Archives for the month of: March, 2020
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New Fear Expressed by Scientists: Their Work Is Viewed as a Hoax

By dianeravitch
March 27, 2020 //
36

A story in the Washington Post today. Trump’s lies could kill many people because scientists are not believed.

In the one month since the first U.S. coronavirus death, America has become a country of uncertainty.
New cases of infection and casualties continue multiplying. New York and Louisiana hospitals are grappling with a flood of patients that threatens to overwhelm their health-care systems. Meanwhile, the president and political conservatives are increasingly agitating to end drastic restrictions meant to buy time and save lives.
Running beneath it all, in a continuous loop through our national psyche, are basic questions leaders are struggling to answer: When can we safely lift these quarantines? How many people could die if we do it too early? Just how dangerous will this pandemic turn out to be? And what exactly should be our next step?
This is why epidemiology exists. Its practitioners use math and scientific principles to understand disease, project its consequences, and figure out ways to survive and overcome it. Their models are not meant to be crystal balls predicting exact numbers or dates. They forecast how diseases will spread under different conditions. And their models allow policymakers to foresee challenges, understand trend lines and make the best decisions for the public good.

But one factor many modelers failed to predict was how politicized their work would become in the era of President Trump, and how that in turn could affect their models.
In recent days, a growing contingent of Trump supporters have pushed the narrative that health experts are part of a deep-state plot to hurt Trump’s reelection efforts by damaging the economy and keeping the United States shut down as long as possible. Trump himself pushed this idea in the early days of the outbreak, calling warnings on coronavirus a kind of “hoax” meant to undermine him.

The notion is deeply troubling, say leading health experts, because what the country does next and how many people die depend largely on what evidence U.S. leaders and the public use to inform their decisions. Epidemiologists worry their research — intended to avert massive deaths in situations exactly like this pandemic — will be dismissed by federal leaders when it is needed most.

Categories Health, Lies, Trump

Stephen Dyer: Ohio Legislature Continues to Be Obsessed by Vouchers

By dianeravitch
March 27, 2020 //
10

Stephen Dyer of Innovation Ohio is a former legislator and is currently the most astute analyst of the legislature’s efforts to undermine public education.

In this post, he describes the legislature’s current approach to vouchers.

He writes:

Yesterday, Ohio’s legislature passed their COVID-19 emergency package. And while there were some much needed and positive things in it (no standardized tests this year, no report cards), the bill also settled the contentious debate over what to do with next year’s EdChoice perofrmance-based voucher program.

A bit of background. Next year, due to legislative changes, 1,227 school buildings would have been labeled by the state as “failing”. Families with students in those buildings could therefore receive publicly subsidized private school tuition vouchers to leave these schools. The problem for districts is the way this program is funded, the state removes state revenue meant for the students in the districts and instead provides a private tuition subsidy — an amount that on average is abot $1,300 more per pupil than the student would have received from the state if he or she had remained in the school district. This forces many districts to use local revenue to make up the difference.

Also, it is obvious that more than 1/3 of Ohio school buildings are not “failing” students, as the current 1,227 building calculation would conclude. And legislators on all sides of the aisle agreed that the state report card that made this determination is fatally flawed.

However, families were gearing up by Feb. 1 to request vouchers for next school year based on the expanded school building list. The legislature put off that deadline to April 1 and included $10 million in state funding to help offset the cost of increased vouchers. They were hoping to hash out a plan to address this issue before that date.

Then COVID-19 hit and everything changed.

The solution included in yesterday’s bill was essentially freezing the number of buildings at this year’s 500+ buildings, and limiting new vouchers to siblings of current recipients and incoming kindergarten students, as well as any 8th graders who want to take the voucher in high school.

But it’s all based on this current school year’s building list — which is still about double the amount of the 2018-2019 school year, but is far fewer than the 1,227 it could have been.

This solution also did not include the $10 million state infusion to help districts cope with the increase in vouchers.

