As a former radio guy, I never really understood sports talk radio. Granted, I never really cared about sports that much either, so maybe I am not an objective observer of the sports talk radio milieu. But I just can’t understand why some dimwit from Staten Island should be given 10 minutes of airtime to phone in his opinion about how the Mets should completely change their pitching rotation or how the Jets need to switch to a herringbone offense or how the Knicks should invent a time machine so they can bring back Walt Frazier and Patrick Ewing on a dream team.
It just all seems so… pointless. Armchair quarterbacks doing their Monday morning quarterbacking is the very definition of the blind leading the blind.
So, with that in mind, let’s reflect on some of the reports coming out about how we, in our towns, cities, country and planet, handled the early days of the pandemic. In particular, there are now experts coming out and evaluating the effect of school shutdowns and remote learning in 2020-2021.
It’s not good news. A new study from the Harvard Center for Education Policy Research indicates that “remote instruction was a primary driver of widening achievement gaps.” In its conclusion, the study says that:
“…the shifts to remote or hybrid instruction during 2020-21 had profound consequences for student achievement. In districts that went remote, achievement growth was lower for all subgroups, but especially for students attending high-poverty schools.”
The report is devastating, but not unexpected. I talked to several friends who had kids of varying ages, from kindergarten up through high school and even college. All of them, to a person, said that remote learning was inferior at best and a sad joke at its worst.
So, as we slowly emerge from the pandemic, with the benefit of hindsight, the Monday morning quarterbacking has begun.
This is not to criticize the Harvard report (and all the others to come). Rather, we should thank the researchers for their rigorous use of data to confirm what we all suspected.
No, I am going to preemptively criticize the inevitable parade of asshats who are going to say “SEE??? WE TOLD YOU SCHOOL SHUTDOWNS WERE A BAD IDEA!!!” They will be coming out from under their slimy rocks in the coming days and weeks to vomit up an unhealthy dose of ill-informed and unhelpful bile.
So, a quick reminder about what was happening in the spring of 2020:
- We didn’t know what we didn’t know. It was a pandemic that was poised to kill millions (and has killed millions.) People were scared and it’s no surprise that at the time no one – NO ONE – wanted to send their kids to school.
- In autumn 2020, there were no vaccines, and the virus was just ramping up for a massive surge over the winter of 2020-2021. So, even though there were parents agitating for schools to go back to in-classroom learning (and many areas of the country did so), it was still a time when a deadly virus was killing thousands per day and we just didn’t have any data on how badly it would spread and potentially kill in a classroom setting.
- Decisions were being made in real time by school boards around the country that are made up of people like you and me. That is, not infectious disease experts, or experts in remote learning or experts in HVAC retrofitting or experts in fluid dynamics and how airborne particles spread when expelled from the human lungs. No, these were people who volunteered to serve on their local school board and were being assigned an expertise that even the experts did not yet have.
Now, there is some hard data from real experts that remote learning was NOT good for our kids and more precisely, some kids in particular, demographically speaking.
But instead of using that data to say “OK. Now we know what the problems are, let’s roll up our sleeves and fix them!” we are going to get “We told you so!” from a certain segment of society.
This report and others like it cast a glaring light on the inequities in our school systems, urban versus rural versus suburban, wealthy versus poor, primarily white versus non-white. And while no doubt there will be many who will say “Look at this disparity. We must fix it,” there will be countless others who will say “Not my problem. My school did it right. What do I care about some kid in Oakland?”
In fact, many in the latter group are very likely to say that our public education system is failing, the pandemic is just another proof point and then continue to try to cut budgets, ban books and advocate for alternative curriculums that deemphasize the very science that produces reports like the Harvard study and that saved millions more from dying in this pandemic.
The Harvard report and its ilk are a gift. The pandemic is a catastrophe of historic proportions, we acted and now we have some data to say whether HOW we acted was bad or good. In essence, we have a playbook for how to prepare for the next catastrophe and all we need is the policy and financial will to enact it.
But, we live in THIS world, the real world, where many would rather have the issue to make political hay instead of the solution to make our kids smarter, happier and more productive.
It will be no surprise then, when we face the next pandemic and we fumble the ball all over again.
<cue Johnny Jerkmire, calling from Staten Island: “You’re on the air!”>