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!