Declining enrollment at APS

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I'm not surprised VA was 44th last year. It's hard to imagine many places offered less in-person instruction than we did. That's why it boggles my mind all the people who are like, "Eh. We tried." We did, but were quite close to dead last. I think a lot of people really don't understand how things ran elsewhere. It's not just TX and FL either. The whole Mountain West - places I normally think of us lapping in education -- the Dakotas, Montana, Idaho, Wyoming -- were all basically business as usual last year, with much better outcomes for their students.

Yes, the five kids in Wyoming could spread out in the barn.

Wow you are ignorant. These places have smaller populations, but they have similar class sizes (both in terms of number of students and physical space). But I feel like I'm wasting my time here, because many of you will never admit just how poorly APS handled the pandemic, even now that we have giant datasets that provide empirical evidence that demonstrates it.

That’s not necessarily true. Western states tend to underfund education and can have huge class sizes. I worked in a 2nd grade classroom with 32 kids in Colorado and that wasn’t an outlier.

OK so even more so the barn answer is ridiculous. These places found a way, and APS could have too, is that point. But we didn't. And now we have these huge gaps.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I'm not surprised VA was 44th last year. It's hard to imagine many places offered less in-person instruction than we did. That's why it boggles my mind all the people who are like, "Eh. We tried." We did, but were quite close to dead last. I think a lot of people really don't understand how things ran elsewhere. It's not just TX and FL either. The whole Mountain West - places I normally think of us lapping in education -- the Dakotas, Montana, Idaho, Wyoming -- were all basically business as usual last year, with much better outcomes for their students.

Yes, the five kids in Wyoming could spread out in the barn.

Wow you are ignorant. These places have smaller populations, but they have similar class sizes (both in terms of number of students and physical space). But I feel like I'm wasting my time here, because many of you will never admit just how poorly APS handled the pandemic, even now that we have giant datasets that provide empirical evidence that demonstrates it.

That’s not necessarily true. Western states tend to underfund education and can have huge class sizes. I worked in a 2nd grade classroom with 32 kids in Colorado and that wasn’t an outlier.

OK so even more so the barn answer is ridiculous. These places found a way, and APS could have too, is that point. But we didn't. And now we have these huge gaps.

My point is that the class sizes aren’t similar and APS parents freak out at 25 kids in a class! I thought it was so luxurious when I got here and started teaching. We have supplies, comparatively tiny classes and nice facilities.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I'm not surprised VA was 44th last year. It's hard to imagine many places offered less in-person instruction than we did. That's why it boggles my mind all the people who are like, "Eh. We tried." We did, but were quite close to dead last. I think a lot of people really don't understand how things ran elsewhere. It's not just TX and FL either. The whole Mountain West - places I normally think of us lapping in education -- the Dakotas, Montana, Idaho, Wyoming -- were all basically business as usual last year, with much better outcomes for their students.

Yes, the five kids in Wyoming could spread out in the barn.

Wow you are ignorant. These places have smaller populations, but they have similar class sizes (both in terms of number of students and physical space). But I feel like I'm wasting my time here, because many of you will never admit just how poorly APS handled the pandemic, even now that we have giant datasets that provide empirical evidence that demonstrates it.

My point is that there are many significant differences between Wyoming and Arlington. When you look at other areas that faced similar challenges during the pandemic we aren’t such an outlier.

And from the study linked earlier:
It is possible that the relationships we have observed are not entirely causal, that family stress in the districts that remained remote both caused the decline in achievement and drove school officials to keep school buildings closed.

The pandemic sucked. It will have long-lasting damages. Let’s address those.

Blaming APS is pointless - especially since they had a reasonable response given the constraints.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Can I just confirm that the people upset with APS have withdrawn their children and will not be returning?

At least one made that claim recently on AEM. Good riddance.

I don't understand this mentality. I think it's actually bad for communities and public schools overall when a large percentage of the students opt out. I thought that was one reason APS historically has been better than Alexandria, for example, or DCPS. We don't really want to be a community where the wealthy send their kids private.

I think what we're seeing is a community where the entitled send their kids private, and if it gives lower-income families more of a voice, I'm all for it.

I am frustrated by parents who can't distinguish between schools being closed and instruction being remote; by parents who think, all things being equal, teachers prefer remote instruction; by parents who think test scores and achievement are the same thing; by parents who think that because they rely on schools for child care, that is the schools' job regardless of circumstances

I am also frustrated that APS did not seem to do a better job of (or explaining why it didn't do a better job of) triaging and remediating -- or providing guidance to parents on how to remediate -- the biggest problems with remote instruction, such as a lack of social interaction. I think APS' longstanding inadequacy in diagnosing LDs such as dyslexia made life a lot worse for everyone involved. I don't think APS ever set clear guidelines for when it would and would not offer in-person instruction, what would be expected of students and teachers when there was in-person instruction, and how it would assess whether schools were safe places to be.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I'm not surprised VA was 44th last year. It's hard to imagine many places offered less in-person instruction than we did. That's why it boggles my mind all the people who are like, "Eh. We tried." We did, but were quite close to dead last. I think a lot of people really don't understand how things ran elsewhere. It's not just TX and FL either. The whole Mountain West - places I normally think of us lapping in education -- the Dakotas, Montana, Idaho, Wyoming -- were all basically business as usual last year, with much better outcomes for their students.

