Every major newspaper carried a story this morning about the sharp decline in NAEP scores because of the pandemic.
The moral of the story is that students need to have human contact with a teacher and classmates to learn best. Virtual learning is a fourth-rate substitute for a real teacher and interaction with peers.
Tech companies have told us for years that we should reinvent education by replacing teachers with computers. We now know: Virtual learning is a disaster.
The crisis we should worry about most is the loss of experienced teachers, who quit because of poor working conditions, low pay, and attacks by “reformers” who blame teachers at every opportunity.
The pandemic isolated children from their teachers. It caused them to be stuck in front of a computer. They were bored.
They needed human interaction. They needed to look into the eyes of a teacher who encouraged them to do better, a teacher who explained what they didn’t understand.
The NAEP scores are a wake-up call. We must treasure our teachers and recognize the vital role they play in educating the next generation.
Any politician who disrespects teachers by calling them “pedophiles” and “groomers” should be voted out of office.
Every “reformer” who disparages teachers should be required to teach for one month, under close supervision, of course.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Diane, your perceptive blog tells it like it is. As usual, NAEP provides the stark evidence, and your interpretation gives it meaning. As a society we must find ways to support and respect teachers. Your blog today provides a blueprint.
NAEP provides pure unadulterated BS evidence that is completely invalid. Using invalid processes can only lead to invalid conclusions. Sad day in America, indeed, that we rely on such “vain and illusory” BS.
Thank you, Charles.
Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ad infinitum.
One sure can get off discussing standardized test scores, yes, even Diane’s favorite type–NAEP. Mind bending!
When one focuses on bullshit, i.e., NAEP scores, when one uses bullshit as a basis for argumentation, well. . . all that one is left with is bullshit and a complete waste of time, energies and resources, all the while harming students in the process. Sad days in America indeed!
Until we break out of the standards and testing malpractice regime we will continue to harm all students in the process.
Yes, sad days in America, indeed!
So true, Duane. Have you read ‘The Mismeasurement of Man?’ It’s about IQ testing, however the same problems persist in ALL standardized testing.
As a teacher, I didn’t like testing. Unfortunately, I had to give ‘grades’, and the students actually felt more comfortable with tests than I did. We need a new model (Socratic?)
As a teacher I had/have no problem with teacher made assessments that are directly tied to the curriculum and whose purpose is to help the student learn where they are in their own learning process.
Any other reason for assessment is bogus.
I too disliked giving out grades, so I made the process as easy as possible for the students to play the grade game, including discussing with them at the beginning, and throughout the year, that grades are bullshit. If the students did the work they were guaranteed a minimum B and almost all who did the assigned work got A’s. The year after I retired they required all teachers to have test scores be 75% of the grade. The grades in my class were just the opposite 75% completion of daily and other assignments and 25% test and quiz scores. If I would have taught that following year all of my daily assignments would have been called quizzes and the test and quizzes would have been plain assignments
Yeah, that’s the kind of prick I was in the adminimal’s arse!
Yep, Senor Swacker, B.S. by any other name still stinks.
No hay duda.
Just one day into the Oklahoma school year, Summer Boismier was told she was required to attend a Disciplinary Hearing after she shared a QR code with her students linking to the Brooklyn Public Library’s Books Unbanned site, which provides digital and audio access to censored books. They tried
bending her to their will and she resigned. A 10 year veteran teacher!
Now Oklahoma wants our HS English teacher to LOSE her state teaching certification because she shared with her students a QR code to the Brooklyn Public Library’s banned books collection.
“There is no place for a teacher with a liberal political agenda in the classroom. Ms. Boismier’s providing access to banned and pornographic material to students is unacceptable and we must ensure she doesn’t go to another district and do the same thing.”
https://www.vice.com/en/article/qjk3dp/oklahoma-banned-books-teacher-license
Kathy, that is shameful.
Joe, you cain’t trus’ them folks upair in Brooklyn. They funny.
Proving, once again (or should I say as always?) that Oklahoma is NOT OK.
