As far as K-12 education is concerned, the distance learning experiment has completely and utterly failed.
Schools were instinctively closed in the spring amid uncertainty about the coronavirus and the dangers it posed, but we soon saw that COVID-19 poses a statistically negligible threat to children. Examples from Europe and research have long since shown that in-person schooling doesn’t lead to spiking levels of COVID-19 transmission.
Yet, in a disgraceful cave to the demands of unreasonable teachers unions, many states and localities have mandated that public and private schools close at various times during the pandemic. The costs of these sweeping restrictions were always going to be much harder for low-income and working-class students and families to manage, the ones who can’t afford nannies or don’t have parents working white-collar jobs from home.
The full magnitude of the failure of “distance learning,” and just how far it has set back disadvantaged students, is becoming more clear. It’s even worse than previously expected. Just consider the results reported from Montgomery County, Maryland’s largest school district.
“Failure rates in math and English jumped as much as sixfold for some of the most vulnerable students in Maryland’s largest school system, according to data released as the pandemic’s toll becomes increasingly visible in schools across the country,” the Washington Post reports (emphasis added).
This fall, more than 36% of low-income ninth-graders in the district failed English. Compare that to less than 6% that failed eighth-grade English the year before.
School closures have also had disproportionate effects among different racial groups. “In Montgomery, a diverse system of more than 161,000 students, Black and Hispanic students from families at or near the poverty line were among the most severely affected groups, along with English language learners,” the Washington Post report continues.
In perhaps the most disgraceful trend of all, distance learning has woefully failed students with special needs. In 2019, 6% of special-needs students failed sixth-grade math. This year, it’s an astounding 16%.
In ninth-grade English, the rates of failure among Montgomery County special-needs students spiked from 6% to 32%.
Don’t think that Maryland is some outlier. Similar results were reported for Fairfax County in Virginia:
In fact, we can reasonably assume that similar failings are happening nationwide. A recent survey found that low-income families are 10 times more likely to say that their child has received little or no distance education at all since schools have closed. More than twice as many poor households say “distance learning” is going poorly for their children.
To be clear: Reopening schools does not endanger students or staff. This is the finding of multiple international and domestic studies. Even Dr. Anthony Fauci has now come fully around on the safety of in-person schooling and admits that “the spread from children and among children is not very big at all, not like one would have suspected.” For what it’s worth, Sen. Rand Paul was right about this way back in May, in a back-and-forth he had with Fauci during a committee hearing.
Reasonable people can disagree about the proper extent of pandemic restrictions when it comes to closing bars, mandating masks, and more. But we should all acknowledge that school closures were a mistake. The damage they have done will not be made right overnight.
Brad Polumbo (@Brad_Polumbo) is a Washington Examiner contributor and host of the Breaking Boundaries podcast.
