Nearly two years into her herculean effort to keep schoolchildren out of classrooms, Los Angeles teachers union boss Cecily Myart-Cruz finally said the quiet part out loud: The public school system isn’t particularly important or helpful for childhood development and learning.
In a rare interview with Los Angeles magazine, Myart-Cruz lambasted the critics of school closures, inexplicably arguing that students lost nothing in over a year of being barred from classrooms.
“There is no such thing as learning loss,” the head of United Teachers Los Angeles told journalist Jason McGahan. “Our kids didn’t lose anything. It’s OK that our babies may not have learned all their times tables. They learned resilience. They learned survival. They learned critical thinking skills. They know the difference between a riot and a protest. They know the words insurrection and coup.”
The damning exposé, which is worth reading in its entirety, details Myart-Cruz’s COVID-19-era measures that have nothing to do with COVID-19, namely UTLA’s boycott of Israel and push for greater ethnic studies, as well as her fallacious framing of the reopening debate as a race war.
But most baffling is Myart-Cruz’s argument that public school is not a public good that benefits children in any meaningful way.
Since the end of March, Los Angeles County’s seven-day rolling average of COVID-19 deaths has been just one in 400,000 residents. Yet in this interview, Myart-Cruz excoriated Gov. Gavin Newsom for offering $2 billion in incentives for schools that reopened by April 1, deeming the proposal “a recipe for propagating structural racism.”
But it’s not just in-person schooling Myart-Cruz has rejected. As other districts hastened to move classes to Zoom at the start of the pandemic, Myart-Cruz limited Zoom hours to four per day, all the while insisting that teachers receive a full day’s pay. She conceded to Los Angeles magazine that although “getting back into schools as safe as possible” is a goal, “there are broader issues at play.”
“Education is political,” she said. “People don’t want to say that, but it is.”
Contrary to Myart-Cruz’s willful delusion, the learning loss suffered by students is a quantifiable travesty — and one that harms the very political classes she claims to protect.
A national study by McKinsey found that, overall, the pandemic left K-12 students, on average, five months behind in mathematics and four months behind in reading by the end of the 2020-2021 school year. Students in majority black schools and majority low-income schools were the hardest hit. Unless the year’s learning loss is reversed, McKinsey determined that today’s students could earn a projected $49,000 to $61,000 less in their lifetimes, costing the domestic economy as a whole over $100 billion as each class of pandemic students enters the workforce with artificially depressed human capital.
Another national study by the NWEA found that students from grades three through eight were 8to 12 points behind in math and 3 to 6 percentile points behind in reading. Like the McKinsey study, the losses were much harder on minority and lower-income students. While white and Asian American third graders only dropped by 9 percentile points in math, their black, Latino, and Native American counterparts fell by 17, 15, and 14 points, respectively. In reading, black and Latino third grade percentile performance loss doubled that of white third graders. The effects were even pronounced across income, with reading performance among third graders at low-poverty schools falling by just 3 percentile points as opposed to a drop of 11 percentile points among those at high-poverty schools. In math, the drop was 6 points for third graders at low-poverty schools and 17 points for those at high-poverty schools.
In Los Angeles in particular, district data now shows that a majority of black and Latino students through the fifth grade are not on track to learn how to read. This is the case for just 1 in 5 Asian students and 3 in 10 white students. Among the district’s high school students, 40,000 are no longer on track to graduate on time, and only one-third of middle school students are at the proper reading and math levels. Only 2% of ESL learners and 9% of disabled students are at their reading levels.
One stated purpose of public education is to ameliorate the very inequality that Myart-Cruz and her ilk claim to loathe. If Black Lives Matter rioters burning the nations cities to the ground and Jan. 6 thugs storming the Capitol provide as much instruction to children as 40 hours a week of publicly funded education, then there isn’t really a point to funding public schools in the first place.
Of course, any reasonable person can see through Myart-Cruz’s charade. Chad the investment banker and his trophy wife, Karen, can always pay for an au pair to facilitate extra Kumon courses in their Brentwood bungalow — that is a lifestyle that Miguel and Consuela, who work a combined 100 hours a week to make their Pico Rivera rent, cannot afford. Don’t take my word for it — read Los Angeles magazine’s account of single mom Renee Bailey, who is black, in South Los Angeles.
“[Bailey’s] 14-year-old son, Kaled, suffers from autism and in the past year away from the classroom has developed new and distressing behaviors like bed-wetting and biting,” McGahan writes. “She tried repeatedly to get Kaled enrolled in an in-person instruction program but her efforts came to nothing; citing safety concerns, UTLA discouraged its teachers from participating in the program. ‘With distance learning, he was receiving behavior-intervention services through his iPad,’ she says. Frustrated that parents have been frozen out of reopening negotiations, Bailey began organizing parent rallies and attending protests at UTLA headquarters.”
Not everything under the sun these days is a culture war, racist, classist, or cruel. But the school closures truly are. And those who claim to champion the least privileged are actually the ones threatening their futures the most.