Yes, the five kids in Wyoming could spread out in the barn.

Wow you are ignorant. These places have smaller populations, but they have similar class sizes (both in terms of number of students and physical space). But I feel like I'm wasting my time here, because many of you will never admit just how poorly APS handled the pandemic, even now that we have giant datasets that provide empirical evidence that demonstrates it.

My point is that there are many significant differences between Wyoming and Arlington. When you look at other areas that faced similar challenges during the pandemic we aren’t such an outlier.

And from the study linked earlier:
It is possible that the relationships we have observed are not entirely causal, that family stress in the districts that remained remote both caused the decline in achievement and drove school officials to keep school buildings closed.

The pandemic sucked. It will have long-lasting damages. Let’s address those.

Blaming APS is pointless - especially since they had a reasonable response given the constraints.

Every well-done research study you will ever read will contain two sentences to a paragraph on caveats and limits of the study. That is a hallmark of good research. But absent good explanations of other variables driving these differences we are seeing, the reality is the "amount of remote instruction" explains a tremendous amount of the variation in school performance. This is the most likely explanation by far. Again, this study involved 10,000 school systems, each unique in its own way, just like APS. But across these systems, student outcomes were very strongly associated with days or remote learning.

And again, VA was 46th in the nation. That's the bottom 10th percentile.

To your point below (I think it's the same person, maybe not), the language of school closed vs. remote instruction is not technically correct, I agree. But meaningfully, for many students, there was little difference. My APS student learned almost no math last year remotely (as shown by test scores), and likely no science (though since they are taking a different science class this year, we are not seeing it to the same degree). My children learned nothing in the spring of 2020. So remote instruction is very similar to closed from my perspective. I don't fault teachers for this, who were doing their best in terrible circumstances. But I do think APS should have opened for in-person sooner, and with more days offered.

[Anonymous]

... and to continue my thought ...

Having made those decisions, which we see now had a huge and negative effect on our children, APS should be offering remediation in the form of tutoring, summer school, and anything else we can think of to help get them back on track. That is part of what the Harvard study is saying.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Can I just confirm that the people upset with APS have withdrawn their children and will not be returning?

At least one made that claim recently on AEM. Good riddance.

I don't understand this mentality. I think it's actually bad for communities and public schools overall when a large percentage of the students opt out. I thought that was one reason APS historically has been better than Alexandria, for example, or DCPS. We don't really want to be a community where the wealthy send their kids private.

I think what we're seeing is a community where the entitled send their kids private, and if it gives lower-income families more of a voice, I'm all for it.

I am frustrated by parents who can't distinguish between schools being closed and instruction being remote; by parents who think, all things being equal, teachers prefer remote instruction; by parents who think test scores and achievement are the same thing; by parents who think that because they rely on schools for child care, that is the schools' job regardless of circumstances

I am also frustrated that APS did not seem to do a better job of (or explaining why it didn't do a better job of) triaging and remediating -- or providing guidance to parents on how to remediate -- the biggest problems with remote instruction, such as a lack of social interaction. I think APS' longstanding inadequacy in diagnosing LDs such as dyslexia made life a lot worse for everyone involved. I don't think APS ever set clear guidelines for when it would and would not offer in-person instruction, what would be expected of students and teachers when there was in-person instruction, and how it would assess whether schools were safe places to be.

For those of us with K-3 students, the biggest issue with remote learning wasn't a lack of socialization but a lack of learning. Kids that age just aren't independent learners and cannot learn to read or write via iPad. No additional communication from APS would fix that. We we extremely fortunate enough to have a babysitter for childcare and who was able to spend her sole focus supervising virtual learning, and my kids still didn't learn what they needed to. (To the clear, the babysitter was not someone with the capacity to teach the kids herself.)

For those who didn't witness this ridiculousness, our APS school's principal allowed teachers to combine classes so they could prepare fewer lessons and split responsibilities. This meant we had 45-50 7 and 8 yos on a Teams call at a time. There were zero small groups or 1:1 interactions for the entire year. No work was ever graded. No feedback given. Report cards weren't even filled out.

Was your APS elementary school different? Probably. APS allowed each principal to concoct their own approach to virtual learning. Some schools did better than others. Regardless, K-3 cannot reasonably be taught virtually. That cohort should have been back in person by October 2020 once we'd seen that schools weren't a major source of covid spread in other parts of the country.

[Anonymous]

Ugh, PP. That's so awful. And I agree 100%. I wasn't so upset when we were remote in September, because I thought it might actually be a disaster. By October it was clear that schools that opened were actually doing OK, including all the privates here in the DMV (thus controlling for any mysterious other variables), and still APS continued remote for the vast majority of last year.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I'm not surprised VA was 44th last year. It's hard to imagine many places offered less in-person instruction than we did. That's why it boggles my mind all the people who are like, "Eh. We tried." We did, but were quite close to dead last. I think a lot of people really don't understand how things ran elsewhere. It's not just TX and FL either. The whole Mountain West - places I normally think of us lapping in education -- the Dakotas, Montana, Idaho, Wyoming -- were all basically business as usual last year, with much better outcomes for their students.

