Academic interventions needed after local school Covid shutdowns

In Front Page Magazine, educational commentator Larry Sand analyzes local teachers unions’ pressure to keep public schools closed during and post-pandemic, and how recent data highlights the academic achievement consequences students face today as a result.

Another way the unions have done great damage to children, especially minorities, was their insistence on shutting down schools during the Covid pandemic. Using testing data from 2.1 million students in 10,000 schools in 49 states and D.C., researchers found that “shifts to remote or hybrid instruction during 2020-21 had profound consequences on student achievement. In districts that went remote, achievement growth was lower for all subgroups, but especially for students attending high-poverty schools. In areas that remained in-person, “there were still modest losses in achievement, but there was no widening of gaps between high and low-poverty schools in math (and less widening in reading).”

Additionally, a study by Amplify, a curriculum and assessment provider, examined test data for some 400,000 elementary school students across 37 states. It found that the shutdowns led to a spike in students unable to read at grade level, with literacy losses “disproportionately concentrated in the early elementary grades. The study revealed that during the 2021-2022 school year, 47% of black and 39% of Hispanic second graders fell behind on literacy and needed “intensive intervention,” compared to 26% of their white peers.

Of course, if any students try to break out of their public school prisons, the teachers unions are standing at the schoolhouse door fighting tooth-and nail against any kind of parental choice.

This article originally appeared in Front Page Magazine. Read the whole thing here.

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Image by Denise Krebs