See You In September

Around these parts, school starts in the beginning of September. It’s a pretty big deal, with parents buying their kids new school supplies, clothing and issuing edicts about hard work, college and future success. Around these parts, teachers are very well paid, and it’s very hard to get a plum job as a public school teacher. Accordingly, the cost per pupil is astronomical, charged via property taxes that people in other parts of the country would find shocking.

But rarely is a school budget voted down, and even when it is, it’s approved in the next vote with a tweak here or there. The reason is fairly simple. Around these parts, education matters.

Education is highly valued, perhaps too highly, and we are willing to do whatever is necessary to make sure that our children are well educated. We pay the taxes. We buy the supplies. We read with our kids, study with our kids, instill in them the value of education and push them to get as much out of it as possible. Some parents harp on grades to get into the Ivies. Others on knowledge for its own sake. Either way, education matters.

This is the ingredient in the education soup that the Times can’t taste.

One of the most distressing aspects of the Covid pandemic has been seeing governors and state education officials abdicate responsibility for managing the worst disruption of public schooling in modern history and leaving the heavy lifting to the localities. Virtually every school in the nation closed in March 2020, replacing face-to-face schooling with thrown-together online education or programs that used a disruptive scheduling process to combine the two. Only a small portion of the student body returned to fully opened schools the following fall. The resulting learning setbacks range from grave for all groups of students to catastrophic for poor children.

There’s a shift here, from the NYT reporting that we shouldn’t point out that the kids’ education is failing because it would hurt their self-esteem and stigmatize them, which one might see as prioritizing feelings over actual education, but is countered by the question of whether education is what we think it is anymore either. Between basic math having no wrong answers, to history twisted from one set of lies to another, to requiring students learn cultural submission but not how to read,

Sure, around these parts, parents and property owners are able to pay for education, and they do, even if it means paying the cost of education for those who can’t. It’s part of the deal, so that’s what we do. Some will call this “privileged” which is the wrong paradigm to consider education. We don’t have to pay this much for education, whether we can afford to or not. We choose to.

And a public education, theoretically the great equalizer with a bunch of caveats, benefits children of all races and ethnicity no matter what the parents of students can afford to pay. Ironically, the wealthiest send their kids to private schools, and also pay the most in property taxes so the black and Hispanic kids in the hamlet get educated as well.

But the one thing money can’t buy is an appreciation of the value of education.

Governors and other elected officials are trying to whistle past the devastating learning setbacks that schoolchildren incurred during the shutdown. That story is coming to light in studies and reports that lay out the alarming extent to which all groups of students are behind where they should be in a normal academic year and how the most vulnerable students are experiencing the steepest drop-offs in learning.

As is the NYT’s wont, even as they finally admit we’re facing an educational disaster, they blame the usual suspects. And the usual suspects may well deserve blame, even if the common wisdom of Tuesday is the debunked lies of Friday, only to become the obvious answer next week with enough excuses built in to pretend the “experts” didn’t just flip in a circle but were right all along.

In the United States, a growing body of research shows that the suffering of poor children during the pandemic was compounded by the fact that their schools were more likely to remain closed than schools serving higher-income students. This left poor students more dependent on online education. A recent analysis by the National Center for Research on Education Access and Choice found that schools in districts with higher percentages of Black and Latino children were more likely to have remote schooling and that, with all other things being equal, districts with more people living in poverty “were more likely to have remote instruction.”

What’s ignored here is the perpetual question that the unduly passionate really hate to face. Why? Why were schools serving “higher-income” students (noting, as an aside, that students don’t have income. Their parents do) while poor children suffer. There are some hard reasons, lack of computers and internet access even though schools that tried to give them computers quickly learned that few cared enough to get one, and huge swathes of poor students just didn’t show up. The woke are hellbent on coming up with excuses that don’t “blame the victim,” the dreaded mantra that feels so very good and fails so miserably to include any personal responsibility component. Better to creates excuses for failure than to promote values that will help to achieve success,

The learning catastrophe that has befallen the country’s most vulnerable children will take longer than one academic year to remedy. For starters, states and localities will need to create intensive plans for helping children catch up while moving them through new academic material and to devise systems for measuring progress toward clearly stated goals. This project will not be easy to accomplish. But pretending that everything is fine — and that no extraordinary measures are needed — is a recipe for disaster.

They’re right that it’s a disaster, and one that will follow us for many years to come as we try to circumvent reality by handing out Harvard diplomas to the maginalized who can’t do math, but it wasn’t their fault. Then again, their solution is to demand someone do voodoo, “create intensive plans” and “devise systems for measuring progress” as if yelling unicorns at a problem makes them magically become real. And, of course, the responsibility to fix this fiasco is someone else’s problem, “states and localities,” to come up with their voodoo.

I’m well aware that ideas like valuing education is one of those dreaded “whiteness” bourgeois things. I’m well aware of the litany of excuses for poor parents to not be responsible for the education of their children. And I’m well aware of the myriad excuses for children for whom the value of education is nonexistent to either disrupt the education of those who do care or just not bother showing up at all. But it costs nothing to value education and instill that value in children. Without it, no magical unicorn is going to fix this disaster.

When September rolls around, will students be in the classroom learning? If they value education, they will, masked and vaccinated (if possible) and doing whatever they have to do to be educated because that’s what they value. None of the nuts and bolts of safety matter if they don’t value education, and valuing education is a personal choice and responsibility. Will they see you in September?