Yes, the five kids in Wyoming could spread out in the barn.

Wow you are ignorant. These places have smaller populations, but they have similar class sizes (both in terms of number of students and physical space). But I feel like I'm wasting my time here, because many of you will never admit just how poorly APS handled the pandemic, even now that we have giant datasets that provide empirical evidence that demonstrates it.

My point is that there are many significant differences between Wyoming and Arlington. When you look at other areas that faced similar challenges during the pandemic we aren’t such an outlier.

And from the study linked earlier:
It is possible that the relationships we have observed are not entirely causal, that family stress in the districts that remained remote both caused the decline in achievement and drove school officials to keep school buildings closed.

The pandemic sucked. It will have long-lasting damages. Let’s address those.

Blaming APS is pointless - especially since they had a reasonable response given the constraints.

Every well-done research study you will ever read will contain two sentences to a paragraph on caveats and limits of the study. That is a hallmark of good research. But absent good explanations of other variables driving these differences we are seeing, the reality is the "amount of remote instruction" explains a tremendous amount of the variation in school performance. This is the most likely explanation by far. Again, this study involved 10,000 school systems, each unique in its own way, just like APS. But across these systems, student outcomes were very strongly associated with days or remote learning.

And again, VA was 46th in the nation. That's the bottom 10th percentile.

To your point below (I think it's the same person, maybe not), the language of school closed vs. remote instruction is not technically correct, I agree. But meaningfully, for many students, there was little difference. My APS student learned almost no math last year remotely (as shown by test scores), and likely no science (though since they are taking a different science class this year, we are not seeing it to the same degree). My children learned nothing in the spring of 2020. So remote instruction is very similar to closed from my perspective. I don't fault teachers for this, who were doing their best in terrible circumstances. But I do think APS should have opened for in-person sooner, and with more days offered.

It wasn't a disclaimer buried in the text. It was a key point in the conclusion. Because you can't easily control for the other variables.

Citation for the 46th? Based on what metric? Does that include people choosing to stay remote? Does it reflect the difference in baseline VA instructional hours for the year (one of the issues with the burbio data)?

APS certainly did make some errors (some described by the teacher above), but the decisions around distance learning were very reasonable at the time. There were many real challenges and constraints. And APS was trying to work within CDC recommendations - again, very reasonable.

Anyway, let's focus on remediating our kids and fixing literacy instruction issues that predated the pandemic.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Ugh, PP. That's so awful. And I agree 100%. I wasn't so upset when we were remote in September, because I thought it might actually be a disaster. By October it was clear that schools that opened were actually doing OK, including all the privates here in the DMV (thus controlling for any mysterious other variables), and still APS continued remote for the vast majority of last year.

Do you honestly think the private schools share the same challenges and have the same resources/control as public schools?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:... and to continue my thought ...

Having made those decisions, which we see now had a huge and negative effect on our children, APS should be offering remediation in the form of tutoring, summer school, and anything else we can think of to help get them back on track. That is part of what the Harvard study is saying.

I do agree we should be addressing the negative impacts of the pandemic.

[Anonymous]

Citation for the 46th? Based on what metric? Does that include people choosing to stay remote? Does it reflect the difference in baseline VA instructional hours for the year (one of the issues with the burbio data)?

My experience in APS was that once parents saw kids in APS schools back in person without major outbreaks, they wanted their kids back too. Our in person cohort got larger every single week last spring.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Ugh, PP. That's so awful. And I agree 100%. I wasn't so upset when we were remote in September, because I thought it might actually be a disaster. By October it was clear that schools that opened were actually doing OK, including all the privates here in the DMV (thus controlling for any mysterious other variables), and still APS continued remote for the vast majority of last year.

Do you honestly think the private schools share the same challenges and have the same resources/control as public schools?

I have friends with kids in public schools in urban areas in CT, MA and NJ and they all had more in person days and sooner. I even sent Duran a covid playbook from one of those schools outside of Boston in fall 2020 hoping that he'd use it as a template.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Ugh, PP. That's so awful. And I agree 100%. I wasn't so upset when we were remote in September, because I thought it might actually be a disaster. By October it was clear that schools that opened were actually doing OK, including all the privates here in the DMV (thus controlling for any mysterious other variables), and still APS continued remote for the vast majority of last year.

Do you honestly think the private schools share the same challenges and have the same resources/control as public schools?

I have friends with kids in public schools in urban areas in CT, MA and NJ and they all had more in person days and sooner. I even sent Duran a covid playbook from one of those schools outside of Boston in fall 2020 hoping that he'd use it as a template.

And I have friends with kids in schools in NY, MA, and CA who went back *after* our kids.

Comparing to private schools (who have very different challenges/resources/control) and also small, nimble school systems isn't meaningful.

[Anonymous]

The schools population will undoubtedly increase after the Missing Middle Housing is approved by the board later this year. It’s the most ambitious residential upzoning in the country.