Month: July 2023

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Lamenting student learning loss caused by the pandemic year of closed schools

Educational authorities are shaking their heads to the realization that the nation’s school children are not as smart as they were before the pandemic followed by a year or so of online learning circa 2019 – 2021. Virtual learning did not work, now did it? Kids are not responsible adults. Youngsters lack the wherewithal to dutifully concentrate from home or car to Ms. McCracken’s virtual math class every morning for more than a year plus the other six or seven online classes they had to take. Online teaching was hell for teachers … and play time for kids and adolescents, if we’re being honest. Society actually thought tens of millions of parents, most likely mothers, would stay at home, not work and earn money, and instead monitor their children’s daily online lessons. What were the adults in charge thinking? It’s laughable in retrospect if it hadn’t been so extremely stressful mostly to the students.

But now that their scores in reading and math indicate for the first time in a long time much lower scores and reduced comprehension, America is in an uproar. The number one target public schools, with teachers a close second, are to blame. For shame.

That year and a half of dystopian mandatory online learning was ineffective and a near total disaster. It was as if created by noneducators, by people who have no background in educational psychology beginning with Socrates who taught in person. We should be ashamed of what we allowed, and by ‘we’ I mean Americans. Sudden virtual learning. Come on. Teachers had no training. Maybe aspiring teachers in college are prepared to teach virtually but not the vast majority of teachers on the job. Many teachers took that moment in time as their cue to quit or retire.

Most kids have a short attention span, and online learning in general was never going to work for that age despite all the computer games that keep their eyes glued to the screen. Then there were the annoying issues with freeze frames and static in video and audio on both ends: teacher and student computers. What a mess. So now with significantly lower test scores, educational experts are scratching their heads trying to figure out what to do about this massive learning loss, a national disgrace.

The learning gap

In 1959 my mother began a career as an elementary teacher. During the ’70s when I was in school and had to take annual achievement tests, the kind we bubbled in No. 2 pencil the answers to be scored by a computer, she recalled those national tests were created to show the rest of the world Americans are smarter than people in other nations like the Soviet Union and China. But from the get-go, mid-century American legislators (often wealthy products of private education and Ivy League college) may have presumed the results would reveal a high intellect across the country. Yet American students ranked way lower than their counterparts. And it’s been that a-way from the Space Age to the Information Age to our high-tech age today.

When I was a kid, School House Rock provided a new kind of education while we watched Saturday morning cartoons. The 5-minute upbeat songs, rhymes and funny animated stories were entertaining and unforgettable; we can still sing them today. Learning was fun. But the annual achievement tests were not. They were too long, colorless, tedious and no doubt to students who were not bright pure drudgery. Knowing my peers, some filled in the bubbles without much thought to the questions or the answers. A couple just filled in the C bubbles if they didn’t know the answers.

That’s very American, by the way. We are an impatient people. Even as kids, we don’t take to government mandated test taking. What’s so funny is the government still takes those achievement scores as a real indication of the intelligence of American youth. Nothing could be further from the truth.

Nevertheless, government education officials thoroughly review and study these annual test results and publish their findings good or bad. The possibility that kids pranked them has yet to be discovered at least publicly.

Gee, I hate to think the rest of the world takes these tests seriously, the ones with the U.S. ranking 11th or lower while Russia’s always number one even when it was the USSR. That’s the reported results to scratch our heads. Meanwhile, American kids enjoy their childhoods when free from mandatory testing—and remain oblivious to the concerns of educators and government officials. Play ball!

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Affirmative action is exactly that and exactly necessary

The deal, U.S. Supreme Court, is, see, white America hasn’t totally changed their views on the races since the 1960s. The dominant, or domineering, race of this nation is still white. And not surprisingly to nonwhite Americans, racial prejudices and bigotry still exist. That’s why government programs like affirmative action used in considering employee hires and college admissions were created. The program was fundamentally necessary when created in the early 1960s. White people, time and again, have shown they cannot be trusted to … do the right thing when it comes to treatment of Blacks and other ethnicities.

Yet since the 1980s, a growing white segment of the U.S. population decided they are being replaced by other races in employment and college. Race consideration in college admissions was to be fair toward minorities by giving them a leg up, a gigantic break. Even so, nonwhite families still have far fewer members who earn college degrees. Affirmative action was a small way to open doors for nonwhite families who historically were treated like third-class citizens in their own country.

But the issue that made young white people cry foul was the college admissions’ practice of weighing applications including race: more points for the candidate who is Black or other minority, or simply not white. If two candidates presented the exact same credentials such as high GPA and exam grades, more points would go to the nonwhite student. That’s the simple theory thought to be unfair and the same method understood and overturned by the U.S. Supreme Court. Surely more thought was placed into college admissions than just race. After all, the intent among colleges and universities was to strive toward racial inclusion and diversity whereby all students would gain from each other in course lectures, studies, research, and class discussions—all the way to the locker room and dorm.  

Reversal of fortune

Reverse discrimination is what white college candidates claimed when they received an unexpected rejection letter by a desired university while a Black or nonwhite student received a warm welcome. This is the part that, repeated loudly through the decades, brought on the U.S. Supreme Court review. And, not surprisingly, the Court voted a firm no on this type of affirmative action.

I don’t or won’t claim to be a victim of reverse discrimination. But once as a job candidate, I was told point blank by a hiring authority that if the choices were me, a white, and a Black candidate, the Black candidate would get the job. The business was under the gun to hire more Blacks. I was shown the door and understood as a white person, I best seek work elsewhere. I didn’t file a lawsuit or yell discrimination. I accepted affirmative action. Always believed in it because I am well aware of white America’s bloody mean cruel not-so-distant past against nonwhite people. I also realized, no, I knew, as a white person, I would get a job and achieve my goals easier than someone who goes through life in this country with dark skin. I don’t know if today nonwhites think the same given our entwined racial history.

The move to reverse college affirmative action and diversity programs was called out during the Obama administration. Remember back then how everyone said, almost as a boast, we’re now living in a ‘post-racist’ society with the election of our first Black president? Hah. Seems many Americans forgot: The political pendulum swings hard conservative after a relatively liberal administration.

So with the Court’s opinion, now the ‘many’ white students who cried “Unfair!” when they were not admitted into the university of their choice may apply and surely be accepted. Time will tell. College is so expensive to most Americans, enrollment numbers have been dropping significantly—no more realized than statistics for white males. What’s that all about? And isn’t the high cost of college a much bigger issue than banning college affirmative action?  

Affirmative action was one way this nation showed we care about helping nonwhite people achieve what many of us take for granted: employment, housing, education. This program was created to make up for centuries of white treatment toward Blacks in particular, from slavery to racial discrimination, segregation, bigotry, economic deprivation, intimidation, harassment and lynching. Doing away with affirmative action and related civil rights laws such as the Voting Rights Act by the predominantly white U.S. Supreme Court says racial discrimination—whether whites are consciously or unconsciously aware of their actions and deep-seated prejudices—is a thing of the past.

Not in this country. Not this century. Still.

The FBI will tell us white-on-Black crime continues to escalate and remains the largest percentage of hate crimes in the U.S.

A college education was perhaps the best opportunity white American society could deliver, promote and encourage among minorities. But, no, we had to take that away, too. We never countered against cries of ‘reverse discrimination’ by self-important students who minorities see as winning the racial lottery, that is the great fortune of having been born white.

For more than 50 years, affirmative action did far more good than bad to Americans white, Black and other. I hate to see all that generational progress forgotten and played down—like it wasn’t important or vital to this nation’s well-being and survival.