Data has been released that to the surprise of absolutely no one, test scores dipped over the past couple of years during the pandemic. These statistics are being used, of course, in a vacuum, to bash teachers and unions with no mention of the 3 year drop in life expectancy over the past two years and the fact that OUR FUCKING ENTIRE SYSTEM OF MEDICINE WAS ON THE VERGE OF NATIONWIDE COLLAPSE AND IN SOME PLACES HAD or that none of the teachers signed up to work in a BSL-4 without PPE and that gathering in enclosed areas is the worst way to spread covid and that kids would then spread it to their parents, grandparents, and caretakers and that 50% of school districts have HVAC systems from the 60’s and 70’s and that none of the people bitching about this were willing to do the bare fucking minimum to wear masks or get a vaccine so it would be safe to reopen schools. So, yeah.
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karensky
Absolutely yeah. The old bats of US print media , WaPo and f’n NYT are the worst! My local paper in Philly, The Inquirer, did a more comprehensive dive.
TaMara
As someone who made extra scratch grading standardized tests, I can tell you what you probably already know, they are a bogus way to determine anyone’s abilities in any aspect. Problem-solving, creative thinking, and anything that veered from the rubric either resulted in not counting or, worse, downgrading a final score.
fuck that noise
Alison Rose 💙🌻💛
@TaMara: John Oliver did a good segment on standardized testing (and how generally stupid it all is) back in 2015. I’m sure a lot of it is still applicable, and some aspects might even be worse.
The Moar You Know
My wife is a teacher. I will never forgive any of the vast number of people who turned what was already a supremely shitty job into one that she had to risk her life for.
Incidentally, she does not recommend to any of her students (or anyone else) that they become a teacher.
To think, there are people genuinely puzzled as to why there’s a teacher shortage.
bbleh
“Context: What Is It?” A panel of members of televised media, print media, and online media discuss whether the media should or can address context, what the media are saying about it, whether it’s a problem, and if so what the media can do about it. This week on “Medium: Media on Media.” (Also available on podcast).
trollhattan
O/T Is this on-brand, or what?
West of the Rockies
Rightwing Nomad: “All teachers are lazy, that is why they become teachers, because teaching is easy and lazy people like that… Teachers are quitting because they are lazy and want a different–does not compute–teachers are lazy and… but if teachers are lazy… must destroy!”
trollhattan
@The Moar You Know:
The amount of work and stress, the level of pay, it’s hard to name another profession that requires so much education, plus credentialing, for such poor working conditions and compensation.
And we need them more than ever. (Same goes for journalism, the actual variety.)
Dangerman
I was reading some Reichwing news and, of course, they were bitching and moaning about “woke” schools. Then these assholes used “Top Gun: Maverick” as an example of something not woke.
I guess I don’t know what woke means.
Did TGM have a woman lead character? Check.
Did TGM have multiple minority characters? Check.
Did TGM have one of the most horribly abused and disrespected subclasses of all as a character (i.e. nerds, meaning Bob)? Check.
I assume the word “woke” must poll like shit given they are pushing it so hard.
different-church-lady
@West of the Rockies: A dumb populace is to their advantage.
eversor
When the mask mandates and vaccines started to trickle out if you went to any conservative area and read the comments it was always “I won’t take advice or be told what to do by someone who murders babies, thinks men can marry men, and thinks there are more than two genders” over and over and over again. That’s still lobbed at any ask that they do anything or listen to anyone from someone who does not agree with them on a narrow band of sexual issues.
Bezos made out like a bandit during COVID and these people are not upset by the price gouging and screwballness of it all, they are pissed about supporting pride, support for the right to choose, and supporting trans rights. This is also why they support Russia against Ukraine.
They aren’t going to listen or do anything smart, they will keep trying to burn things down, root for enemies, and let their children die unless they get put in charge of everyones sex lives and identities. It’s silly to pretend the issue is actually about masks or shots.
different-church-lady
@eversor: Now let’s be fair here: Bezos was making out like a bandit before COVID too.
Alison Rose 💙🌻💛
@trollhattan: You’d think they could at least come up with some new material.
TaMara
@trollhattan: Ooopsie!
FastEdD
This retired teacher says standardized tests are a good way to measure … nothing.
So, yeah. And duh.
The beatings will continue until morale improves.
