04/09/2021
Sci-fi writer Philip K. Dick famously said, “Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away.”
But during the Not So Great Reset, an increasingly powerful belief is that reality will go away if we just stop talking about it. For example, from The New York Times news section:
Does It Hurt Children to Measure Pandemic Learning Loss?
Research shows many young children have fallen behind in reading and math. But some educators are worried about stigmatizing an entire generation.
By Dana Goldstein
Published April 8, 2021… Ms. Bonilla’s experience illustrates a roiling debate in education, about how and even whether to measure the academic impact of the coronavirus pandemic on the nation’s children — and how to describe learning gaps without stigmatizing or discouraging students and families.
Studies continue to show that amid the school closures and economic and health hardships of the past year, many young children have missed out on mastering fundamental reading and math skills. The Biden administration has told most states that unlike in 2020, they should plan on testing students this year, in part to measure the “educational inequities that have been exacerbated by the pandemic.”
But others are pushing back against the concept of “learning loss,” especially on behalf of the Black, Hispanic and low-income children who, research shows, have fallen further behind over the past year. They fear that a focus on what’s been lost could incite a moral panic that paints an entire generation as broken, and say that relatively simple, common-sense solutions can help students get back up to speed. …
Others go further, arguing that regardless of what terminology is used, standardized testing to measure the impact of the pandemic is unnecessary or even actively harmful. Voices as prominent as the former New York City schools chancellor, Richard Carranza, and the Massachusetts Teachers Association, the state’s largest educators’ union, have encouraged parents to opt their children out of state tests during the pandemic. “We do not want to impose additional trauma on students that have already been traumatized,” Mr. Carranza said.
This week, the nation’s largest school system, in New York City, announced that parents would have to opt their children in to state standardized testing, which could lead to a smaller group of students taking the exams, and results that will be difficult to interpret.
Jesse Hagopian, a Seattle high school teacher and writer, said testing to measure the impact of the pandemic misses what students have learned outside of physical classrooms during a year of overlapping crises in health, politics and police violence.
“They are learning about how our society works, how racism is used to divide,” he said. “They are learning about the failure of government to respond to the pandemic.”
They are learning what’s hot on Tik-Tok, and can the value of that be measured with a mere test?
Mr. Hagopian said he believed that “learning loss” research was being used to “prop up the multi-billion-dollar industry of standardized testing” and “rush educators back into classrooms before it’s safe to do so.” …
Eventually, the reporter finally slips in the knife:
Debates about the extent of missed learning are more than academic. If remote school is actively harming children’s skill development, it becomes harder for teachers’ unions, school boards or administrators to argue that schools should remain shuttered as vaccines roll out across the nation, or should operate only on limited schedules.
How much longer will objective data that reflects poorly on blacks be allowed to be published?
This is a content archive of VDARE.com, which Letitia James forced off of the Internet using lawfare.