So the immediate question became: Will this “freeze” really be a cost-neutral freeze on the program? Or do we still need an infusion of state cash to offset new vouchers?

Looking at the data, it appears we could be looking at an increase in voucher funding next year, but it could also be cost neutral. It all depends on how the math works out.

According to the latest state funding printouts, there are currently 3,264 kindergarten voucher students. In addition, there are an average of 2,324 voucher students in 12th grade this year.

The kindergarten students cost $4,650 per year. The 2,324 12th graders cost $6,000 a year.

When advocates of vouchers assert that all children should have the “same choices” as rich people, they are lying. The private schools that Trump, Gates, and others of their wealth choose do not charge $6,000 a year. They charge $30,000-$60,000 a year.

Ohio is offering a subsidy to religious schools, including to children who have never attended a public schools. These schools do not necessarily require that teachers are certified. The education they offer is typically inferior to public education.

Ninety percent of the children of Ohio choose to attend public schools. Their legislators ignore them.

Categories Education Reform, Ohio, Privatization, Religion, Vouchers

Why Nationwide Mail-In Voting Will Be Problematic

By dianeravitch
March 27, 2020 //
18

The concurrence of primary voting for the 2020 voting and the onset of a global pandemic caused many to worry about whether the pandemic would disrupt not only primaries but the November elections. One answer seems to be to ramp up balloting by mail.

Veteran journalist Stephen Rosenfeld warns that absentee and mail-in balloting is rife with problems.

https://www.rawstory.com/2020/03/why-nationwide-voting-by-mail-isnt-a-silver-bullet-in-a-pandemic/

Rosenfeld writes:

“Before the COVID-19 virus upended the 2020 election—where several states delayed presidential primaries, sparking fears that the Trump White House could seek to postpone the November election—Michigan was seeing absentee voting increase in its primary after passing election reforms via a 2018 ballot measure.

“It is a success,” said Roz Kimbrough, Detroit Department of Elections senior training specialist. “We have seven satellite offices for the Detroit municipality that we opened up to accommodate this overflow beyond just going out to the precincts and voting directly in their area—giving them availability to vote absentee.”

“Kimbrough was at a command center in a cavernous downtown convention center hall where she and others were supervising 800 workers who were processing the last of 141,000 absentee ballots that had been cast in the March 10 primary. Thirty-six percent of the city of Detroit had voted absentee, compared to a 27 percent nationwide average in November 2019.

“However, shifting broadly to absentee ballots—which arrive by mail and can be dropped off or mailed back—as congressional Democrats, election law scholars, party officials, campaign lawyers and activists have been saying is the best way to ensure voting next fall amid the pandemic, is not a simple task.

“Before the COVID-19 virus upended the 2020 election—where several states delayed presidential primaries, sparking fears that the Trump White House could seek to postpone the November election—Michigan was seeing absentee voting increase in its primary after passing election reforms via a 2018 ballot measure.

“It is a success,” said Roz Kimbrough, Detroit Department of Elections senior training specialist. “We have seven satellite offices for the Detroit municipality that we opened up to accommodate this overflow beyond just going out to the precincts and voting directly in their area—giving them availability to vote absentee.”

“Kimbrough was at a command center in a cavernous downtown convention center hall where she and others were supervising 800 workers who were processing the last of 141,000 absentee ballots that had been cast in the March 10 primary. Thirty-six percent of the city of Detroit had voted absentee, compared to a 27 percent nationwide average in November 2019.

“However, shifting broadly to absentee ballots—which arrive by mail and can be dropped off or mailed back—as congressional Democrats, election law scholars, party officials, campaign lawyers and activists have been saying is the best way to ensure voting next fall amid the pandemic, is not a simple task.

“Rushing to an all-mail voting system nationwide, without guaranteeing the reasonable availability of in-person polling sites as an alternative, thus risks inadvertently—but profoundly—changing the makeup of the electorate,” writes David Becker, executive director of the Center for Election Innovation & Research and former Justice Department voting section attorney, in the Washington Post.

