American Greatness By Larry Sand
COVID shutdowns. Teacher union dominance. Dumbed down curricula. The proliferation of low expectations. Education in America is unraveling very quickly.
Itâs no secret that education in America has been in bad shape for some time, and now, low student proficiency has been exacerbated by the hysterical response to the COVID outbreak. Most recently, the results of a Harvard University study, which investigated the role of remote and hybrid instruction in widening gaps in achievement by race and school poverty, have been released.
Using testing data from 2.1 million students in 10,000 schools in 49 states and D.C., the researchers found that âshifts to remote or hybrid instruction during 2020-21 had profound consequences for student achievement.â In districts that went remote, achievement growth was lower for all subgroups, but especially for students attending high-poverty schools. In areas that remained in-person, âthere were still modest losses in achievement, but there was no widening of gaps between high and low-poverty schools in math (and less widening in reading).â
Another study, by curriculum and assessment provider Amplify, examined test data for some 400,000 elementary school students across 37 states and found a spike in students not reading at grade level, with literacy losses âdisproportionately concentrated in the early elementary grades (K-2).â The report also found that minority children suffered disproportionate learning loss. As the Wall Street Journal reports, âDuring the last normal school year, only 34% of black and 29% of Hispanic second-graders needed intensive intervention to help catch up. This school year 47% of black and 39% of Hispanic second-graders have fallen this far behind on literacy, compared to 26% of white peers.â