Virtual learning is NO substitute for a real teacher and interaction with peers.
“There have been a number of studies on the complex topic of nonverbal communication with varying results. However, most experts agree that 70 to 93 percent of all communication is nonverbal.”
https://www.lifesize.com/en/blog/speaking-without-words/#:~:text=There%20have%20been%20a%20number,of%20all%20communication%20is%20nonverbal.
Teacher and students interact nonverbally, too. In fact, those nonverbal cues say a lot about who someone is and what’s going on inside of them.
As a teacher, I spotted nonverbal signs of suicide in one of my best students and sent her to her grade level counselor. Later, the counselor told me, yes, she was planning to end it all and that intervention probably saved her life.
Another year, there was a class clown that showed up late. His eyes, his expression, his body language signaled he was in a sorry state. I knew who his girlfriend was because she was in one of my other classes. I called her teacher and asked her what was going on? She was concerned too, said she didn’t know, That he was acting all weird that morning before school. I asked his girlfriend to bring him to my classroom at lunch so we could talk.
It turned out that a couple of men had tried to rape him but he managed to escape them. Off to his grade level counselor he went. I filed a police report and there was an investigation. I never did find out the results, but that class clown returned to his normal, cut-up self before the end of that week.
During period breaks as students are switching classes, teachers often wait outside their door. Because of that I picked up clues form students walking by that something was wrong. It took a moment to figure it out. A few class down in a walking space between two portables a fist fight was going on out of sight of teachers in their classroom doors but students saw the fight as they walked by the out of sight fight, but their nonverbal body language gave the fight away, and I managed to stop it, before calling the CPOs to pick those two boys up.
Virtual schools cut children off, isolate them, they don’t interact and learn how to read those nonverbal cues that are a huge part of social and learning communication. The damage that does to those isolated students in the long run has to be tragic in the extreme for their ability to interact with others in public settings. I wouldn’t be surprised if some of those virtual schools are grooming those isolated students to become an army of murderous for a libertarian theofascist MAGA army.
Without interaction in a classroom/public setting it is so much easier to program humans of all ages to become whatever the want-to-be masters want them to be. When children and adults are around others in public settings, even classrooms, they learn more about what’s going on in the world and have a better perspective on it.
Diane’s interpretation of the scores is spot on. Unfortunately, we can expect the mainstream media to lead with “learning loss” not the failure of isolating, mind numbing cyber instruction. Unfortunately also, the so-called solution will entail doubling down on more mind numbing computer skill, drill and ultimately kill the spirit of young people that will produce lots of monetized data for investors. This is what happens when commercial interests are allowed to invade public institutions that are led by foolish “adminimals.” They are encouraged to buy cyber garbage that will make money for Silicon Valley and Wall St. instead of investing in quality, meaningful instruction from certified professional teachers.
The fact that Daedalus’ comments are still appearing on this blog after I understand that he/she has been blocked, tells me that Daedalus has more then one computer device an/or more than one email address, more evidence that Daedalus is a troll, because that’s what anonymous trolls that use sock puppet names do. The set up several accounts through VPNs, and may even have more than one sock puppet name.
Blocking a hard-core troll is not always easy. Specially if those trolls might have the support of Russia’s rasPutin’s army of hackers.
I have had one or two plaguing my e-mail inbox for the last week or two, ever since Daedalus went bonkers, even after I stopped opening and kept reporting these two suspicious emails, several times a day that they are SPAM, they keep landing in my in-box anyway when they should be sent to the SPAM folder. That tells me those emails may be coming from a computer using a VPN to confuse the SPAM filters or the sender is using multiple devices.
Dear Sock-Puppet Daedalus, you are showing your ignorance about censorship in the US, but that shouldn’t be a surprise, because there are too many Americans that think only they should be able to censor someone else’s opinions, like my opinions that the sock-puppet Daedalus is a troll that may be working for or supporting Russia’s brutal, murdering dictator rasPutin and/or Traitor Trump.
Daedalus complains he’s being censored in the same comment where he complains about me exercising my opinions about someone I think is a troll.