“A switch to all-mail, or mostly mail, voting would also be a massive administrative undertaking,” he continues. “It requires planning, training, procurement of new technology and education of the electorate, particularly if in-person voting is being limited.”

”There are formidable legal, technical and logistical hurdles that must be addressed if a shift to absentee and more early voting options emerges—starting with the fact that one-third of states limit absentee voting, and some even criminalize efforts to assist absentee voters. Before the pandemic broke, Florida’s Republican-controlled legislature was “advancing a bill that would prohibit people from helping with or returning any mail ballots outside their own family if they received any ‘benefit’ for doing so,” noted Marc Elias, who filed two-dozen voting rights suits on behalf of Democrats this cycle.

”There are other challenges beyond the legal issues. These issues include the Postal Service’s ability to deliver ballots amid ongoing budget and workforce cuts, how the public will adapt to new voting regimens (March 17 primaries saw confusion and consternation as precincts closed and moved), and ensuring that voters are not disenfranchised.”

Categories Elections

Toronto Symphony Orchestra Challenges Rotterdam Symphony Orchestra!

By dianeravitch
March 27, 2020 //
7

The Rotterdam Symphony Orchestra performed Beethoven’s exhilarating “Ode to Joy,” a tribute to theh7man spirit, as each musician was isolated in his or her home.

The Toronto Symphony Orchestra responded by performing Aaron Copeland’s “Appalachian Spring” in their homes.

The website SlippedDisc posted both and invites viewers to vote.

Bottom line: creative artists are learning to collaborate while isolated, to share the gift of music with all of us.

I vote that we, each isolated, are the real winners!

Bravo!

Categories Art, Creativity

An Interview with a Conservative Talk Show Host in St. Louis

By dianeravitch
March 27, 2020 //
10

Several days ago, I was interviewed by Dr. Randy Tobler of radio station KFTK in St. Louis about SLAYING GOLIATH, which is pro-public school and anti-privatization.

When the interview was scheduled by my publisher, I wasn’t familiar with the station or the host.

As I waited a few minutes for the show to start, I heard an advertisement for Rush Limbaugh, whose syndicated talk show would air later that day.

As a defector from conservative think tanks, I started to worry whether this interview would be unpleasant. I remember years ago being on a talk show in Chicago with a foul-mouthed shock jock and feeling trapped. I remembered a “debate” on FOX with Judge Napolitano and a right wing hater of public schools, teachers, and unions.

As I waited for the show to start, these bad memories resurfaced.

But I was in for a wonderful surprise. I had a great talk with Randy. He told me that everyone in St. Louis is obsessed with vouchers and charters, and he invited me to respond. I learned that his father taught music at a public school, and we hit it off. We discussed the hot topics, and he understood that vast amounts of money are wasted on consultants. He believes that teachers should have more autonomy. I expect he heard that from his dad.

We ended up having a good conversation, and I felt that he was one of the few radio interviewers who actually read the book. I can’t tell you how often I have been interviewed by people who have not read the book. They ask uninformed questions, and it is frustrating.

I enjoyed talking to Randy Tobler.

https://971talk.radio.com/blogs/the-randy-tobler-show/professor-ravitch-fights-to-save-public-education-in-us

Categories Education Reform

Harold Meyerson: How Mean Are Senate Republicans?

By dianeravitch
March 26, 2020 //
39

In this editorial, Harold Meyerson plumbs the depths of meanness in the Senate’s majority party. It would be better for the unemployed if more of them were quarantined and unable to vote:

ON TAP Today from the American Prospect
MARCH 26, 2020

Meyerson on TAP

The Senate’s OTHER Vote Last Night—Along Party Lines. As every news-following American knows, the Senate voted unanimously last night to pass a $2.2 trillion stimulus package for our rapidly shrinking economy. But hardly any news-following American knows about the vote that immediately preceded that—on the amendment that four Republican senators introduced to greatly reduce unemployment insurance payments.

