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by batrachos
1337 days ago
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You've made a lot of arguments itt:
1. Closures, all two years of them, were fully justified from a public health perspective.
2. Learning losses weren't all that bad.
3. The tests are arbitrary anyways. On point 1, it would be helpful to look at the public health outcomes of districts that closed for two years vs. those that didn't. I don't know the answer on that one, although I do know my kid's private school was open for much of that time without anyone being hospitalized. On point 2, we "only" went back to 2003 levels. "Only" 20 years worth of losses doesn't convince me. On point 3: Yes? Tests are to a certain extent arbitrary. But these ones show a clear bad trend. You could ask the children to paint pictures of clowns as a test and if the number went down it would probably be a bad sign. These tests are less arbitrary than that, and lower reading scores in particular are correlated with a higher high school drop out rate. You could argue that "bad things happened but it was worth it." But you can't reasonably argue that "nothing bad happened and the tests are all bunk and also it was totally worth it." |
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What I am arguing elsewhere in the thread is probably more along these lines:
- Something bad happened due to a once-in-a-lifetime event. Education probably did suffer, quite badly due to this once-in-a-lifetime event.
- It is hard to definitively say that specific problems happened due to specific causes in the cause of such an event
- So, if you try to bolster your preconceived notions about public schools with poorly-controlled data like a 2% dip in some standardized test scores, I'm going to point that out. If you say stuff like "Well, the data points out...", you have to be able to defend the data.