A colleague of mine used to say he wanted a farmhouse out in the middle of nowhere. He dreamed of a place where he could wake up in the morning and take a pee off the front porch. Because there are no neighbors. He told me this year he already bought that house. “All they have to do is piss me off one too many times and it is ADIOS MF!” he said. Good luck my friend. And good luck replacing an experienced AP Physics teacher.
Martin
I said at the outset that schools were our best bet for public health education and management because they scale well and have good control systems. We should have closed everything but schools and not opened other businesses until public health measures at schools were good enough to start dialing them back. We could have made schools safe, even if we could make nothing else safe.
But no, we closed the schools and kept the bars open. Because capitalism is the only thing that matters in the US. China’s life expectancy has passed the US, which is wild when you see how poor large parts of China still are.
Bill Hicks
There was some bashing of standardized testing in previous comments and that often is well deserved (e.g., SAT/ACT scores aren’t very useful for predicting the future success of an individual in college). Standardized tests like the NAEP can be useful for looking at populations of students. Kevin Drum has a quick take on how the NAEP scores show that learning/performance fell a bit during the COVID pandemic (https://jabberwocking.com/fourth-graders-lost-about-half-a-grade-level-of-learning-during-the-pandemic/). As a teacher this was obvious (shit fell apart the first months students were sent home due to lack of any idea/technology/support on how to go about teaching kids in quarantine and the very real problems students had learning from their homes), but it is important to have standardized data to support the anecdotal info. The standardized data helps show the magnitude of the problem and it is a way to focus efforts on the students that were hurt the most (black students for example declined more than other groups), or which subject (math declined more than reading). It also allows monitoring of progress of these populations of students and can allow you to see if various interventions are effective. Lets try to be careful about bashing science.
Alison Rose 💙🌻💛
@Bill Hicks: I definitely think there can be some good gleaned from testing, but I think there is a lot about how the tests are made and given, how scores are calculated, and what weight and meaning schools gives to the scores that is pretty messed up.
Nina
Also a lot of schools were remote in places where wifi is completely unavailable and in a lot of houses the idea of a kid having their own dedicated place to set up a laptop is a pipe dream.
Jager
My teacher-daughter was on the committee to get her school reopened, the cost increase of just over 100k was almost all for cleaning and air movement, and filtration improvement.
MattF
Speaking of stupid shit, in a Newsmax interview Trump agreed with an interviewer that the FBI search at MAL was trying to prevent information about the ‘Biden crime family’ from becoming public. Also Hillary something something. So, yeah, MSM is bad, but RWNJ media is entirely bananananas.
Sloegin
Student scores tank when they lose a parent, guardian or other loved one in the family to Covid?
Yeah, totally the fault of the teachers and their union. Or maybe it’s that rainbow made out of craft paper in the corner, or the photo of MLK next to the clock.
HumboldtBlue
Speaking of stupid, Palin and her latest loss gets its own song.
Roger Moore
You left out the part where the teachers are all being bashed as a bunch of overpaid CRT-spouting LGBTQIA+ groomers. It is a great puzzlement we’re having a hard time finding enough teachers to fill the job openings.
anon
a lot of the schools that don’t have HVAC systems from the 60s and 70s , is because they don’t have the AC part at all
Booger
@FastEdD: So I’m confused…is your friend in favor of or against pissing off? Or is he heightening the contradictions, so to speak?
HumboldtBlue
Today ion seditious stupidity — BREAKING: Former NYPD Officer Thomas Webster sentenced to 10 YEARS in federal prison. A new Jan. 6 record.
Eunicecycle
@Nina: a friend of my daughter’s has 4 children, who were all needing to do zoom classes. And only one computer. Friends got together and got them enough tablets etc then her internet couldn’t handle 4 at the same time. So they had to go to other people’s houses. She was lucky she had a community to help; many aren’t so lucky. Remember the kids sitting outside a Taco Bell to use the internet? It was a struggle for so many people.
Chief Oshkosh
@The Moar You Know: Yep. Two of my work colleagues have parents who were teachers. Both of them took early retirement, even though they still had a passion for teaching, because they weren’t willing to risk their lives in pre-vaccine in-person classrooms, as mandated by their red state shithead governors.
