Published
3 years agoon
By
Joe MathewsNot one day.
Our kids should not lose one day of school, not a single day of instruction, to the coronavirus. Or to anything else.
Losing those school days would be a betrayal of our children.
In education, nothing is more important than instructional time with good teachers. Studies show that kids don’t catch up after missing extensive amounts of school; poorer kids are most at risk.
Even in good times, California fails to give its children enough instructional time. The state refuses to provide full-day kindergarten. And for grades eight and below, a full school day is really only a half-day, with five hours or less of daily instruction.
Officially, California is supposed to provide 180 days of school. But during the Great Recession, the school year was shortened to 175 days, and some districts less. As the nonprofit news site CalMatters has shown, individual school districts now routinely cancel instruction for various reasons.
Even in this context, the speed with which California abandoned instruction during the COVID-19 crisis is stunning. Before many schools had closed, the education lobby—including school boards and teachers’ unions—successfully lobbied state to keep funding the school districts even if there was no actual school.
Of course, Newsom publicly demanded that schools keep teaching students online, but that’s a fig leaf. It’s clear that little education will happen with the schools closed. Many students, especially poor ones, don’t have the technology or parental supervision to take classes from home.
Another reason why online education won’t work now is that state politicians, bowing to teachers’ unions, previously imposed rules to discourage online education, including a moratorium on virtual charter schools. Ironically, state’s most dependable online educational system is the system of state assessment tests, which California officials have now cancelled. The tests should be reinstated, precisely so we can determine what this lost instruction time cost kids.
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