“The First Amendment to the United States Constitution protects the freedom of speech and expression against all levels of government censorship. This freedom and protection is an essential component of the American experience and allows our country to have the arguably most diverse population in the world.”
Read that previous quote again and focus on where it says “all levels of government censorship.” The First Amendment does not stop private sector nonprofits and businesses from censoring speech and expression. Diane’s blog is a private sector blog and not a government website/blog.
This is why DeSantis’ Anti-Woke law was rejected by a judge. It was considered a violation of the First Amendment. This Oklahoma teacher in the post above should contact the ACLU to see if they can challenge her dismissal. We have to push back against fascism.
I agree. But most working people do not have the money to hire lawyers. Her only recourse, as you suggested, is to contact the ACLU, a nonprofit that is widely hated by racists, the Walmart Waltons, ALEC, et al. for making their attempt to take over the US and turn it into a theofascist, dystopian state more difficult, where only the wealthiest 1% would be free if the autocrats succeeded.
But the ACLU isn’t the only nonprofit, private sector watchdog guarding the first amendment from 2nd amendment worshipers.
This link lead to a list that includes the ACLU and others that may be helpful. I’m not sure they are all still active though.
https://www.mtsu.edu/first-amendment/encyclopedia/topic/15/groups-and-organizations
So disagreement equals “Russian troll”.
Do you guys even see yourselves here? Joe McCarthy would be so proud!
I would say, Dienne, after six months of unprovoked and brutal aggression in Ukraine by Russia, anyone who defends Putin is a Russian troll. He is a dictator, a tyrant, and a clone of Stalin.
Feel free to disagree about anything else.
dienne77
“Ravil Maganov, the chair of the board of directors of Lukoil, Russia’s largest private oil company, “fell from a window…
Half a dozen businesspeople with ties to the Russian energy industry have died in apparent suicides or in mysterious circumstances since the outbreak of the war in Ukraine. None of the deaths have been classified as murders.”
Sounds like a wonderful place .
“Unprovoked”. Do you even see how ridiculous that sounds? So Putin, who has controlled the second most powerful country for 20 years, is just some crazed madman who does things for no apparent reason? Do you realize the media have portrayed every leader of every country we’ve ever opposed in exactly the same way? Go back and look at how Saddam Hussein, Muammar Gaddafi, Daniel Noriega, Ayatollah Khomeini and many, many other leaders have been portrayed (after they turned on the U.S. which initially installed them in the first place). Read Michael Parenti’s INVENTING REALITY and you will see example after example after example from the 50s through the 90s of how the media have, at the behest of the Pentagon, the president and other government individuals and agencies, shaped the thinking of the American people by how they portray “hostile” countries and their leaders (those that disobey the U.S.) vs. how they portray friendly (i.e., submissive) countries. The pattern is so clear and the playbook is used time after time after time, yet people like you buy into it time after time after time. Every major conflict the U.S. has been in the media have either blatantly lied about or at least grossly misled the people about, while the independent media have been the ones trying to put the truth on record and getting called “traitors” and “stooges” and “[Russian, Iraqi, Chinese, fill in the blank] assets/agents/etc. Seems like Americans would be tired of being lied to, but there’s always an insatiable appetite for it.
Say the word and I’ll be happy to send you a copy of the book – it’s dated in one way in that it was written in the 90s and early 2000s, but on the other hand it is so completely relevant to today because the pattern has never changed.
And, once again, the independent media is trying to get the truth out there and once again being called propagandists and liars. People who have believed independent media over mainstream media have been proven right time after time after time. Do you want to be on the right side this time or do you want to keep repeating the past?
