Class wars

How we lost an entire generation of low-income students

The elites never really cared about the working class…

But never before the disconnect has become so blatantly obvious. Until March 2020, that is…

When governor after governor announced that they were closing schools and businesses, the elite never worried about losing their jobs or businesses, or their children falling behind in learning. Instead, they saw it as a fun little experiment in which they would learn to bake and finally binge-watch that show on Netflix.

They never understood what was so hard about “just staying home”.

They never understood why people were making such a big deal out of remote learning. Many claimed it was because parents now had to provide childcare to their children and they didn’t want to. Those who said this were mostly childless or had the means to hire a full-time nanny, but that did not stop them from speaking on the issue…

Well, the results are in…

According to this report that was just published by Harward University:

• The schools that had the most weeks of remote instruction are the high-poverty schools in blue states. You know, the states that are the most “progressive”…

• While every school has some learning loss, the worst effects are seen in high-poverty schools.

• However, even among the high-poverty schools, the losses increase as the number of remote weeks increases.

• In fact, in schools with no remote learning, learning loss is comparable between low- and high-poverty schools.

The table below tells a very clear story: Achievement gaps between low- and high-poverty schools have widened significantly. But it did not happen because of COVID. It happened because of remote learning… Because high-poverty schools were more likely to go remote (30%) and because they were affected worse by it (51%)…

Another table from the same report tells an even more troubling story:

Only 4% of low-poverty schools are black students. In high-poverty schools, 27%.

Only 7% of low-poverty schools are Hispanic. In high-poverty schools, 40%.

Years of effort aimed at closing the achievement gap between minority and non-minority students… Down the drain…

Families who are well-off will make sure their kids catch up. They will hire tutors. They will buy books, resources, subscriptions to educational apps… Kids in the other families? They will see their chances of having a decent life diminish more and more as they keep failing in school. Many of them will never be able to recover from this…

So there you have it. Liberal/ “progressive” blue state governors who “care deeply about racial equity”, listening to public health “experts” and the media both of which are mostly liberal/ “progressive” people incapable of understanding that trade-offs exist (but they also “care deeply about racial equity”), have destroyed the lives of a generation of minority kids.

I couldn’t have imagined a better vindication for red states…