Agree.

But it’s hard to fathom how households all over the country can find the time or energy to care about the impeachment of a former president as their kids remain out of school and away from their peers. Every Republican should be hammering this issue right now, everywhere, on every network TV appearance and Twitter feed. Fighting with the media about Donald Trump will not automatically lead to midterm victories next year. Fighting for parents across this country might.

 

Here’s a tip for GOP politicians on how to respond when CNN reporter Manu Raju pulls his ‘chasing Republicans through the halls of Congress’ act to ask them about the nutty tweets of a random House member of whom a majority of Americans have never heard. Look right down the barrel of the camera and tell parents that they have a choice, if they want it — you no longer have to be beholden to the protest and strike whims of teachers’ unions, who have demonstrated that they have been given far too much power and influence by our public officials for far too long.

 

Republican members of Congress should be talking about nothing else. Not Donald Trump. Not impeachment. Not QAnon tweets. Nothing. It is clear that President Biden has abandoned the parents of schoolchildren who voted for him for a little peace and quiet coming from Washington, because that is who Joe Biden is and always has been.

This is something I learned a long time ago with this blog and every seasoned public figure knows… just because someone asks you something doesn’t mean that you have to answer them. You can ignore them or use the platform they just handed you to say what you want. As long as Republicans are in a persistent defensive crouch, they will cede thought leadership on these important issues to the Democrats.

I’ll bet you a warm bowl of mayonnaise that there is no regular in-person instruction this school year.

Once again, our government schools are leaving kids behind.

A study by McKinsey and Company found “students of color may have lost three to five months of learning in mathematics, while white students lost just one to three months.”

 

And when McKinsey looked ahead at what that loss could mean by June of 2021, the end of the school year, it found “students of color could be six to 12 months behind compared with four to eight months for white students.”

And we don’t even know how badly they have failed because we suspended tests. BTW, Evers wants to suspend testing for another year. These poor kids are going to pay for these decisions for the rest of their lives.

Those responses came from a survey of 3,227 Wisconsin parents and students in 16 Wisconsin districts — most from the northern, rural part of the state — conducted by Curtis Jones, a senior scientist at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee’s Socially Responsible Evaluation in Education program. It found nearly half of the students were failing to keep up with homework as much as they had before the pandemic.

 

As the first full semester of U.S. students learning under the pandemic comes to a close, experts like Jones are particularly concerned about young people who already were behind. Only 15% of survey respondents said their child was learning as much as before the COVID-19 crisis. Some policymakers are pushing for a massive tutoring effort to help students catch up.

 

“Any type of negative impact on the education system hits people who have privilege less hard,” Jones said. “They can pick up that slack themselves. People who have less privilege, it’s more impactful. It hits harder.”

 

The full scope of the pandemic’s effect on academic progress is still unknown in Wisconsin. As part of a pandemic relief bill, the state Legislature suspended student testing requirements for the 2019-20 school year and prohibited the Department of Public Instruction from issuing school and district report cards covering this school year.

Here, here. Emphasis mine

Yet across the U.S., many school districts, especially those in large metro areas, still remain closed to in-person learning for some if not all grades and may not reopen at the start of 2021.

 

According to the Pew Research Center, 72% of parents in lower-income brackets report being “very” or “somewhat” concerned this fall that their children are “falling behind in school as a result of the disruptions caused by the pandemic.” With thousands of students not in class, even virtually, and falling grades among those who are attending, who can blame them?

 

For taxpayers and policymakers looking for lessons in the pandemic, the utter failure of school assignment systems to provide quality-learning options to all students, especially the most vulnerable, is clear.

 

The quality and consistency of the education a child received during the pandemic has been dependent on the attendance boundary in which that child’s family lives. At the same time, so many of the issues plaguing education during the pandemic—and for that matter, the entire century leading up to the pandemic—are rooted in policies that fund school systems, rather than individual students.

 

Allowing dollars to follow children directly to any public or private school of choice is a critical emergency policy reform that states should pursue. Such a policy change is overdue.

Remember that the kids who are learning nothing in these schools will one day be your mechanics, doctors, employees, and maybe your boss. Let’s hope that the can find an education after leaving school.

The San Diego Unified School District, for instance, moved this fall to abolish its traditional grading system. Students will still receive letter grades, but they won’t reflect average scores on papers, quizzes, and tests. Under the new system, pupils will not be penalized for failing to complete assignments or even show up for class, and teachers will give them extra opportunities to demonstrate their “mastery” of subjects. What constitutes mastery is not quite clear, but grades “shall not be influenced by behavior or factors that directly measure students’ knowledge and skills in the content area,” according to guidance from the district.