Schools, teachers, and COVID-19

There were a lot of businesses forced to close their doors during the COVID-19 pandemic. Many of these businesses never reopened. While this was happening, schools joined the list of closures.

I remember an early feel-good story the schools tried to promote. Some schools had buses running their usual routes to deliver meals for their students. I'm not against providing food for these children, but this was not the right way to handle it. Taxpayers losing their jobs should not be forced to fund inefficient food distribution. Buses are way too big for these deliveries, and routes should have been modified. Teachers didn't care. It wasn't their money. The PR boost was worth it.

There was some good news in all of this. Teachers insisted that they were not essential workers. I fully agreed with this point. Of course, teachers changed this narrative when they wanted to cut in line for vaccines.

Schools eventually switched to distance learning. They were reluctant at first, insisting that access to technology would create an inequitable environment. In other words, it would be more equitable to deprive all students of schooling than just low-income students. They might actually be right about that point.

Distance learning turned out to be a disaster. Schooling under normal circumstances is mentally unhealthy. Adding schooling on top of social isolation was a horrible idea. In all honesty, I think that distance learning was worse than the closures.

The pandemic amplified many existing flaws with the conventional schooling model. Destroying the natural desire to learn and promoting educational dependence drastically reduced the amount of learning that occurred during the closures. In an environment that promotes educational rights, closures would likely have altered what was being learned without nearly as substantial reduction in educational levels.

This led to the so-called COVID slide. There was a lot of talk about pandemic-related learning loss. Usually learning loss is used to refer to memorization forgotten during the summer, which isn't really learning loss. In this case, they were comparing what people learned versus what they were expected to learn. Reduced progression is not the same as losing what has been learned, so this is once again flawed terminology.

Failure to meet expectations resulted in discussions about whether schools should hold students back or to extend the school year into summer. This wouldn't be nearly as big of a discussion if we saw children as more than just their ages. If we are meeting the needs of each individual, there will be a lot of variability between what children have learned. Rigid age-based groupings are rather pointless if schools are meeting diverse needs.

Although a lot of people have criticized school closures, I definitely have a different viewpoint. Considering the horrible performance of our schools, I honestly think that closures would have been better than distance learning. In fact, I would fully embrace permanent closures. This would lead to less mental health problems and more independent learning. I have been saying this for years. Completely dismantling our schooling system would improve the quality of education in America. Our schools really are that bad.