Back to School With Common Sense – by Bari Weiss – Common Sense with Bari Weiss
Of all the broken things the pandemic has revealed about our country, you can make a good case that the state of American education came out looking more battered than just about anything else.
There s the stranglehold that the teachers unions have over our public schools. (And the influence those unions seem to have over our public health organizations.) There s the war over masking our students and the inability of the adults in charge to have an adult conversation about trade-offs and risks. There s the revelation, via Zoom, that students might not be learning much of anything. (Besides obsessing over race.)
There s the decline of the American university, captured with love on Netflix s new series The Chair. Colleges and universities have 1.5 million fewer students today than they did five years ago. Men, according to a story out today in The Wall Street Journal, account for more than 70% of that drop. Soon, university women will outnumber men by two to one. It s an astonishing gender gap that would perhaps generate more alarm if we weren t already focused on skyrocketing tuition and student debt.
When I think of the sorry state of American schooling, though, I think mostly of a boy named Shemar.
He s a 12-year-old from East Baltimore and the main character of this devastating investigation by the brilliant reporter Alec MacGillis. The story focuses on the students left behind by remote learning and the indefensible gap between those students and the kids who have pods, and private tutors, and reliable wi-fi and helicopter parents who ensure they don t fall behind.
When anyone suggests the Delta variant means schools should keep their doors closed, that remote learning can go on forever, I send them MacGillis s story. When anyone talking about justice and equality suggests that learning loss isn t something that should be measured right now last week the head of the L.A. teachers union actually said It s OK that our babies may not have learned all their times tables. . . They know the words insurrection and coup I think of Shemar.