Reality was very offensive to her.

The tiresome absurdity of the indulgences.  I just posted a couple of days ago about the chattering institutional class trying to suppress the signal and increase the noise (SATs aren't the problem, you just don't like the reality they reveal).  And here we are with another example.

From Does It Hurt Children to Measure Pandemic Learning Loss? by Dana Goldstein.  

Research shows many young children have fallen behind in reading and math. But some educators are worried about stigmatizing an entire generation.

Again there is the naive ignoring of conflicts of interests.  Education experts were among the most vocal advocates for keeping schools closed while parents were desperately advocating for reopening.  Parents had science on their side.  There is little evidence of schools as a significant vector of transmission and children have extraordinarily low mortality rates to Covid-19.  Virtually zero.

Is it any surprise that education experts who brought on the giant learning loss from school closures might be worried about measuring pandemic learning loss?  Of course they want to hide the signal.  Their policy recommendations were not science-based, were self-serving, and had huge negative consequences on everyone else.  

It has nothing to do with stigmatizing an entire generation.  It has everything to do with revealing that the imperial education experts have no clothes.

The opening paragraphs are an astonishing illumination of class privilege and the prioritizing of emotional incontinence over data and reality.

Over the past year, Deprece Bonilla, a mother of five in Oakland, Calif., has gotten creative about helping her children thrive in a world largely mediated by screens.

She signed them up for online phonics tutoring and virtual martial arts lessons. If they are distracted inside the family’s duplex, she grabs snacks and goes with the children into the car, saying they cannot come out until their homework is done. She has sometimes spent three hours per day assisting with school assignments, even as she works from home for a local nonprofit organization.

It all sometimes feels like too much to bear. Still, when her fifth-grade son’s public-school teacher told her he was years behind in reading, she was in disbelief.

“That was very offensive to me,” she said. “I’m not putting in myself, my hard work, his hard work, for you to tell me that he’s at second-grade reading.”

Apparently the reality is that she worked hard but not effectively to provide an education while school was closed and now she finds it offensive that 1) her child is behind in reading, and presumably 2) she wasn't an effective parent teacher.  

It is hard not to feel a knee-jerk, "suck it up buttercup" response.  School closures were bad policy with negative consequences for children's learning.  That is measured reality.

Being offended by that reality has no bearing on addressing the negative consequences of those bad policies.

Ms. Bonilla’s experience illustrates a roiling debate in education, about how and even whether to measure the academic impact of the coronavirus pandemic on the nation’s children — and how to describe learning gaps without stigmatizing or discouraging students and families.

Studies continue to show that amid the school closures and economic and health hardships of the past year, many young children have missed out on mastering fundamental reading and math skills. The Biden administration has told most states that unlike in 2020, they should plan on testing students this year, in part to measure the “educational inequities that have been exacerbated by the pandemic.”

Bad policies led to bad educational outcomes and the response is to consider not measuring those consequences?  Utter madness.

If you cannot measure a problem, you are unlikely to understand how to solve it.  This was articulated nearly 150 years ago by one of our foremost scientists in history.

I often say that when you can measure what you are speaking about, and express it in numbers, you know something about it; but when you cannot measure it, when you cannot express it in numbers, your knowledge is of a meagre and unsatisfactory kind; it may be the beginning of knowledge, but you have scarcely, in your thoughts, advanced to the stage of science, whatever the matter may be.

Lord Kelvin - Lecture on "Electrical Units of Measurement" (3 May 1883), published in Popular Lectures Vol. I, p. 73 

This is frequently rendered as "If you cannot measure a problem, you cannot solve it" and attributed to either Peter Drucker or Lord Kelvin.  But neither said it.  They were more nuanced.  

But the foundation for progress is an understanding of the status quo as measured.  No measures, little understanding.

Which is what some of the education experts, who misled the nation, now want as national policy.  Let's not measure the damage done by our bad policy recommendations.

So why would anyone oppose knowing how big is the gap that needs to be made up?  The experts oppose to hide their lack of expertise.  And then there are the ideologues who want to avoid measuring because of their strawman theories and negative prejudices against their fellow Americans.

