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Est. April 5, 2002
 
           
Oct 14, 2021 - Issue 883
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The COVID-19 pandemic is causing massive academic failure among poor students in K-12 public education. They already trailed behind their working- and middle-class counterparts, but there have been major declines in reading and math during the past 18 months. Remote instruction has exacerbated this gap for several reasons.

The abrupt and necessary switch from in-person teaching to Internet instruction caught administrators and teachers off guard. There was little preparation for this schooling transition. The vast majority of educators had never taught via computers and had hardly any training or planning for this immediate education changeover.

In addition, poor students, especially those of color, were ill-prepared for this new education paradigm as they lacked the psychological and equipment readiness. In many families, there was a limited period to get ready for the changeover.

There was also a lack of laptop and desktop availability and regular access to Wi-Fi. In many urban communities, disproportionately populated by poverty-ridden ethnic-minority students, wireless networks are luxuries, and they are frequently unavailable among rural, mostly White communities where Internet access is sketchy or does not exist.

Another barrier to success in remote learning is that numerous households contain two or more K-12 students in different grades who could not share a laptop for their daily classes. Educators only began addressing this obstacle after several months of remote instruction when school systems started providing laptops and iPads to students who needed them.

COVID-19 effectively closed off students experiencing academic difficulty and students enrolled in school-day and after-school tutorial and mentoring programs to bring them up to grade level, leaving these at-risk students and their parents to their own devices.

Many of these parents work in low-wage industries and struggle to give their children the support they need to improve their lives. Yet they lack the oral language development and vocabulary skills to supplement their kids’ learning at home that students from more economically advantaged families routinely receive.

During the 2020-21 school term, there was a dramatic loss in literacy and math among poor students and those of color, in particular. This group’s learning loss far exceeds the traditional summer drop-off in academic proficiency. Some schools have used funds from Biden’s American Rescue Act in a belated effort to develop educational interventions with minimal success to date.

Perhaps the most egregious disappointment of this K-12 educational collapse is the essentially non-instruction of students with special needs. In-person teaching of these vulnerable groups - those with deaf/blindness, emotional, visual, autism, and intellectual disabilities and/or some combination thereof - does not lend itself to instruction through the Internet where tactile contact is unavailable.

In-building teaching allows for one-on-one encounters and small group tutoring in dedicated spaces that cannot be replicated by Wi-Fi. Also, hundreds of thousands of poor, regular and special-needs students across the racial spectrum simply disappeared from school rolls, as school districts reeled from their new educational responsibilities.

The aforementioned issues combine to push poor students further behind in their quest for educational success. And the broader community seems not to be bothered by this deepening crisis as the poor are not at the forefront of their minds, specifically when they are ethnic minorities. Few in positions of power and leadership have acknowledged these realities.

These educational failures are being ignored by Democratic leaders who claim to be avid supporters of K-12 public education and the people of color who propelled them to majority status at the national level. Presently, House Progressive Democrats consume themselves with their personal vanity of passing a $3.5 trillion social infrastructure bill that they have decided needs to be voted on post-haste even though they lack the Senate votes to do so in its current form.

While the children of their support base - Blacks, Latinx, Asian and Pacific Islanders, and Indigenous Americans - are suffering “bigly” in K-12 public education, Democratic elected officials are following their own political instincts and neglecting to frame a message that will galvanize their voters in the 2022 midterms and ultimately enable them to retain power.

The Democrats’ firm support for the design and funding of programs for poor students and students of color, who are now the majority in K-12 public education, would be a positive sign for their parents whom Democrats need in order to guarantee their hold on federal power. But they act as if they are blind to this political certainty.

National Democratic politicians presently seem unaware that not having the educational failures of the COVID-19 pandemic on their political radar may likely contribute to a Democratic loss of House and Senate seats in the 2022 midterms.

They have three opportunities to turn around their sinking political fortunes: pass the bipartisan infrastructure bill, come to an agreement on the contents and final cost of the reconciliation bill, and immediately design a collective message that will generate enthusiasm among the Democratic base that will cause them to turn out in historic numbers in 2022. Otherwise, they will be toast.

There is still time for Democrats to get a grip on their political actuality. But only if they will!


BlackCommentator.com Columnist, Dr. Walter C. Farrell, Jr., PhD, MSPH, is a Fellow of the National Education Policy Center (NEPC) at the University of Colorado-Boulder and has written widely on vouchers, charter schools, and public school privatization. He has served as Professor of Social Work at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and as Professor of Educational Policy and Community Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. Contact Dr. Farrell and BC.

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Executive Editor:
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