Reply to Does Arlington have a plan to make up for pandemic learning losses?

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Learning was greatly interrupted by the pandemic. We should [u]absolutely[/u] address that with intensive remediation - 1:1 tutoring, summer school, etc.

But don’t blame distance learning. The study doesn’t support the causation, only the correlation.

From the summary of the report: 
[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. However, even if that were the case, our results highlighting the differential losses in high poverty schools that went remote are still critical for targeting recovery efforts.[/i]

[/quote]

This is a total misrepresentation of the report. “Not entirely causal” is different from “not causal.” Distance learning was absolutely the problem. The study just confirmed what every parent was seeing with their own eyes.

From the author of the report:

What happened in spring 2020 was like flipping off a switch on a vital piece of our social infrastructure. Where schools stayed closed longer, gaps widened; where schools reopened sooner, they didn’t. Schools truly are, as Horace Mann famously argued, the “balance wheel of the social machinery.”

Like any other parent who witnessed their child dozing in front of a Zoom screen last year, I was not surprised that learning slowed. However, as a researcher, I did find the size of the losses startling—all the more so because I know that very few remedial interventions have ever been shown to produce benefits equivalent to 22 weeks of additional in-person instruction.

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/05/schools-learning-loss-remote-covid-education/629938/[/quote]

Yes, lots of anecdotal data points.

At least the author is being honest that there were other factors that may have led to disparity — factors that were not taken into account in the study. We do know there is a strong correlation at a minimum.

Regardless of the cause(s), we should continue to push for remediation. 
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