Schools Are Back and Confronting Devastating Learning Losses
wsj.com
wsj.com
https://gov.wales/sites/default/files/publications/2022-04/a...
A second issue, as I see it, is the collapse of expectations in terms of evaluation ("grading"). We don't want to make a students anxious ==> grades are unfair/adversarial ==> allow retakes/change or remove evaluation methods/etc. This may seem tangential, but the students are not incentivized to pay attention, which is how I see this point relating to your very good question.
I could go on, but I only get more negative from here. I think there has been a subtle, but wholistic change in the way we think about educating our kids, especially around a degradation of expectations. Kid's can get away with quite a lot, especially if we don't reinforce the behavior that will actually incentivize "real" learning.
This is a nitpick but if done right (eg, avoid cheating, such as by making up a slightly different exam for each retake) retakes not only don't hurt mastery-based learning, but improve it dramatically. Since the whole point of a class is to learn the designated material, it seems silly that exactly when during the semester you finally figured it out has any bearing on the final grade, as long as you did learn and master the skills and/or content at some point before the end of the semester (and demonstrate that you did so). And, this encourages kids to see school as a game where as soon as a unit is over the knowledge they gained no longer matters, and it devalues perseverance. Worse, without retakes, tests/projects become more high stakes, subtly encouraging teachers to make the standards slightly more "forgiving." With retakes in the mix, it's easier to keep the bar where it should be, because there's no penalty for failing and trying.
There has been and still is a serious lack of focus on making grades actually measure "Did they learn the material?" but the influences you talk about have neither improved nor degraded that situation.
For that matter, a kid who failed to learn multiplication in elementary school, but who managed to fully catch up and even ultimately master algebra in 9th grade, should not be penalized for their previous "failures" (which honestly, were probably failures of their prior teachers in this particular example, since elementary math ed is just so bad in the USA) as long as they did eventually rectify them. After all, they're going to graduate high school knowing just as much as the kid who learnt the things on the official schedule.
The official schedule has little to do with reality and everything to do with practical school operational logistics and a lack of imagination.
In order to be able to set high expectations, we have to get away with our obsession with meeting those expectations on a fixed schedule. The natural result is that the expectations slide to conform to the schedule, not the other way around.
Keeping them at home obviously had/has its challenges. And if we had to go through this again, perhaps there are ways to improve - but to offer only the snark "maybe it wasn't the best idea" is neither very helpful nor insightful.
But the more salient one probably is the social climate of rapidly increasing public distrust, desperation, not giving a shit about each other in society, the zeitgeist as it were. These kinds of wooly vague things do really matter, you know.
For example:
Do you remember the 2004 northeastern blackout? Of course you do. A third the US/Canada population was without power for a day or two. Nothing terrible happened, no rioting or anything. A lot of observers were amused, relieved by this, because the last big NYC metro area blackouts in the 1970s immediately triggered severe rioting.
And clearly, the zeitgeist was quite different in 2004 than in the "End of Growth" supply-crunched 1970s.
Considering how dramatically the national mood was shifted by the pandemic, I would not actually be surprised if the rise in crime was largely caused by that.
Another example: Did you know violent crime and rioting are significantly more common in the summer than winter? A statistical fact that goes back a long, long time.
I advise not being so quick to dismiss the effects of such things, even if they seem more abstract and less simple to understand. The world isn't simple.
https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/research-reports/myth...
The list goes on. Not mentioned above is the indisputable fact in crime statistics that a very small percentage of the population commits a disproportionately large amount of the crime, especially violent crimes. If you put 2 and 2 together, and remind yourself that the criminal reforms removed in NYS the dangerousness consideration for bail, it's pretty obvious that repeat criminals are allowed to go on sprees. It's bearing out every day in headlines, and the breakdown of trust in the society is because quite simply: you're rubbing shoulders with violent and unhinged people on a daily basis in NYC.
I'll take my down votes with glee here. That's the Zeitgeist : denial by the current crop of people in power. And the pendulum will swing back in a few years, as it does.