Geminid
There has been news recently of substantial shifts towards Democrats in polling of a generic ballot. Today, a Wall Street Journal article today was headlined “Independent Voters Now Tilting Towards Democrats in Midterm Elections, WSJ Poll Finds.”
The article is paywalled, but reporting on it indicates that while a comparable poll taken in March found Independents favored Republicans on a generic ballot by 12%, they now favored Democrats 38-35%. That would be a 15 point swing.
scav
If teaching were so god-damed easy, wouldn’t test scores have gone UP with all the home-schooling from these O-so-critical and superior screechers?
Roger Moore
One thing I don’t see in any of this is a comparison of performance based on how long the schools stayed primarily remote. It seems like the comparison we need the most to see how much of the decline is a direct result of the pandemic and how much is because we went to remote classes. I could even imagine the results being worse for schools that stayed in-person than those that went remote because the disruption from students and teachers getting sick was worse than the disruption from moving online.
HeleninEire
We are going to emerge from this pandemic without having learned a fucking thing. So when the next one rolls around we will repeat the same stupid mistakes.
Geminid
@HumboldtBlue: Webster was the infamous eye gouger. Pictures of him in action were propagated for weeks through social media until he was finally identified. A police officer who knew Webster turned him in.
FastEdD
Here’s one example of standardized testing nonsense. One public school I know had an exemplary record of really high test scores, considering the students were low income and the teachers gave it their all. A private school moved in next door and some of the high achievers left. Boom, test scores are now way down and public school teachers are blamed and it is a “failing school.” Of course the public school is required to educate the Special Ed kids and the English Language Learners. Private school was not. Just. Not. Right.
A woman from anywhere (formerly Mohagan)
@trollhattan: I was startled, years ago, to learn there is a word in English for this: defenestration. In research for a trip to the Czech Republic, I ran across the incident called “The Defenestration of Prague”, where several politicians were tossed out of windows (and incidentally basically started the Thirty Years War).
Ksmiami
@HeleninEire: except a lot of the people who made mistakes won’t be around so there’s that…
E.
@FastEdD: My tiny little town, strewn end to end with “Let’s Go Brandon” banners lost it’s high school physics teacher under those exact circumstances and they did the only thing they could think of. They eliminated the position. And everyone is happy with the decision. There are very few thinking people left in that town. I left too.
HeleninEire
@Ksmiami: Yes. There’s that! 😆
bbleh
@trollhattan: omg totally. It’s brutal and awful but I still hadda laugh — it’s so on-brand it’s a caricature. It’s almost worse than Boris and Natasha
Old Dan and Little Ann
My training yesterday revolved around Adverse Childhood Experiences. I kept imaging some wingnut barging in and screaming, “Look at all you woke losers. Wake up, sheeple!”
ACEs
FastEdD
@Bill Hicks: Science is useful when predicting the motion of planets and massive objects. I taught it for years! For understanding students and human behavior not so much. In our district we had 4 high schools. If you rank them in order of parent income, they go 1,2,3,4. If you rank them as to test scores, year after year, same order, 1,2,3,4. Are the rich kids smarter? No. Are the teachers and teaching techniques better? No. I taught in all of them. I’d rather teach the low income kids because you can see improvement. Test scores can help you measure kids against themselves, but not so much against other schools.
Geminid
@anon: In 2021 Virginia Governor Northam and the General Assembly directed $250 million of the state’s American Recovery Act money towards upgrading public schools’ HVAC systems. Local governments had to match the state money with their own ARA funds.
Some of the ARA money is still being spent, although most went out in the first year and a half. The 50-50 Senate vote that passed the ARA in February, 2021 now seems like it was ages ago.
FastEdD
@E.: Ouch. That hurts. Sometimes in the fall they have to hire somebody for several sections left over. The district would put out a call for someone who could teach AP Physics, Spanish, Math, and coach basketball. All in the same position. Good luck with that.
Tony Jay
It’s (black) magical thinking. That’s the unreachable mental plateau where decades of inhaling increasingly unhinged propaganda has left these people. Everything even remotely connected to ‘Liberal’ thought has been cut and pasted into their Regnery published copies of Malleus Maliberalicum and might as well be upturned crucifixes or pentagrams inked in the blood of virgin goats.
