Having taught through the pandemic and seen the students return to campus, I find the direction of this report problematic. Bluntly, it annoys the crap out of me. If the only thing that you get out of falling test results is “learning loss” and that we need to “return to normal ASAP” than you haven’t been paying attention or you really have no idea what the base problem is. 

It’s right there in black and white. Which population of students seem to suffer the most “learning loss”? (I really hate that phrase…. more on that later). Which group seems to need the most help coming back after the pandemic? The groups most effected are Black and Latino communities. Which areas are the ones with most difficulty with teachers leaving or hiring more teachers? Same areas. Why is that? And is the real solution to add more days to an effort that appears to be failing in the first place? How is that a solution? No wonder educators in those areas are pushing back. 

The problem isn’t that some how Black or Latino students were “naturally” more effected than White students. When we were all sent home in March of 2020 I was teaching at an elementary school in North Las Vegas where the student population was largely Latino and Black. The school facility was a beautiful safe space, the educators and staff were all highly trained, highly committed professionals, but the surrounding neighborhood was another story. There were some newer homes near the school and the neighborhood wasn’t a dangerous hell hole, but it had a definite edge compared to other parts of the Las Vegas area. The point being that other parts of the larger area, where the communities more reflected the quality of the school facilities, they didn’t seem to have the same “learning loss.” Why is that?

The capacity to learn has nothing to do with the color of ones skin or even whatever ones native language happens to be. We like to believe that we live in a meritocracy. I grew up hearing continually that “you can be whatever you want to be,” and that my life was not limited to whatever it was that my father or grandfather did. I was lucky. My siblings and I exceeded in education and livelihood from the previous generation and lived lives that our grandparents would have never imagined. But even the opportunities that I had growing up in the 1960s and ‘70s hardly exist today. I was lucky. You see, the issue is that we keep making education an individual responsibility and achievement but then wonder why some communities or ethnic groups fail to succeed. 

The pandemic was a wake-up call. Whatever it was that we were doing before, we were forced to try to do it another way with our students staying in their homes and communities, no longer able to escape to their neighborhood schools. Before coming to Las Vegas I taught fully online at the university level for six-years and before that worked on a doctorate and earned my masters online. There is a way to do this online and it be just as successful as face-to-face, but it requires a lot of work and a change in understanding of what education is. You can’t throw a PDF up on a website with a short video with crappy sound and you off-camera and call it done. The problem wasn’t online versus face-to-face. The problem wasn’t ethnic or cultural differences between more successful and less successful communities. The problem is that this isn’t a problem with education. It’s a sociological problem where we only accept individual achievement but fail to see that there are whole communities that don’t get the same opportunities or are limited by implicit expectations. 

What we were doing before the pandemic wasn’t working, but we were able to pave over the problems with a rotating collection of “learning strategies,” more testing and the fantasy that making education profit-driven would produce better results. If decision makers think that the problem is that we aren’t spending enough time doing the same thing that wasn’t working before, that we just need four extra weeks in the classroom… Good Lord, please spend some time in these classrooms, and not just dog and pony visits, but really spend time and tell me that we need to continue doing what we were doing just extend the school year another month. I think I left the profession at just the right time (I am so sorry my friends still carrying the torch…). 

Sources: District extends school year to help students catch up from pandemic learning loss, PBS Newshour for 2023-06-20, https://youtu.be/2EbmSvE2CDE