This whole narrative is insane. I can't help but think there's an underlying objective to drive for additional funding to fix a problem that does not exist.

Kids did not go from learning 100% to 0%. Let's make an argument that, perhaps (and I don't believe this either) they learned 50% of what they would have learned in person. Half.

OK. How much harm does that cause?

For reference, I have two kids who went remote the entire year. I am very aware of what work they did.

OK. What's the lifelong harm of learning half of history, health, geography, social studies and underwater basket weaving for a single school year?

None. Zero. Less than a rounding error.

Please raise your hand if missing half of what you learned in tenth grade history (or almost any subject for that matter) would have destroyed your life as an adult?

From my perspective, the only subjects that could suffer would be the sciences, math. This, because they are incremental. Half of math in a year does mean you lost half of the incremental steps needed to go on to the next stage.

How bad is this? Not bad at all. Just do some remedial work next year and stop whining about it. Seriously, kids today have no clue how hard we had to work in school decades ago. In high school I regularly had to stay up until midnight or so to do homework.

The point is: Adult life isn't easy. It requires hard work and sacrifice. What better time to teach kids about reality than in school, when all they have to worry about is school?

Well, they don't have the time in a new school year to do that?

Drop some of the bullshit courses and add extra time with what matters!

This is where I go into a rant. Sorry. I'll keep this comment to the US for now.

Our K-12 educational system is an abject disaster. We give our kids to this system for well over a decade and what we get in return isn't something to be proud of.

What?

Answer a very simple question:

What is a high school graduate in the US good for? If you had to hire a high school graduate in the US, what job would you give them?

Let's make a list:

- Stacking boxes
- Answering the phone
- Making coffee (with training)
- Washing dishes
- Waiting tables
- Fast food order taking
- Amusement park "associate"
- etc.

In other words, after spending over a dozen years in the educational system we graduate young adults devoid of marketable skills, to the point they barely qualify for the simplest minimum wage jobs.

College? Sure. Yet, not everyone goes to college. And if you truly care about raising the poverty line you have to deliver more out of a dozen years in an educational path than barely being good enough to stack boxes.

As my oldest kid approached the end of his "stay" in high school I made it a point to put him through actually useful learning, bot formal and informal. He came out of high school with a nanodegree from Udacity as well as a solid range of skills he learned from me, from woodworking to manual and CNC machining, welding, electronics and coding. While his college friends were struggling to find anything that paid more than minimum wage he was making triple minimum wage in his first job with no prior work experience.

That is the value of an education that develops real marketable skills vs. the bullshit we like to call "education".

Harsh words? Sure. Please provide me with your list of what a high school graduate could be hired to do without significant further instruction to earn anything above minimum wage. I'll wait.

That's the perspective from which I say that this idea that missing some instruction for a year caused kids irreparable harm. From my point of view we cause more harm --lifelong harm-- by not delivering young adults with a reasonable set of marketable skills after a dozen+ years in educational institutions. One way to look at it is that this is a massive waste of a dozen years.

One of my kids regularly tells me he learns more about a range of subjects at home from my wife and I than he does at school. This is certainly true of the sciences. That's another rant.

As an example, his middle school science teacher was a Chiropractor. While I am not here to disparage Chiropractors, this guy knew nothing about nothing. It was horrible. This guy had no business teaching almost any subject in science. He regularly taught falsehoods and he clearly did not have the background in math, physics and chemistry to qualify for the job. We live in a reasonably decent school district, and yet, due to the iron-grip labor unions have on education in the US (an other big problem) there was absolutely no way to object to or get rid of this guy.

Here's an example of how bad this guy is: He told the kids the moon does not rotate about its axis. That statement defies even the most basic logical exploration of the concept. He actually argued with me when I pointed out that it does and refused to correct what he taught his class.

Missing half a year of this moron's "science" class was likely a good thing for every kid in that class.

Another one of my kids had "robotics" class in middle school. The teacher would go into the classroom, sit down and read a magazine while the kids played with legos on their own. She earned an extra boost in income and retirement by being a "robotics" teacher while the kids go NOTHING out of it for a year. I volunteered to go teach these kids something actually useful that year but the school did not take-up my offer.

And we complain about 2020? Really?

In another case, a math teacher, middle school, her "teaching" consisted of copying from the book onto the blackboard. If kids had a question they had to write them down on a piece of paper and she would answer them next class (if at all).

I can only imagine the horror stories we might be able to compile if we did an honest appraisal of the level of instruction our kids get from substandard teachers protected by a system that cares not one bit about the students. This is far worse than almost anything that could have happened in 2020.

To be repetitive: If we are so concerned about a partial deficiency created by a difficult year, we ought to look at the damage this system is causing kids after 12+ years. What happened in 2020 is a rounding error in the context of a person's entire life. If a half year of deficiency in education is so significant, 12+ years is just-about criminal.