Anything that doesn’t actively seek to harm, degrade, or otherwise stomp all over the happiness pursued by members of non-approved cultures (i.e. everyone else) elicits the same mindlessly hostile conditioned response because, as everyone who saw a 1970s horror movie can attest, you simply can’t fuck around with evil, no matter how outwardly pleasing or compassionate it may initially appear.
Basically, it’s a militant religion with its own list of proscribed topics and forbidden taboos, and the usual punishment for apostates and blasphemers. There’s really no way for rational people to reason with cultists who see everyone else as heretics or actual devils in human form.
All you can do is tell them where they can shove their lunacy and jail their Pope for espionage.
Poe Larity
Any doctors here want to coauthor a defenestration medical paper for an Ig Nobel submission?
karensky
@trollhattan: Defenestration was a death tool of the KGB and the FSB seems to have taken up the practice.
Ohio Mom
As someone with a child who had a very atypical developmental arc, I can tell you that almost all kids can catch up, given focused intervention.
Now that would require hiring just about double the current school staff — more teachers for smaller classes, an aide for every classroom, more school pyschologists, speech-language therapists, the list goes on and on.
So you can be pretty sure we aren’t going to do that, we are just going to write off every at-risk child even more than we did before (I’m not talking about the valiant efforts of individual teachers, I am talking about the U.S. as a whole).
I was so glad that Ohio Son was done with public school when Covid hit. He went to well-funded suburban schools and his time there made all the difference in his development. He would not be where he is today without that experience.
eversor
@E.:
The conservative fever swamps are very specific of what they want to tolerate public schools. Remove sex ed entirely. Replace it with something that teaches traditional Christian gender roles, absitencne only, gays go to hell, and homosexuality is evil. Teach Christianity, and that is teh awesome and the root of all civilization and all that is good in the world. Mandatory prayer in school and at all school events.
They want full public religious indoctrination in everything all the time. If a public service won’t do it than it should be closed and given to the Church. If a business stands against it than the business should be destroyed. And if non of them should happen than the nation should be destroyed.
Along those lines as Rod Dreher got divorce while he was writing that “Don’t call it enforced Theocracy or National Socialism it’s National Conservatism” screed he’s expatriating to Hungary.
hotshoe
I have a lot of sympathy for parents who are deciding to home-school now, considering the losses of actual educational value at public schools (and I have total respect for the public school teachers who are devoted to hanging in there despite the boards and communities threatening them).
But if you’re a parent of a gay kid, of a nerd, of a kid who doesn’t want to be forced into christian prayer on the field, how could you trust the system to protect your child much less educate them?
Disclosure: we homeschooled our younger boy for years because he was targeted by bullies and school couldn’t/wouldn’t do anything about it — years ago — I can imagine how much it has gotten worse in a “no CRT don’t say gay pledge allegiance to the cross” kind of school nowadays.
eversor
@hotshoe:
I think Jesusistan is in for a world of hurt. Corporations will pull out, people will leave, teachers won’t go there, doctors won’t go there, colleges will see applications drop, and places like Goldman Sachs are already saying “we don’t want your money we are out” over stuff.
We need to also start defunding them and blocking money at the federal level like they do to us.
hotshoe
@Tony Jay: “jail their Pope for espionage”
from your lips to god’s ears ;)
FastEdD
@Booger: He is just at the end of his rope. The admin needs him much more than he needs the job, and he is looking for any excuse to quit. I’ve worked with principals who were great, dedicated professionals, and I have had supervisors who were idiots. Just like lots of jobs out there. If my boss could take over my class for a day and answer questions about binomial expansions off the top of their head, cool. I can wear a suit and field questions from parents and go to meetings just like the principal. If we can’t switch jobs then it is hard for me to take this person seriously as a supervisor.
hotshoe
@eversor: heard a minute on radio this morning about TX state law which bans state/local govt entities from contracts with a new list of finance corps who cut/reduced investment in fossil fuel industry. What the hell! State pension funds, municipal bonds …
So, any Wall St (or foreign) stock fund which “recognize that investments in fossil fuels bring significant risk in the face of an inevitable clean energy transition, and that addressing the financial risks of the climate crisis is essential to good business,” is now a target of TX Comptroller Hegar.
Way to be business-friendly and attractive, Texas!
All folks who still identify as Republican deserve all the suffering they bring down on their heads with their own corruption and stupidity.