Already the truth is coming out. Amnesty International, for instance, just published a report about how ukrainian forces operate from residential areas. CBS issued a documentary about how the corruption in ukraine is preventing supplies from getting to the front. Pentagon officials have admitted ukraine cannot win the war (but they’re going to continue it anyway to “bleed” Russia, no matter how many ukrainian lives are lost. And the fact remains that Russia holds all of the independent territories in the Donbass. ukraine just launched a massive offensive to try to reclaim those territories (the fact that they have to be “reclaimed” tells you Russia holds them) and got thoroughly routed. The mass Bandera worship in ukraine is giving lie to the notion that there are few nazis in ukraine. More and more evidence is piling up that a lot of the atrocities like Bucha and the Mariupol Theater were perpetrated by ukrainian forces. Russia is currently being accused of shelling a nuclear power plant that they control, which is risible. You can disbelieve all of that if you want, but as I said, the truth is coming out.
Is Russia innocent and wonderful? No, of course not. It’s a war and war is hell. There are self-serving motives and actions on both sides. But stop believing this ukraine babe of the woods nonsense too.
Putin’s aggression against Ukraine was entirely unprovoked.
Did I read Dienne77 say that Putin has controlled the 2nd most powerful country in the world?
Any power Russia’s has based on its ability to threaten other countries with nuclear war because of its huge nuclear weapons arsenal left over from the cold war. Without those nuclear bombs, Russia would only be a big gas station and not much else. It’s military without nuclear weapons is only good for waging war against countries a fraction of its size and population.
Russia’s GDP is ranked #11 behind ten other countries. India is ranked #5
https://www.worldometers.info/gdp/gdp-by-country/
The only reason Putin is holding on to power is because he has his rivals murdered or sent to prison.
I’ve read that Russia’s military is built on a foundation to wars using WWII tactics and weapons.
What country is the second most powerful country in the world? That is China, not Russia.
Diane,
Not everyone believes that the invasion was unprovoked: https://consortiumnews.com/2022/09/01/scott-ritter-getting-it-wrong-on-ukraine/
Joel – shall we talk about the number of ukranians who have been assassinated for being alleged “Russian collaborators”?
Dienne is anti-Ukrainian. Period. She thinks it’s their fault that Putin invaded. Before the invasion, she assured us that Putin would never invade. Then she said he had to invade to block NATO encirclement. Then she said the Ukrainians are Nazis and Putin had to kill the Nazis like Zelensky. Putin keeps throwing in more Russians to die. Bombs hospitals, schools, and apartment houses. Finland and Sweden joined NATO. Putin has to keep killing Ukrainians and Russians. He’s getting drones from Iran. But he can do no wrong in her eyes.
Another fact, Russia can’t be encircled by NATO or the EU, which are pretty much the same.
This is how long the border between Russia and the EU is: 2,250 kilometers
The Russian border is the world’s longest at 57,792 kilometers (35,910 miles).
I do not think Dienne77 could relational explain (or care) how a 2,250 kilometer border running alongside most of Russia’s western border can surround the other 55,542 kilometers.
What rasPutin really means is there won’t be any tiny little helpless countries he can wage war with along that border if they are all members of the EU and/or NATO.
The EU and NATO are only a threat if Russia starts the war with a member state. The EU/NATO alliances are defensive, not aggressive and controlled by one lunatic monster like a Hitler, Stalin, or rasPutin.
Russia has less than 150 million population. The EU nations have more than 500 million people. NATO has even more because of the UK, Canada and the US.
So the fact that your government has lied to you about every single previous military engagement doesn’t bother you? The fact that people who believed in things like WMD and Saddam’s soldiers throwing babies out of incubators and Gaddafi’s soldiers given rape drugs all have egg on their faces doesn’t bother you? You’re convinced you’re being told the truth this time? Even though I’ve posted multiple sources documenting my points? Oh, hell, who am I kidding? You all still believe in Russiagate. You obviously enjoy being lied to. It’s more comfortable than the truth.
I challenge you to read the Parenti book and then continue to defend mainstream media.
Speaking of atrocities, I suppose you think it makes sense that Putin would drop petal mines on territory that he holds that’s friendly to him, right?
https://thescrum.substack.com/p/eva-bartlett-reports-from-donetsk?utm_medium=email
Putin would never do anything criminal, like having his political opponents murdered or invading a neighboring nation and seizing its territory. Of course not. He’s too noble.