But others are pushing back against the concept of “learning loss,” especially on behalf of the Black, Hispanic and low-income children who, research shows, have fallen further behind over the past year. They fear that a focus on what’s been lost could incite a moral panic that paints an entire generation as broken, and say that relatively simple, common-sense solutions can help students get back up to speed.

“This isn’t a lost generation,” said Kayla Patrick, a policy analyst at the Education Trust, a national advocacy group focused on low-income students and students of color. “They just need extra support — in many cases, the support they probably needed before the pandemic, like tutoring.”

The ideological blinders are too obvious.  She believes Americans will act prejudicially against this one-year cohort because their education has been retrograded by the education establishment.   

There is no evidence offered to support this ideological belief.  And plenty to counter it.  All it will take is an ambitious catch-up year to bring them back up to speed.  There is plenty of data supporting how resilient children are in adapting to set-backs.  The kids will be fine.

On the other hand, there is a lot of evidence to suggest that the education establishment is pretty bad at its role.  Not teachers per se.  Those vary as in any profession.  But virtually no major education establishment initiative of the past fifty years has produced positive outcomes and certainly none which have produced beneficial outcomes in excess of their costs.  

At this point the NYT article becomes a little incoherent.  For example:

While there are deficits across demographic groups, the gaps were larger in schools that serve predominantly Black, Hispanic or low-income students.

Yes the NYT is a paid up advocate of critical race theory, but this isn't about race.  It is about culture, family dysfunction, class, and poverty.  The gaps are larger for those students from poor and single parent families, regardless of race.  By focusing on race, we ignore the totality of the problem.

Then there is this "No Shit Sherlock" paragraph.

Debates about the extent of missed learning are more than academic. If remote school is actively harming children’s skill development, it becomes harder for teachers’ unions, school boards or administrators to argue that schools should remain shuttered as vaccines roll out across the nation, or should operate only on limited schedules.

This isn't about suffering kids.  This is about urban ideologues favoring school closings which benefit teachers and inflict harm on parents and children.  Measuring the lost learning should make it harder for self-serving political interests such as teachers unions from pursuing bad education policy such as keeping schools closed.  

Goldstein apparently can't think straight.

Nationwide, about half of students attend schools that are currently offering daily, in-person learning. Federal data shows stark disparities. As of January, the majority of Black, Hispanic and Asian-American fourth graders were learning fully remotely, compared to a quarter of white fourth graders. And West Coast schools are lagging significantly behind in reopening.

I am completely willing to stipulate that "the majority of Black, Hispanic and Asian-American fourth graders were learning fully remotely" even though only a quarter of white students are doing so.  But I am also willing wager good money that Black and Hispanic students have a much larger gap and that Asian-American students will have virtually no gap.

Goldstein is mixing two concepts without apparently understanding how they differ from one another.  The percentage of students being educated remotely versus in-person is an input-measure.  Education attainment gaps are an output measure.  Even if everyone had the same input percentage, there are going to be different output results.  Because mode of education is not the sole factor determining results - parental education attainment, family intactness, income, are all contributing factors.

In other words, family structure and poverty are likely far more determinative of differential education outcomes than are form of teaching (in--person versus remote).  Goldstein mixes these issues together.

Goldstein's reporting is further marred by her over reliance on vague generalizations.

Some educators
Some students
Some research
Some experts 

There is always "some"?  But how many?  A few, a plurality, 50:50, a majority, a super majority?  "Some" tells us virtually nothing.   

But ultimately, disregarding the almost incoherent reporting, the fundamental issue is that too many unaccountable government institutions, in this instance K-12 education, are deferring to institutional insiders embarrassed by the consequences of their self-serving policies.

Deferring in the sense of listening to arguments that the scope of the problem should be suppressed due to emotional fragility.  Once again government and the chattering class seeking to suppress the Signal in favor of mere Noise.

Interestingly, the urban liberal readership of the New York Times is having nothing to do with this misleading reporting.  In the comments, the overwhelming sense of the first couple of dozen most popular comments are along the lines of "What are you, stupid?"