making less money than estimated, but also losing money.

The GAO found the other 39 percent of the miscalculation is due to “programmatic changes such as ongoing repayment pauses, participation in Public Service Loan Forgiveness, interest waivers, and new income-driven repayment plans,” the Signal reported.

And this isn’t about to be corrected anytime soon. The DOE will continue to use these inaccurate accounting metrics for the next three years, making the budget incorrect until at least 2026.

And none of the bad accounting includes the recent announcement from President Joe Biden that forgives $10,000 in students loans per person, costing an estimated $300 billion.

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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)

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