COVID-19 has disrupted American life in many ways, but its effect on our children has been particularly devastating.
Experts estimate that the shift to remote learning last spring alone set students of color back three to five months in math. Learning losses are concentrated among students from less-educated homes, who lose 55% more than their more advantaged classmates. School districts report that more students than ever failed a class this fall. Thousands of the youngest students in the nation’s largest school districts have simply stopped showing up for “class,” and 20% of students in the United States still lack the technology to show up, even if they wanted to.
Parents have had enough, and rightly so. Recent polling confirms that levels of dissatisfaction are at an all-time high, with more than 3 out of 5 people saying K-12 education is on the wrong track. The curtain has been pulled on our education system, and parents finally see it for what it is: an inflexible, ossified, bureaucratic system that serves adults and politics before children. But our education system was broken long before the pandemic. If someone who lived in the late 1800s were to teleport to the present day, that person would recognize almost nothing about life in America. Nothing, that is, except our schools, which have changed remarkably little in the last 125 years.
Read Full Article »