(I chose this picture of Robert Taft Information and Technology High School because it’s obviously an expensive, top-quality building, and its name suggests that its curriculum focuses on the currently popular STEM program, yet Money Inc. named it the worst high school in the US in 2019. )
Catrin Wigfall, American Experiment: Report estimates as many as 25% of marginalized Minnesota are missing from school since March.
As schools across the country continue to remain closed, too many students are paying the price. From academic impacts to social-emotional and mental health impacts, school closures have had grave consequences on students. In Minnesota, many students have not stepped foot in a classroom since March.
But they aren’t just missing from the classroom, they are likely missing from school altogether, according to a report released by the Washington-based nonprofit Bellwether Education Partners.
Using news reports and state and local survey data sources, researchers Hailly T.N. Korman, Bonnie O’Keefe and Matt Repka predict as many as 52,250 educationally marginalized students in Minnesota have possibly not attended school since closures began in March. That is more than the seating capacity of Target Field (39,504) and even the TCF Bank Stadium (50,805). In the U.S., estimates of missing marginalized students are between 1 to 3 million.
The report’s authors identify five groups of public school students most at risk from school closures: children in foster care, students experiencing homelessness, students with disabilities, English language learners, and migrant students. (While recognized as likely experiencing higher levels of educational disruptions from school closures, students of color and low-income students were not included because the researchers decided “these groups were too large and overlapped too much with the other groups of interest to add meaningful estimates.”)
Korman, O’Keefe and Repka then calculated a likely percentage of students in the identified groups not in school based on media reports and available data. The identified students included those who haven’t logged online but would if they had the opportunity to do so and those “who have made a transition away from school engagement in ways that could be permanent.”
For Minnesota, the number of marginalized students is estimated to be around 209,000. If one percent of those students lost access to education from schools shutting down, that would impact 2,090 students. If 10 percent lost access, around 20,900 students. And if 25 percent, over 52,000 students in those above-mentioned groups possibly haven’t received formal education — virtual or in-person — in seven months.
Stories from across the country illustrate this problem.
In Los Angeles, 15%-20% of English learners, students in foster care, students with disabilities, and homeless students didn’t access any of the district’s online educational materials from March through May.
In Washington, D.C., back-to-school family surveys found that 60% of students lacked the devices and 27% lacked the high-speed internet access needed to successfully participate in virtual school.
In Miami-Dade County, 16,000 fewer students enrolled this fall compared with last year.
This loss of a school year may not cause any significant harm, though, because the majority of high school graduates of inner-city schools, where many (most?) of these marginalized children live, emerge from 12-years of “schooling” completely unprepared for gainful employment or college.
New York City’s school system is one of those failed cesspits.
New York City’s literacy rates are on the decline: nearly 80 percent of high school graduates lack basic skills like reading, writing and math and are required to relearn them before qualifying for community college.
During his most recent State of the City address, New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg hyped about the large investment the city has made on education – a multi-billion dollar investment that seems to have done little to help the city’s teens.
Critics pointed out that just 13 percent of black and Latino students graduate from New York City schools with the skills required for community college – and overall, 80 percent of all graduates lack these skills.
And Detroit
According to estimates by The National Institute for Literacy, roughly 47 percent of adults in Detroit, Michigan — 200,000 total — are “functionally illiterate,” meaning they have trouble with reading, speaking, writing and computational skills. Even more surprisingly, the Detroit Regional Workforce finds half of that illiterate population has obtained a high school degree.
And Baltimore
Baltimore City students scored near the bottom in reading and math compared to children in other cities and large urban areas on an important national assessment given in 2017, according to scores released Tuesday morning.
In fourth- and eighth-grade reading, only 13 percent of city students are considered proficient or advanced. In fourth-grade math, 14 percent were proficient and in eighth-grade math 11 percent met the mark, according to the National Assessment of Educational Progress, a federally mandated test from the U.S. Department of Education.
And so on. This nonfeasance and malfeasance has been going on for decades, and the sorry decline in academic ability is not just restricted to poor children or innercity schools,
That’s the conclusion of Education World, a publication by teachers, for teachers.
According to the U.S. Department of Education, 47 million American adults are functionally illiterate today, and each week, another 44,000 people are added to the U. S. adult illiterate population.
The U.S. Department of Education says that the number of functionally illiterate 17-year-olds in the United States still is about 13 percent. Among minority youth, 44 percent of 17-year-olds are functionally illiterate.
About 13 percent of all 17-year-olds in the United States can be considered functionally illiterate. Functional illiteracy among minority youth may run as high as 40 percent.
According to "Youth at the Crossroads: Facing High School and Beyond," a 2000 Education Trust report, however, "although only one country does better than we do in grade 4 science, by the 12th grade, we outperform only Cyprus and South Africa. Our 12th graders end up in the same position in mathematics”.
Democrats claim they are the elite, because, they assert, they are “compassionate”, yet they’re run these shitholes of slums and useless schools for decades for the benefit of the public employee and teachers unions. Citizens without political clout and, especially school children, have been left to rot. If that’s compassion, if that’s the best they can do, then they should step back and get out of the way.
