The Great Revealing begins to transition to the Great Admission phase

Over the past ten years, I have referred to the serial revelations that the fads and obsessions of the clerisy are mistaken and dangerous as the Great Revealing.  We are apparently moving now into an era of Great Admissions.  We are beginning to see it with Great Admissions that the clerisy and State were dreadfully wrong (as was documented even at the time) in terms of Covid-19.  There are an increasing number of semi-confessional research papers, books and experts coming forward regarding the same pattern of mistaken beliefs with regard to Anthropogenic Global Warming.  We might be seeing it with the January 6th convictions (though a little too soon to tell.)

Not fast enough, but reassuring to see that there is robustness in the epistemic system.

Here is the most recent one - The Startling Evidence on Learning Loss Is In from the editorial board of the New York Times no less, the insider Bible for the clerisy.  That mandatory school closure would be materially detrimental to students, that it would harm the most educational vulnerable the most, and that the school closures would have no material impact on student or societal health in terms of the spread or mortality of Covid was documented on historical and evidentiary grounds from the very beginning.  It was entirely ideology based decision-making rather than evidence-based decision making and ideological decision making backed by state coercion and punishment for non-compliance.

In the thick of the Covid-19 pandemic, Congress sent $190 billion in aid to schools, stipulating that 20 percent of the funds had to be used for reversing learning setbacks. At the time, educators knew that the impact on how children learn would be significant, but the extent was not yet known.

The evidence is now in, and it is startling. The school closures that took 50 million children out of classrooms at the start of the pandemic may prove to be the most damaging disruption in the history of American education. It also set student progress in math and reading back by two decades and widened the achievement gap that separates poor and wealthy children.

These learning losses will remain unaddressed when the federal money runs out in 2024. Economists are predicting that this generation, with such a significant educational gap, will experience diminished lifetime earnings and become a significant drag on the economy. But education administrators and elected officials who should be mobilizing the country against this threat are not.

There's the admission.  But the faith-based belief of the clerisy remains unshaken no matter how wrong they are.  While the article acknowledges that school closures was a bad policy choice, it fails to acknowledge that 1) the NYT fully supported the education establishment and their pursuit of school closure, 2) that all the criticisms and evidence against the policies were extant at the time of the policy decisions, and, 3) that the NYT derided informed criticism at the time as deranged conspiracy theories.  

Perhaps most astonishing in this Great Admission (partial though it is), is from the comment section.  The most upvoted comment by far (with 2,000 votes compared to 1,100 votes for the next most popular) is:

 

Upstate Guy

Albany, NY

Nov. 18

I’m a science teacher with urban HS and MS experience. The learning loss and gap predate the pandemic, it just accelerated it. The roots of our problems are actually easy to recognize:

1) In a bizarre quest for equity, we aren’t allowed to suspend black or brown students because the State says they are suspended too often. The kids know this and thus do whatever they want. They literally run the school. I was hit by a shoe in the hallway this week. I asked the student why she threw it and she replied, “Because I can.” 

2) To protect their own jobs, school officials juke the state about academic performance, attendance and graduation rates. Students are not held back for failing a grade. Summer school is academically useless. My 8th grade students are 4-6 years below grade according to their NWEA test scores and my observations. Yet I’m ordered to teach 8th grade curriculum to them. How engaged are students who can’t even read the material? How does it affect their mental health to be humiliated day after day because they lack basic skills to engage the material? For example, none of my 8th graders can read the analog clock on the classroom wall.

These issues can be solved with much smaller student:teacher ratios and truly rigorous standards. Kids can’t be promoted until they have mastered the material. Poor behavior must have consequences.

Raising children without consequences is producing a generation of antisocial young adults, without drive, discipline or knowledge.

New York Times readers are hardly a hotbed of reactionary, capitalist, Republican, fascists.  As demonstrated by the next most popular comments which could largely have been written by Rand Weingarten, head of the teachers unions.  The readers acknowledge the problem of underperforming students but congeal around our not spending enough on education, too large classes, bad parenting, celebrity culture, insufficient value attached to the profession of teaching, and the competitiveness of the capitalist system.  

From the beginning we have known that school closures would make no difference in health outcomes and that has proven true.  We have known that the education and child development consequences would be material and exponential the longer the schools were closed.   We have known that the damages would be in terms of lost academic ground, lost social development, and non-covid 19 health complications.

All of which have been proven to be true.  

We also know that there are tried and proven tactics for addressing the lost ground and disarray.  We need to revert to those approaches which have worked in the past and which work elsewhere.  Direct instruction.  Phonics.  Rote memorization.  Direct, impartial and transparent progress reporting.  Classroom management effectiveness.  Prompt, impartial and reliable discipline system.  Parental involvement.

On these tried, tested, and effective technics, the New York Times readers are in sharp opposition.  They want their Social Justice and their educational effectiveness too.  But this is one of those goal trade-off challenges which the real world glories.  If you can only have one or the other, which would you choose.  The number one comment supported by the readers suggests that the readers want educational effectiveness.  The subsequent comments indicate that other readers are not yet ready to let go of Social Justice as the primary objective.