Pandemic education has featured a great deal of chicken littling about "learning loss" that is largely ridiculous. Test manufacturers and folks in test-adjacent edu-biz endeavors are selling the picture of students as buckets and education as water, and now the education is just leaking out at a rate so alarming that it's kind of amazing that people have not turned into drooling couch potatoes once they've been out of school for a decade.
NWEA's report from last April is oft-cited, along with its sexily simply assertion that students will learn days and months of learning. That's baloney, and what it really means is that the folks at NWEA are guessing that test scores will probably go down X points. And if that isn't enough evidence this was a nothingburger, note that in November NWEA announced that their guesstimate had turned out to be over-stated.
But the learning loss drama continues, with Hechinger Report this week emailing links to some research from Amplify (motto: "Trying to make a buck off education since 2000), launched by Rupert Murdoch, later sold to Joel Klein after the company failed to make a killing with their flawed school CONTINUE READING: CURMUDGUCATION: More Absurd Learning Loss Data
I've been reporting periodically on how pandemic school is going in my own rural/small town county. Since nobody is doing any kind of systematic large-scale tracking of which schools are doing what and how it's going, I'm just throwing one more batch of data into the general big-city-dominated noise (here's the most recent post on the subject, from the beginning of November).
Numbers have continued to climb here, though deaths are still relatively low. The four local districts moved to save winter sports season, so basketball and even wrestling have been going on scholastically. In Pennsylvania we experienced a tightening of the rules around the holidays, but now they're loosened and restaurants are operated at limited capacity again.
A couple of local school districts (there are four) mostly decided to go back to full face-to-face at the beginning of the second semester last week, while the others remained hybrid and anticipated going full face to face in a week or two. That plan lasted a couple of days, until it turned out that a cafeteria worker at my old high school had tested positive for covid. That triggered a two day shut down, but while that shutdown was happening, more positive cases turned up and now the school CONTINUE READING: Update: How Pandemic School Is Going In One Rural Area