The senators’ objection to the agreed-upon UI fix in the stimulus bill was itself widely reported. Because unemployment insurance levels in many states with right-wing governments are so low, Democrats insisted upon the federal government topping off UI payments with an additional $600 a week to the unemployed for a four-month period. Four conservative senators objected on the grounds that that might create incomes for the unemployed that exceeded their pay when on the job. Not surprisingly, two of those senators were South Carolinians Lindsey Graham and Tim Scott. South Carolina, it should be noted, is one of the six states that have never passed a minimum-wage law, and one of the two states (the other is North Carolina) that always place first or second in having the lowest rate of unionized workers—invariably, below 3 percent. In short, it’s no great achievement to make more money off the job than on the job in the senators’ home state, precisely because South Carolina’s historic denigration of workers creates so many poverty-wage jobs. Graham and Scott were like the kids who kill their parents and plead for mercy because they’re orphans.

But here’s the kicker: Surely, the objections of these two troglodytes and their two co-sponsors (Florida’s Rick Scott and Nebraska’s Ben Sasse) were just idiosyncratic social meanness, right?

Wrong. The vote on their amendment was 48-48; the only Republican to join the chamber’s 47 Democrats in voting no was Maine’s Susan Collins. (Fortunately, the Democrats, as part of the agreement on the stimulus bill, had insisted that the amendment require 60 votes to pass.)

If there’s a clearer expression of Republicans’ concern for their fellow Americans who lose their jobs in the pandemic crisis, I sure don’t know it. ~ HAROLD MEYERSON

Categories Accountability, Cruelty, Economy, Republicans

A Wise Superintendent Offers Counsel for Our Times

By dianeravitch
March 26, 2020 //
57

Michael Matsuda is Superintendent of the Anaheim Union High School District in California. He served on the board of the Network for Public Education.

Important Message Sent on Behalf of Superintendent Matsuda

Fifty years from now, when our students are old, when they have children and grandchildren of their own, they will look back and say, “Do you remember what happened?” I picture them pensively reflecting, staring silently, breathing deeply, perhaps tearing up, and then after reliving the experience to the very end, smiling, “Those were the times of amazing grace, when people came together with kindness and compassion to support each other, when they made sacrifices for complete strangers, when schools became beacons of hope for families who were food deprived, and when teachers transformed educational experiences through emotional connection, through affirming mental health, and through meaningful learning.”

It was a time when people realized that humanity has no barriers, and that love is limitless if we have the courage to embrace it and to share it near and far, with neighbors and strangers, with old and young, rich and poor, Christian, Hindu, Jew, Muslim, Buddhist, LGBT, black, brown, yellow, and white. It was a time like no other, when the world came together, collaborated, communicated, created, thought critically, and acted with compassion to save humankind.

I know this will be true because I see it happening right now. I see it in our Food Service workers as they prepare and pass out food for thousands of our children. I see it in our teachers as they work tirelessly creating new curriculum and a new way of virtual learning through a completely transformed system. I see it in our students who connect and help each other virtually with enthusiasm and care. I see it in our IT workers who have refurbished thousands of laptop computers for kids to use. I see it in our counselors and social workers who reach out to young people suffering from depression, isolation, and emotional starvation. I see it in our administrators who work endlessly, filling all the gaps in a topsy turvy world. And I see it in total strangers, coming out of the woodwork, volunteering time and sometimes money to pitch in and to help heal a fractured world.

I am so proud and blessed to be surrounded by people in the AUHSD who are absolutely committed to our students, our families, and our communities.

But as we face this threat today, let us go forward knowing that things will likely get worse before they get better, that stress will mount and tempers will flare, and that we may take it out on those we love most – our children.

