Prescott Valley, Arizona Correspondent — Yes, and I’d want the scrutiny aimed carefully, because there’s a version of it that will land on teachers and accomplish nothing.
The early indications are consistent — the losses are real, they’re larger in mathematics than in reading, and they fall hardest on the students who were already furthest behind. That last part is the finding that matters.
Having taught special education, I’d single out the students on individualized programs. Services legally required to be delivered were not delivered for the better part of a year, and for a child with a developmental timeline, a year is not recoverable by working harder later.
Scrutiny should focus on outcomes rather than intentions, and on institutions that stayed remote past what local conditions required.
Dayton, Ohio Correspondent — The costs are becoming visible in early assessment data and in what teachers describe, and they’ll be clearer over the next two years.
Schools and universities that extended remote learning well past the point of acute local risk should be asked to justify that against the measured harm.
The engineering instinct here is to insist on a baseline. You can’t manage a recovery you haven’t measured, and there’s a real temptation to skip the measurement because the number will be bad and somebody will be blamed for it. Skip the measurement and you’ll be improvising remediation for a decade.
Myrtle Beach, South Carolina Correspondent — The learning losses are real and institutions that stayed remote longer than necessary should answer for it.
The part I’d add is the students who simply vanished. Districts here couldn’t locate a meaningful number of children for weeks at a time — no device, no connection, no contact. Those aren’t students who fell behind. Those are students who were absent from the system entirely and in some cases still are.
That’s a different problem from learning loss and it’s getting folded into the same conversation, where it will be lost.
Sheffield, Jamaica Correspondent — Extended remote learning had measurable costs and scrutiny is justified. I would enter one qualification.
In much of my region, remote learning was not a policy choice between options. It was the only option, and for a substantial share of students it was not available at all, because there was no device and no connection and in some districts no reliable electricity.
So when American institutions are asked to account for a year of degraded instruction, I would note that they had an alternative and made a decision. A great many places did not, and the loss there is larger and will attract no scrutiny at all, because there is no one to hold accountable for a thing that was never possible.
Tyler, Texas Correspondent — Yes. A year out of a building isn’t a long snow day. It’s a hole in reading, in the child who needed the lunch and the adult who noticed things, and in the freshman who never attached to anything.
Scrutiny means publishing the scores, the attendance that was actually attendance, and a plan to recover time with a date on it.
It also means universities that charged full tuition for a video stream explaining the tuition. I’m not paying for a mood.
And I’d protect the teachers in this. The ones I know fought to open, and a lot of the decisions that kept buildings closed were made well above them.
Jacksonville, Florida Correspondent — Parents saw the gap first and boards were late. Scrutiny is mostly just parents staying awake.
Require the data. Require a recovery clock. And don’t let a therapeutic vocabulary become a reason never to measure anything, because that’s the direction this is drifting.
Measure first, then help. Help without measurement is how you spend a decade and can’t say whether it worked.
Long Island, New York Correspondent — The developmental cost isn’t theoretical in a house with a fifth grader and a connection that drops.
Universities that kept the price and lost the campus owe an account, and some of them are going to give it in court rather than voluntarily — there’s tuition litigation moving through right now, and it will establish more about what was owed than any voluntary disclosure would.
Districts that stayed remote after the local evidence had moved owe one too.
Putting the lost year in the record is what makes the next closure harder, and it should be harder.
Cheyenne, Wyoming Correspondent — Children need a room and a teacher more than they need a portal.
Print what the portal cost in learning. Then talk about money.
Not the other way around, which is how it’s being done.
