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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]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.[/quote]

Yes, the five kids in Wyoming could spread out in the barn.  :roll: 
[/quote]

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.[/quote]

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: 
[i]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.[/i]

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. 
[/quote]

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.[/quote]

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