Remember that one day, our young people will become adults, and how we respond in these most traumatic times will forever imprint on them whether it was our darkest or our finest hour. It is up to us.

Let us take this journey by learning how to forgive, beginning with ourselves. Let us be gentle and kind to our loved ones. Let us practice mindfulness, self-compassion and prayer. Let us just love.

As we adjust our sails and hold fast to the rudder, I ask you to be comforted by the words of a great author of several parenting books, L. R. Knost:

Do not be dismayed by the brokenness of the world. All things break, and all things can be mended. Not with time, as they say, but with intention. So go. Love intentionally, extravagantly, unconditionally. The broken world waits in darkness for the light that is you.

Michael Matsuda

Superintendent

Anaheim Union High School District

Categories Accountability, Courage

Art Conquers Isolation! Watch, Listen, Share

By dianeravitch
March 26, 2020 //
19

The Rotterdam Symphony Orchestra members are confined to their homes. But music cannot be denied.

Here they are playing the closing section of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, the stirring “Ode to Joy,” each of them in his or her own home.

If this stirring rendition doesn’t move you, check your pulse.

Categories Art

Jennifer Senior: Trump’s Press Conferences Are Propaganda

By dianeravitch
March 26, 2020 //
79

Jennifer Senior has been one of my favorite writers for many years. Her columns are always incisive and intelligent.

She is now an opinion writer for the New York Times. In this column, she expresses the extreme frustration I feel whenever I watch Trump speak to the press, surrounded always by people chosen for their obeisance and loyalty.

She writes about a recent press conference. A friend who used to work on Wall Street told me that the market was rising that day, but as soon as Trump began boasting and misleading, the stock market dropped 1,000 points.

What Trump makes clear in this time of national and international crisis is that he is utterly incapable of empathy or compassion. Whatever the topic, he demands adulation.

Senior writes:

In a time of global emergency, we need calm, directness and, above all, hard facts. Only the opposite is on offer from the Trump White House. It is therefore time to call the president’s news conferences for what they are: propaganda.

We may as well be watching newsreels approved by the Soviet Politburo. We’re witnessing the falsification of history in real time. When Donald Trump, under the guise of social distancing, told the White House press corps on Thursday that he ought to get rid of 75 to 80 percent of them — reserving the privilege only for those he liked — it may have been chilling, but it wasn’t surprising. He wants to thin out their ranks until there’s only Pravda in the room.

Sometimes, I stare at Deborah Birx during these briefings and I wonder if she understands that this is the footage historians will be looking at 100 years from now — the president rambling on incoherently, vainly, angrily, deceitfully, while she watches, her face stiff with the strangled horror of a bride enduring an inappropriate toast.

If the public wants factual news briefings, they need to tune in to those who are giving them: Gov. Andrew Cuomo of New York, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau of Canada and Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany, whose addresses appear with English subtitles on Deutsche Welle. They should start following the many civic-minded epidemiologists and virologists and contagion experts on Twitter, like Harvard’s Marc Lipsitch and Yale’s Nicholas Christakis, whose threads have been invaluable primers in a time of awful confusion.

These are people with a high tolerance for uncertainty. It’s the president’s incapacity to tolerate it — combined with his bottomless need to self-flatter and preserve his political power — that leads, so often, to his spectacular fits of deception and misdirection. At his Thursday news conference, a discussion of chloroquine and other experimental therapies formed the core of his remarks, when those drugs and therapies are untested and unproven and, in some cases, won’t be ready for several months, as NBC’s Peter Alexander pointed out the following day.

“What do you say to Americans who are scared?” Alexander pressed.

“I say that you’re a terrible reporter,” Trump answered.

Only a liar — and a weak man with delusions of competence — would be so unnerved by the facts.

Compare this to Cuomo, who takes questions at his news conferences calmly and systematically — and, more to the point, has a substantive response when asked the same questions about anxiety. He hears it. He relates to it. He says it’s real.