Dienne is an idiot. Pure and simple. A simpleton. A tool. Needing therapy. When she writes something as moronic as “So disagreement equals ‘Russian troll’.”, she conveniently forgets years of posted idiocy. It’s not “disagreement”, we welcome that here when it illuminates. Can someone please explain to me how this continuous crap, this justifying of at least two fascists responsible for verifiable death and global disruption, tens-to-hundreds of deaths, and unquantifiable tragedy is constructive or justified?
After I read a recent comment where dienne77 was agreeing with and/or defending Daedalus, I starting suspecting that maybe they are the same person. Not two. One.
Using more than one device and multiple accounts with different sock puppet names is one of the tactics full-time narcisistic trolls use to confuse and/or irritate their targets.
And using those different sock puppet accounts to support each other is almost always the same troll pretending to be two individuals.
How can dienne77 and Dedalus be slandered when he, she, or they are using sock puppet names and no one else, including me, knows who they are?
“To prove prima facie defamation, a plaintiff must show four things: 1) a false statement purporting to be fact; 2) publication or communication of that statement to a third person; 3) fault amounting to at least negligence; and 4) damages, or some harm caused to the reputation of the person or entity who is the subject …”
https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/defamation
I wonder if a person or persons hiding behind sock puppet names can have their anonymous reputations harmed.
If you do a bit of Google searching, you may discover that all of the cases of slander between an anonymous person and a known person are the known person trying to sue the anonymous person, not the other way around.
If anyone knows of a case where an anonymous person hiding behind a sock puppet name on the internet successfully took a real person using their real name to court and sued them for slander, please share it with us and provide the link. Thank you.
So, are you admitting that your real name is Dienne Seventy-Seven? Do you know how many people in the world have Dienne as their the first name, or is Dienne your last name and Seventy-Seven your first name?
I just ran a Google search to see if I could find out how many Diennes there are on Earth and didn’t get an answer. I couldn’t even find out how many Diennes there are in the US.
I’m sure the Census must have a data base with that answer.
Now, Dedalus did claim he lives in Tennessee, a state with almost seven million people. I wonder if anyone in Tennessee has a first or last name spelled Dedalus.
And even when we have a real person’s first and last name, that doesn’t mean we know who they are. Have you ever ran a search for someone with both their first and last name? If you have, you may have discovered dozens, hundreds or thousands of people with the same first and last names.
Dienne is a real person. I met het her at an NPE conference in Chicago.
Thank you for that much, Diane.
To Greg and Lloyd, carry on with your slander party. I’m done here as you have shown your true, repulsive McCarthyite selves. History does not judge your ilk kindly.
Ah, it’s not slander. It’s alleged libel. Slander is for speech. Libel is for print.
https://www.thebusinesslitigators.com/libel-vs-slander-vs-defamation-what-are-the-differences.html#:~:text=Libel%20and%20slander%20are%20types,defamatory%20statement%20that%20is%20oral.&text=At%20common%20law%2C%20libel%20and,as%20the%20more%20serious%20wrong.
Good to know. I still don’t know who she is though, where she lives, what she does, et al. To me, she’s just dienne77, a rasPutin supporter.
Dienne is real.
I’m sure she is. Daedalus is too, but I don’t know who they are, what they do, where the live, their last names, et al. So, to me they are anonymous. Well, worse than anonymous since they appear to support rasPutin.
So, back when Tsar Vladimir was trying to push onto the Russian people an untested vaccine, doctors all over the country who raised objections suddenly started “committing suicide” by throwing themselves out of windows. Now that wealthy businesspeople in Russia are feeling the pitch of the sanctions due to Putin’s illegal and monstrous invasion of another U.N. state, the businesspeople who are objecting are starting to jump out of windows, hang themselves, etc. Meanwhile, the Chekist troll and would-be imperialist Tsar is using body doubles to hide his obvious infirmity.
Duane, you can put the fantasies that you read on Consortium News, that Russian intelligence services propaganda site, alongside the collected works of that crackpot Wilson. Same woo-woo. Different topics. And, in the same vein, these stories just in:
Unborn baby sings like Elvis!
