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.

This is a national travesty.

School districts from coast to coast have reported the number of students failing classes has risen by as many as two or three times — with English language learners and disabled and disadvantaged students suffering the most.

“It was completely off the rails from what is normal for us, and that was obviously very alarming,” said Erik Jespersen, principal of Oregon’s McNary High School, where 38% of grades in late October were failing, compared with 8% in normal times.

And this is failing them even more.

Now, teachers have been instructed to give less homework, prioritizing the most important assignments. They’ve been encouraged to find alternatives to traditional lectures. Grading has been changed from a 100-point system to a 50-point so that missed assignments with zeroes hurt students less.

If you aren’t educating anyone, then you aren’t an educator.

I made this point in shorter form as part of my column yesterday. Adam Peshek does it better.

The first step toward realizing a more resilient and family-centered system is to reimagine how we fund education. In short, it’s time to start funding families, not the buildings that are meant to serve them.

Americans spend at least $720 billion on education each year. At around $13,000 per child, that puts the U.S. among the highest-spending countries in the world.

Instead of providing this benefit directly to families — as we do for higher education, childcare, and health care — in K-12, we send this money directly to school buildings. Taxpayer dollars are collected and sent to a central office, and zones are drawn around individual schools where students are required to attend or forfeit the funds raised for their education.

The pandemic has exposed the flaws in this system. School closures, loss of childcare, and difficulties transitioning to online and hybrid-learning models are having devastating effects on children. According to one report, an estimated 3 million students have received no formal education since schools closed in March. That’s the equivalent of every school-aged child in Florida failing to show up for school.

[…]

To create a more effective and more resilient education system, we must learn from what has proven effective during the pandemic — namely, the ability of those with resources to identify and pursue a variety of individualized learning opportunities to meet children’s needs. To provide these same opportunities for all families, governments should prioritize direct grants to families, education spending accounts, refundable tax credits, and myriad other ways to get money into the hands of families so they can build an education that fits their needs.

Ouch

Enrollment in public school districts dropped 3 percent from September 2019 to September 2020, compared to a 0.4 percent drop in the previous 12-month period.