Thinking Citizen Blog — We Have Failed Our Children — So What? Why? What Is to Be Done?
By: John Muresianu
Tags: Covid, Income Gap, Thinking Citizen Blog, USA, Remote Education

Thinking Citizen Blog — We Have Failed Our Children — So What? Why? What Is to Be Done? John Muresianu Mar 5·4 min read

Thinking Citizen Blog — Friday is Education and Education Policy Day

Today’s Topic: We Have Failed Our Children — so what? why? what is to be done?

It was true before Covid. Before Covid ten to twenty million American children were living a daily Katrina of unsafe streets, second rate schools, and unstable homes. Then it was as if those ten to twenty million children were singled out for special punishment. They were deprived even of the second rate refuge of a second rate school. And who since has given these kids the priority they deserve? Where are the headlines? Where the public statements? Where the focus? Where the plan? This post was triggered by an op-ed piece by Nicholas Kristof (whose daughter Caroline graduated from Adams House last year). Today, a set of excerpts from that article. Next week and until further notice a series on what to do about it. The first step to figuring out is searching deep for the best possible answers to three questions: what exactly did they miss? how can that loss be made up for most efficiently? and who is qualified to say? Experts — please chime in. Correct, elaborate, elucidate.

“AS MANY AS 3 MILLION CHILDREN HAVE GOTTEN NO EDUCATION FOR ALMOST A YEAR”— and Democrats are, for the most part, to blame

1. “The educational losses are disproportionately the fault of Democratic governors and mayors who too often let schools stay closed even as bars opened.”

2. “The blunt fact is that it is Democrats — including those who run the West Coast from California through Oregon to Washington State — who have presided over one of the worst blows to the education of disadvantaged Americans in history.”

3. “The result: more dropouts, less literacy and numeracy, widening race gaps, and long term harm to some of our most marginalized youth.”

THE LONG TERM COSTS ARE QUITE SIMPLY, STAGGERING

1. “I wrote recently about my old buddy Mike Stepp, who dropped out of high school, couldn’t get a job, self-medicated with alcohol and meth, and recently died homeless. I fear that our educational failures during this pandemic will produce countless more tragedies like Mike’s.”

2.“The San Francisco Federal Reserve Bank this month estimated that educational disruptions may increase the number of high school dropouts over ten years by 3.8%, while also reducing the number of college-educated workers in the labor force. This will shrink the incomes of Americans for 70 years, until the last of today’s students leave the work force.”

3. “Rich kids going to private schools glide on through life mostly unaffected, while low-income children often don’t even have internet to attend Zoom classes. I’m writing this in rural Oregon, where some homes have neither internet nor cellphone service.”

NB: Remember that 1.2 million students dropped out of high school per year before Covid.

PRIVATE SCHOOLS, CATHOLIC SCHOOLS, OTHER COUNTRIES — THE DATA IS CLEAR (and how anti-Trumpism made a bad situation worse)

1. “Yes, it’s hard to open schools during a pandemic. But private schools mostly managed to, and that’s true not only of rich boarding schools but also of strapped Catholic schools. As a nation, we fought to keep restaurants and malls open — but didn’t make schools a similar priority, so needy children were left behind.”

2. “The evidence on remote learning suggests that despite the best efforts of teachers it doesn’t work for a large share of kids, “ said Emily Oster, a Brown University economist who has studied the issue. “I think we’ve deprioritized children in a way that will do long term damage.”

3. “What are the risks of opening schools? We now have a great deal of data in the United States and abroad comparing areas that reopened schools versus those that kept them closed. As the Center for Disease Control and Prevention found, “in-person learning in schools has not been associated with substantial community transmission.” The British Medical Journal this week put it this way in an editorial: “Closing schools is not evidence based and harms children.”

NB: “Many Democrats seemed to become more suspicious of in-person schooling last summer when President Donald Trump called for it. We shouldn’t let ourselves be driven by ideology rather than science, and that wasn’t universal. Gov. Gina Raimondo of Rhode Island, a Democrat, worked to open schools and kids are better off because she did.”

WHAT ABOUT THE DANGERS TO TEACHERS?

1. “While it’s crucial to improve ventilation, increase testing and maintain adequate spacing, those steps aren’t always possible — and failure to meet every benchmark shouldn’t be an automatic bar to in-person schooling.”

2. “Teachers in some places are suggesting that in-school instruction shouldn’t resume even after they are vaccinated, not until students are vaccinated as well.”

3. “That’s an abdication of responsibility to America’s children.”

NB: “For almost a year now we as a country have failed millions of America’s most vulnerable children; we must right this wrong.”

Opinion | School Closures Have Failed America’s Children

11 Facts About High School Dropout Rates

Click here for the last three years of posts arranged by theme:

PDF with headlines — Google Drive

YOUR TURN

Please share the coolest thing you learned in the last week related to education or education policy. Or the coolest thought however half-baked you had. Or the coolest, most important thing you learned in your life related to education or education policy that the rest of us may have missed. Or just some random education-related fact that blew you away.

This is your chance to make some one’s day. Or to cement in your own mind something that you might otherwise forget. Or to think more deeply than otherwise about something that is dear to your heart.