Horse tranquilizer cures Covid!
Reptilian spaceport under Vatican revealed!
Is Trump Mussolini’s grandson? The grand lineage revealed!
Iowa mom stumps world’s mathematicians with demonstration that circle can be squared!
Does Hunter’s laptop contain the secret to the disappearances in the Bermuda Triangle? Story inside!
Bob, you have clearly never read Consortium News. It started when Robert Parry was not able to publish his findings on the Iran Contra scandal in the mainstream media. He was right then and CN has been right about everything since then, while the mainstream media have brought us continual lies like Saddam’s soldiers throwing babies out of incubators, WMD and Gaddafi giving his soldiers rape drugs.
When you started posting this drivel, I dutifully followed the links and read it. Whatever its origins, it has become, as another commentator here stated, clearly simply an organ for restating official Putinist propaganda from the various Russian intelligences services, of which there are so many because they are busy little bees.
Correction please: the trolls working in and/or for rasPutin’s propaganda-hacker machine are not busy bees. They are mutated genetically-altered termite fire ants designed to destroy the world.
Educations two major headlines recently:
“Teachers quitting”
“Students failing”
Well said, Diane. Thank you.
I’d like to know what the percentage drop in scores genuinely means; i.e., students answered x fewer questions of y total questions correctly. It probably isn’t an overwhelming number.
No student takes the full test.
“Average scores for age 9 students in 2022 declined 5 points in reading and 7 points in mathematics compared to 2020.”
NAEP scores are reported as scaled scores on a 0-500 range, so while this is a larger drop than we have seen in a while, it’s barely a tick. We’re talking about declines, here, of 1% and 1.4%, during a time when there were (from January 2020 to August of 2022) 1,038,799 deaths from COVID-19 in the United States. “Bring out your dead! Oh, and get plenty of sleep before the test tomorrow!” LOL.
Here’s what happened with both NAEP and state test scores: After the Common Core was passed and the state test scores were made high stakes by tying school, administrator, teacher, and student evaluation to them, people dumbed down curricula and pedagogy to make it test preppy, and they did lots and lots of practice tests and test prep. So, this familiarized students with the question formats of standardized tests, and so scores improved a little. But then they went basically flat for many years. No significant improvement, just VERY minor ticks up and down, for a decade and a half, and what this shows is that Ed Deform’s touted reforms (VAM, school grading, 3rd-grade retention, tests based on national “standards,” etc.) utterly failed. At a cost of trillions of dollars and enormous devolution of curricula, Ed Reform brought about ZERO SIGNIFICANT CHANGE AS MEAURED BY THE VERY INSTRUMENTS THAT THE DEFORMERS TAKE SERIOUSLY, standardized test scores.
Trillions wasted. Ed deformers love to talk about accountability. Where is the accountability for THAT? For the p–sing away of trillions of taxpayer dollars that could have been spent on important things like classroom libraries and eyeglasses and warm coats for kids who need them?
JOURNALISTS: That’s the real story. Do your jobs.
I am willing to grant Diane’s takeaway that the small drop in average NAEP scores might have had something to do with the disruption of having to do remote, computer-assisted schooling rather than in-class, face-to-face schooling. This simply makes sense, for obvious reasons (but ones that will not, alas, be obvious to lots of journalists and lots of Ed Deformers–I could write, myself, the shrill outpourings from Ed Deform shills like the Fordham Institute: “The Sky Fell! Oh, it wasn’t the remote/virtual instruction that did it though! We need more accountability! More VAM. More tests! Standardized reading and math tests of Kindergarteners!” Lol.
The simple act of testing during the 2021 school year — a year when children most desperately needed established routines, relationship building, and kindness — could in itself be considered educational malpractice. Every moment that students were pulled from regular classroom instruction was a missed opportunity to recover from the losses of the pandemic months. How many tests did America’s poor children have to sit through so that administrators in some far-off office could wail about test scores?!