The Patriot Post® · Students' Academic Gap Still a Hard Slog

Once schools closed, pandemic learning losses were going to be catastrophic. Any teacher could have told you that. It literally set children back years. This has been supported by the results of the Nation’s Report Card test scores and most recently by the Northwest Evaluation Association’s (NWEA) findings.

NWEA used 6.7 million public school test scores from third grade to eighth grade over the course of three school years to measure the losses. There were many interesting trends to note in its findings.

First, the third graders didn’t have as bad an academic loss as the rest of the grades. That, even according to NWEA, is a trend that is unexplainable.

The average months behind for every grade was 4.1 months in reading and 4.5 months in math. The eighth-grade cohort was particularly behind. To reach even pre-COVID levels, in reading they need 7.4 more months of schooling and in math they need 9.1 more months of schooling (They basically are behind a full academic year in math).

The saddest stat of all from these findings is that kids fell further behind this past school year (2022-2023) whereas they had made some modest gains the school year before (2021-2022).

The question is, why?

National Review rightly suggests that students have been shown through the actions of the government, teachers unions, teachers, and administrators during the pandemic that their education isn’t important. At least not to the policymakers and cronies who kept schools closed far, far longer than they should have been.

There are other things at play, though, such as the pandemic-era spike in poor mental health, the advent of AI tools, emphasis on political correctness, and woke maxims instead of actual curriculum.

Poor mental health, particularly in the older middle school cohort, is holding many students back. They are fighting depression and anxiety — after all, their whole worlds were turned upside down by the pandemic. Some are even claiming to be struggling with obsessive-compulsive disorder, ADHD, bipolar disorder, or multiple personality disorder. Some of these are probably legitimate; however, there is a large group of kids that is claiming mental disorders after self-diagnosing on TikTok. It’s trendy to have a mental disorder, and the vast amount of time kids are spending on social media is directly contributing to the mental health crisis amongst teens. Even Biden’s Surgeon General Dr. Vivek Murthy has issued a warning about kids using social media.

Then there are the new AI tools that have become readily available on the Internet. ChatGPT can literally write essays for kids. If the computer can think for you, why should you have to learn this stuff anyway? The answer is that there is a truth and beauty that is discovered and developed by pursuing your own knowledge to the assigned work and not needing to rely on an external device for your schooling.

Then there is the infiltration of other external influences that are taking up classroom time and, to quote political pundit Andrew Klavan, “turning everything to crap.” Kids are being taught all about equity, racial quotas, victimhood hierarchy, and who among them is the deplorable class. Then there is all the LGBTQ+ extra learning with its plethora of holidays. How can there be time to learn something so trivial as reading and math? Oh, wait…

Then there is the practical problem that faces every teacher everywhere. To help students achieve gains, students need more one-on-one attention. Most classroom sizes are 30+ in public elementary schools. With a class that big, a teacher is doing well to be able to serve the middle. The higher- and lower-achieving students are often left to tread water. If the struggling students are lucky, they are given time with an aid or pull-out groups. The poor, bored students on the academically gifted side are neglected almost entirely. It is better to be average or struggling than to be intellectually astute (at least that is the message most public school kids are getting).

Educating our children, all our children, is vital to a thriving culture. However, there is so much that is polluting the well of knowledge in the public schools. Kids’ academics have been sacrificed already. What’s going to happen next is that standards are going to sink lower, not expectations raised higher.

What is needed for academic growth can only be fixed on an individual level with parents stepping in and making the necessary changes for their child to succeed.