“People are in a small apartment, they’re in a house, they’re worried, they’re anxious. Just, be mindful of that,” the governor said Friday. “Those three-word sentences can make all the difference: ‘I miss you.’ ‘I love you.’ ‘I’m thinking about you.’ ‘I wish I was there with you.’ ‘I’m sorry you’re going through this.’ ‘I’m sorry we’re going through this.’”

On Friday, Cuomo said something else that was quite striking, as he was issuing his executive order for nonessential workers in New York to stay home, other than to run errands or exercise outside. “If someone wants to blame someone or complain about someone, blame me,” he said. “There is no one else who is responsible for this decision.”

Cuomo is nothing if not politically shrewd. He knows full well how this comment compares to Mr. Trump’s “I don’t take responsibility at all.”

But telling the media that they’re peddling fake news is straight from the playbook of the political gangsters of the last century. So many of Trump’s moves are.

Having each of his cabinet members fulsomely thank him for his leadership and congratulate him for his “farsightedness” before each of their remarks: Check. Making sure each one stays on a message, even if that message has nothing to do with his or her purview: Check.

(Alex Azar may have been the worst offender, speaking Friday to the urgency of closing the southern border. He’s the secretary of health and human services, not homeland security. Yet he was parroting Trump’s message about the coronavirus, one specifically tailored to the base: We’re keeping brown immigrants from spreading it.)

How about Orwellian doublespeak? Ooooooh, check. Trump and his team are continually deploying words and phrases that disguise a reality that suggests the opposite. Vice President Mike Pence talks about a “strong and seamless” partnership with the states, when at the same time Mr. Trump is trolling the states, telling Cuomo to get his own respirators.

Pence speaks relentlessly of a “whole-of-government approach,” when in fact the government is hollowed out — defunded to fight pandemics, denuded of experts — and broken in shards, with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention sidelined in this fight, and the president’s task force now mutely competing with a shadow group run by the president’s son-in-law.

On Friday, Trump said he cherished journalism, and his secretary of state complained about disinformation on Twitter. There are simply too many two-plus-two-is-five moments to count.

But most dangerous of all is Trump’s insistence that things are fine, or will be shortly, that they’ll be stronger and better and greater than ever. We don’t have any evidence that this is true, and the president finds any suggestion to the contrary quite rude. When a journalist pointed out to him on Thursday that the economy had all but ground to halt, Trump cut him off.

“What’s the rest of your question?” he snapped. “We know that. Everybody in the room knows that.”

Here’s the truth: Things might be hard — unfathomably hard — for months, perhaps even north of a year. Anyone who’s reading or listening to other sources of news besides the president knows that. It takes sensitivity and strength and intelligence to speak truthfully to the public about imminent hardship, the prospect of enduring pain.

So I listen to Justin Trudeau, a sci-fi experience, a dispatch from an alternate universe that prioritizes the needs and anxieties of the middle class. He speaks about concerns: The kids will be all right. There’ll be food. You won’t be booted out of your home. Not how our president is speaking right now, but it’s a road map for the Democratic presidential nominee in 2020 to follow.

And I listen to Cuomo, who says the same thing. His news conference on Friday was about the practical things, knowing the entire state — country, globe — had just taken a precipitous slide down Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, with food, shelter and safety now topmost on many people’s minds. No one can evict you for 90 days. We’re getting hospital beds. We’re recruiting doctors and nurses in training to fight this fight, and we’re coaxing medical professionals out of retirement.

Then he spoke from the heart. One of his daughters was in quarantine. “To tell you the truth, I had some of the best conversations with her that I’ve ever had,” Cuomo said. She was alone for two weeks. “We talked about things in depth that we didn’t have time to talk about in the past,” he continued, “or we didn’t have the courage or the strength to talk about in the past — feelings I had, about mistakes I had made along the way that I wanted to express my regret and talk through with her.”

