The United States has spent the last three years arguing about the pandemic’s effects on students’ academic and socioemotional well-being. Of course, this gave rise to the hodgepodge of tutoring services looking to accelerate their earnings, revanchist groups pretending to advocate for “parents rights” as a cover for dismantling democracy, and a plethora of people who coopted longstanding traditions from marginalized groups for their capital gains. These movements are contingent on the idea that our kids were doomed (DOOMED!) if adults didn’t go back to a pedagogically rudimentary disposition (“back-to-basics”) to stop this “liberal” society from falling off a cliff with their COVID safety measures and mass school closures.
But, as David Wallace-Wells illustrates here, the picture is a lot more complicated:
And what it shows is quite eye-opening. American students improved their standing among their international peers in all three areas during the pandemic, the data says. Some countries did better than the United States, and the American results do show some areas of concern. But U.S. school policies do not seem to have pushed American kids into their own academic black hole. In fact, Americans did better in relation to their peers in the aftermath of school closures than they did before the pandemic.
His interpretation of the data suggests that we should be concerned, but not for the reasons we kept hearing. There’s definitely more work to do on the hyper-local/district level in poring through data, but a country with thousands of school districts, myriad decision-making structures, and a pandemic that killed over a million people within its borders fared better than average. The article also accounts for economic subgroups and I’m left pondering how we can rethink our educational priorities.
The United States has never done well, much less #1, on these international assessments, no matter the jingoistic flag-waving. How does The US expect to be #1 in education when we’ve never authentically prioritized education for every student?
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