The only thing is, I’m sorry for the decent folks who are stuck there in circumstances they can’t control.
Ohio Mom
@hotshoe: The story I like to tell about bullying in my Shangri-La of a school district is about another autism family. The mom was walking through the middle school yard during the after-lunch recess, on her way to meet with one of her son’s teachers. She saw her son and noticed he was being bullied.
She mentioned this in passing during the meeting; the next day, she was called into the assistant principal’s office. On the AP’s computer screen was a virtual line-up of the boys under suspicion. “Are these the boys who were bullying your son?” “Why, yes.” “Thank you for coming in today, I’ll take it from here.”
That’s not to say I didn’t butt heads with the school a few times, once our disagreement escalated so much that I called in a mediator from the state. But I always say I could have found a different school system but not a better one.
If only there was a way to make all public schools as well-funded and well-staffed as my suburban one.
Quiltingfool
I read that article. What did they think would happen when learning goes online?
I agree with Martin (and Kay – she was very emphatic that closing schools really hurts the kiddos) – that extraordinary efforts should have been made to keep school open. But, if you couldn’t keep people safe, we would have had a much larger death toll, and there are states and communities that refused to take Covid seriously (Missouri, for one).
My friend taught through the Covid ordeal, and it was a massive shit tornado. I don’t know how she did it, I was thankful I was retired. I did talk to a few parents who were frustrated that they had to fight with their kids constantly to do school work at home. I would tell them that to kids, school=learning and home=do other stuff. Kids know what’s expected in the classroom, and they have a very hard time switching school norms to their homes.
Oh, and blaming teachers? Same shit, different day.
Quiltingfool
One thing, remote learning. In Missouri, some rural schools want to use remote learning options. They can’t find people to teach for substandard pay. Here’s the kicker – remote learning systems are not cheap. May be more expensive than raising teacher pay. Whodathunk it?
Kay
I was a “schools have to be open” person but it would have meant a lot of sacrifice on the part of adults because we would have had to close a lot of other things to make the increased risk even out in the whole risk picture. I thought we didn’t prioritize it and instead prioritized leisure time and for -profit activities. If we has started out with “it is essential kids stay in school” and then adjusted all the other risk factors we could have pulled it off.
I always had some doubts too – and I still do- that covid was “mild” with no after effects. I don’t think we know yet.
The “open schools now no matter the risk!” people were too arrogant to me- just dismissing any discussion of risk to teachers and other workers and also children. I thought they were unreasonable and also very whiny about the whole thing.
IF covid turns out to increase chronic diseases in tens of milions of people I think people might change their minds about the response, which certainly wasn’t perfect but also had to go forward with the information they had at the time.
Justawriter
Every now and then I wish we could extract the righteous rant serum from Cole’s bloodstream and inject it into every Dem senator. Keep lightin’ em up John.
Justawriter
On testing, my personal view: when testing is used to evaluate students’ progress and where they need additional assistance, it’s invaluable. When used to grade teachers who have vastly different groups of students who have vastly different challenges, it’s useless. When used to grade public schools against trust funded “academies” (or public schools where the average income is F*** YOU I GOT MINE) it is downright harmful.
Ruckus
@HeleninEire:
Somewhat the story of most of humanity.
It’s why we still do the same stupid shit our grandparents and great and great, great, great, great ones did. And why so many of the next 10 generations will likely do the same.
Most people want stability, but the world changes at a much faster pace now than it did even when I was born, in the first half of the last century. The changes are distinct, many of them are very good, but the people who are afraid or too stupid to recognize that change is part of history and life. Some can’t handle change because they feel they are getting screwed. But if they are it’s likely that their group was screwing some other group and now that’s changing – and they are scared that all the crap is going to come crashing down on them. Racism in, well anywhere, is that, the change in getting rid of racism or at least mitigating it’s horribleness is hard for some to come to grips with. Which is part of why it was so bad in the first place. We have to remember that conservatives by their very nature hate change, and it doesn’t matter if it’s actually better for them as well it’s still change. Liberals know that things can always be better, it’s how to get there that is the issue, how much change can most people stand or how can we get the defenders of stupidity to learn and be better. I see on twitter, many people claiming that they are no longer republicans, they have seen enough stupidity and hate and realize that better really is better.