Three to read today

I'd say these three articles frame next year pretty well:

• Research suggests months of academic loss being the result of schools being closed, from today's New York Times: 

New research suggests that by September, most students will have fallen behind where they would have been if they had stayed in classrooms, with some losing the equivalent of a full school year’s worth of academic gains. Racial and socioeconomic achievement gaps will most likely widen, because of disparities in access to computers, home internet connections and direct instruction from teachers.

And the crisis is far from over. The harm to students could grow if schools continue to teach fully or partly online in the fall, or if they reopen with significant budget cuts because of the economic downturn. High school dropout rates could increase, researchers say, while younger children could miss out on foundational concepts in phonics and fractions that prepare them for a lifetime of learning and working.

• U.S. schools are laying off hundreds of thousands of teachers as a result of the economic impacts of the pandemic:

  In April alone, 469,000 public school district personnel nationally lost their jobs, including kindergarten through twelfth-grade teachers and other school employees, a Labor Department economist told Reuters.
  That is more than the nearly 300,000 total during the entire 2008 Great Recession, according to a 2014 paper by three university economists financed by the Russell Sage Foundation. The number of public school teachers hasn’t recovered from that shakeout, reaching near-2008 levels only in 2019.
  Multiple school district administrators, public officials and teaching experts have warned that the current school personnel job loss will last for years, hurting the education of a generation of American students. It also could be a drag on economic recovery, for one thing because school districts are big employers.

• The Government Accountability Office has issued a new report on school facilities, finding that:

  ...more than 40% of school districts that need to update or replace heating, ventilation and air conditioning systems in at least half of their schools – an estimated 36,000 schools nationwide – that if left unaddressed could lead to indoor air quality problems and mold. In some cases these problems have already caused schools to adjust their calendar year or shutter entirely.

    

I would say, then, that this thread from last night is warranted: