New figures show that U.S. students’ performance in math and reading took a hit during the pandemic, according to the National Assessment of Educational Progress, also known as the nation’s report card.
You could just hear the anti-masking, anti-science activists salivating, but here’s how I’d answer them: Of course the scores took a hit. Students were trying to adapt to a new way of learning, and the alternative was to let them attend school in droves, and risk infection, while hoping for the best. Thank you, but no. Now take a seat, anti-science parents. Your children survived the pandemic. What are you doing to help them get back on track?
You? I cleaned up my answer, but you should feel free to let ‘er rip, below.
Very few people who cry about the schools closing during the height of the pandemic are willing to acknowledge how much worse all of this might have been if we had done nothing. They want to compare the numbers to some mythical world where the pandemic never happened. It's absurd.
People have such short, selective memories. Two short years ago the hospitals were full, the ICUs were full, hospital staffs were using garbage bags for improvised PPE, and doctors were inventing new ways to allow one ventilator to serve 2 or more patients.
Now that everything is "back to normal," they want to remove all the many safeguards that got us here. "I'm not getting wet now, so I can throw away this umbrella." Kind of like the SCOTUS decision to gut the Civil Rights Act because people in those states are voting now. I honestly don't understand parents who would want to allow their child to go back to a free-for-all environment without being vaccinated to the max. But, then, I don't understand Texas parents who allow their children to go to schools where they could be murdered, who still vote for Abbott and the status quo re guns.
Also, we are still not back to normal as infections rate rise again, hundred continue to die daily of COVID, children's wards and hospitals are already at crisis levels, new variants are being identified, etc.
If parents are given the right to choose if their child comes to school vaccinated (against any and all traditional scourges as well as COVID), then the rights of parents who do not want their children exposed to deadly diseases are eliminated.
As one who spent decades in public schools, routinely getting sick after being exposed to kiddos sent to school by parents who knew they were ill. I have no faith in many parents' ability - or willingness - to choose wisely. When kids are vomiting on your shoes, and Mom is on the phone insisting the child is perfectly well and not the least threat to others? Some kids become homebound because they are too fragile to risk exposure to the diseases spread by their sick peers. Others are harassed by those who insist their freedom requires that they choose to reject vaccines - while ignoring the freedom of the other kids to live free of needless exposure. Unlike me, they do not have the vivid recollection of one of their first grade classmates in an iron lung after contracting polio or the funeral for that child soon after.
I'm not so sure we will recognize what normal might now mean for quite a while. I have to hope it does not mean the present state of affairs: a routine lack of compassion and the widespread rejection of civic responsibility.
Amen. It's stunning, the lengths some parents will go to push sick children into the herd. Is this a cry for better health care? More liberal sick policies for parents?
Available, affordable child care - and extending to an age where kids can be responsible for being on their own after school, not just the youngest kids.
Wrap around services at schools would go a long way toward helping with this, but it requires expenditures for the public good. We see how that too often goes.
I suspect there's some cross-over, but the anti-vaxx problem has been around for quite a long time. The new dimension is the the virulent screaming that boils down to freedom for me and not for thee, the insistence that medical care and scientific research are conspiratorial hoaxes, etc. I think that's a very different set of related, and ominous, issues.
I don't remember knowing anyone with polio, but my mother has told me about relatives who had it. What I do remember is that the swimming pools were closed. But over two weekends in the summer of 1962, over 90% of the population of Dallas TX received the oral vaccine and the scourge was miraculously ended. We don't have that sense of community responsibility and cooperation anymore. Not about public health, not about public anything. At least, that's how it seems, because the "rugged individualists" are the loudest.
Bobby S. is the favored candidate of the anti-science, anti-vax "loud crowd"! He proclaims he will eliminate the requirement for vaccines for kids even now as hospitals are experiencing increased admissions of children with COVID related symptoms! Our country is floundering in an age of "ignorance" where facts don't matter and education is under attack. If the gQp is victorious, as it seems they will be, there will be NO return to sanity?!? How's dem apples?!?
What I've taken to saying to these ghouls on Twitter:
Just think what their test scores would have been like if they’d caught COVID and died! Or got long COVID! Or been vectors who brought COVID home that killed some of their relatives or gave them long COVID!
Very few people who cry about the schools closing during the height of the pandemic are willing to acknowledge how much worse all of this might have been if we had done nothing. They want to compare the numbers to some mythical world where the pandemic never happened. It's absurd.
I have ceased trying to discuss this with them.
People have such short, selective memories. Two short years ago the hospitals were full, the ICUs were full, hospital staffs were using garbage bags for improvised PPE, and doctors were inventing new ways to allow one ventilator to serve 2 or more patients.
Now that everything is "back to normal," they want to remove all the many safeguards that got us here. "I'm not getting wet now, so I can throw away this umbrella." Kind of like the SCOTUS decision to gut the Civil Rights Act because people in those states are voting now. I honestly don't understand parents who would want to allow their child to go back to a free-for-all environment without being vaccinated to the max. But, then, I don't understand Texas parents who allow their children to go to schools where they could be murdered, who still vote for Abbott and the status quo re guns.
I do not understand them, either. I really really don't.
Also, we are still not back to normal as infections rate rise again, hundred continue to die daily of COVID, children's wards and hospitals are already at crisis levels, new variants are being identified, etc.
If parents are given the right to choose if their child comes to school vaccinated (against any and all traditional scourges as well as COVID), then the rights of parents who do not want their children exposed to deadly diseases are eliminated.
As one who spent decades in public schools, routinely getting sick after being exposed to kiddos sent to school by parents who knew they were ill. I have no faith in many parents' ability - or willingness - to choose wisely. When kids are vomiting on your shoes, and Mom is on the phone insisting the child is perfectly well and not the least threat to others? Some kids become homebound because they are too fragile to risk exposure to the diseases spread by their sick peers. Others are harassed by those who insist their freedom requires that they choose to reject vaccines - while ignoring the freedom of the other kids to live free of needless exposure. Unlike me, they do not have the vivid recollection of one of their first grade classmates in an iron lung after contracting polio or the funeral for that child soon after.
I'm not so sure we will recognize what normal might now mean for quite a while. I have to hope it does not mean the present state of affairs: a routine lack of compassion and the widespread rejection of civic responsibility.
Amen. It's stunning, the lengths some parents will go to push sick children into the herd. Is this a cry for better health care? More liberal sick policies for parents?
Available, affordable child care - and extending to an age where kids can be responsible for being on their own after school, not just the youngest kids.
Wrap around services at schools would go a long way toward helping with this, but it requires expenditures for the public good. We see how that too often goes.
I wonder how much of a lack of that has fueled parents' concern about their "freedom." They simply didn't have child care.
I suspect there's some cross-over, but the anti-vaxx problem has been around for quite a long time. The new dimension is the the virulent screaming that boils down to freedom for me and not for thee, the insistence that medical care and scientific research are conspiratorial hoaxes, etc. I think that's a very different set of related, and ominous, issues.
I agree.
I don't remember knowing anyone with polio, but my mother has told me about relatives who had it. What I do remember is that the swimming pools were closed. But over two weekends in the summer of 1962, over 90% of the population of Dallas TX received the oral vaccine and the scourge was miraculously ended. We don't have that sense of community responsibility and cooperation anymore. Not about public health, not about public anything. At least, that's how it seems, because the "rugged individualists" are the loudest.
Bobby S. is the favored candidate of the anti-science, anti-vax "loud crowd"! He proclaims he will eliminate the requirement for vaccines for kids even now as hospitals are experiencing increased admissions of children with COVID related symptoms! Our country is floundering in an age of "ignorance" where facts don't matter and education is under attack. If the gQp is victorious, as it seems they will be, there will be NO return to sanity?!? How's dem apples?!?
I love me some Democratic apples. I just hope the Dems get out and vote and that they not take Lamont’s 15-point lead as the actual election results.
What I've taken to saying to these ghouls on Twitter:
Just think what their test scores would have been like if they’d caught COVID and died! Or got long COVID! Or been vectors who brought COVID home that killed some of their relatives or gave them long COVID!
Or just experienced their classmates dying!
Golly, the fun we missed!