He was expressing fallibility. Imagine that.

Categories Lies, Propaganda

John Richard Schrock: Distance Learning Is Inferior to Human Interaction

By dianeravitch
March 26, 2020 //
39

John Richard Schrock was a professor of science education at a Emporia State University for many years. He also taught in middle and high schools, as well as in Hong Kong. He frequently writes about education issues.

Screen Reading and Online Coursework Inferior

The forced closure of classrooms and shift to online learning from home has revived the hopes of big Ed-Tech companies that they can regain some legitimacy in education. Meanwhile, the general response of teachers and professors is exposing their extensive negative experiences with distance learning.

In the early 2000s, computer enthusiasts predicted the end of “brick-and-mortar” K-12 schools; students would study from home in their pajamas, using online links to teachers who would also teach from home. New digital readers were predicted to totally replace printed books by 2015. And massive open online colleges (MOOCs) would deliver all coursework online and free, replacing university coursework and making college classrooms obsolete a decade ago.

None of these predictions came true. Our armed forces kept track of their training dropout rate for high school students who graduated from online high schools; they performed as poorly as GED students who never completed genuine high school. Citizens who bought digital book devices temporarily increased but then fell back to a smaller number who found advantages in enlarged texts or backlit nighttime reading for recreation.

But university students need intense “deep reading.” Using on-screen textbooks meant printing off the text to avoid eye strain. The vast majority preferred printed texts for in-depth study and comprehension. Ironically, the high cost of college textbooks was due to the publishers covering the cost of added electronic services. American college textbook publishers ignored student concerns and moved to all-online texts in order to pay for tutors, course outlines, quizzes and testing services as professors were evaluated more on research and less on bothersome teaching.

While K-12 administrators found it easy to buy the latest electronic gadgets and sit youngsters in front of screens to impress naive parents, the actual evaluations of student learning on the NAEP, ACT, SAT and other measures show less, not more learning is occurring with on-screen media.

And while the Chronicle of Higher Education just came out with a clueless recommendation that universities should begin making comparisons of online learning with standard face-to-face teaching, there is already over two decades of solid research. It confirms what most teachers and professors already know: face-to-face teaching and reading-print are clearly superior.

In the last two decades there have been hundreds of rigorous studies comparing reading on screens to reading print. A “meta-analysis” is an analysis of previously published research articles and data, selecting just those studies that meet rigorous research criteria. There have been three major meta-analyses, including “Reading From Paper Compared to Screens: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis” by Virginia Clinton and just published in 2019 in the Journal of Research in Reading.

As with the prior studies, she found there was a statistically important benefit to reading print for reading performance, metacognition and efficiency. And despite the fact that online learning using screens has now been in operation in the U.S. for over 20 years, surveys of college professors who have experienced both conventional classroom teaching and online delivery still prefer face-to-face classroom teaching by over two-thirds, a percentage that has not budged for a decade.

We also now know that the student who listens and then writes out class notes understands much more than the student who is transcribing the words they hear a teacher speak onto a laptop, a relatively thoughtless typing process.

The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) compares educational systems of developed countries and administers the international PISA, a test that involves 15-year-olds across 31 nations. OECD found that students who used computers had both lower reading and math scores. “Those that use the Internet every day do the worst,” said Andreas Schleicher, OECD Director for Education and Skills and author of the report. While that study was published in 2015, the Reboot Foundation released a study in June 2019 that followed up using the most recent data and again found a negative connection between each nation’s performance on the PISA and their students’ use of technology in school. The more they used computer screens in schools, the lower the nation’s rank in educational achievement. In addition, the Reboot Foundation found a negative relationship between using electronic tablets in school and fourth-grade reading scores.

But you do not have to resort to extensive research to know that this shift to distance learning, albeit necessary, will produce minimal outcomes. Every teacher and isolated student knows in these upcoming months that there is far less learning going on.

Categories Education Reform, Online Learning
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