Back in April, I
wrote about a study published in
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, which found that Dutch students made "made little or no progress while learning from home". Now researchers have reported a similar
finding in Brazil.
As in the Dutch study, the researchers used rigorous methods to gauge the impact of remote learning on student outcomes. In other words, they didn't just compare outcomes in 2020 to those the year before.
In São Paulo State (where the study was based) state schools switched to remote learning only at the end of the first quarter, and they continued to teach remotely thereafter.
This allowed the researchers to compare the change in outcomes between the first and last quarters of 2020 to the change in outcomes between the same two quarters of 2019.They looked at two different outcomes: high dropout risk (i.e., whether the student had any math and Portuguese grades on his school record in the relevant quarter), and standardised test scores.
When comparing the change in 2020 to the change in 2019, the researchers found
large increases in school dropout and learning losses.
Furthermore, they exploited a natural experiment to gauge the impact of switching
back to in-person learning. In the fourth quarter of 2020, some municipalities allowed high-schools but not middle-schools to switch back. This allowed the researchers to compare middle- and high-schools in those municipalities with respect to the change in 2020 versus the change in 2019.
Consistent with the previous result,
they found that switching back to in-person learning was associated with higher standardised test scores.
In the authors' own words, their results show that "the societal costs of keeping schools closed in the pandemic are very large". As such, they argue that "the public debate should move from whether schools should be open or not to how to reopen them safely".
I can say from experience on one of my kids, since the beginning of this year as soon as he realized they were not going to open back to normal in the spring, he gave up , started skipping classes, started to drop his grades and does not give a crap about it, because in his words, if they don't have normal school then it does not count . They don't make it interesting enough on line, they don't' have the interaction and it is absolutely pointless in their eyes especially for the attention span that technology ruined a lot of their ability to focus. So they can take a freakin nap while school is going on in zoom.
I know a lot of you out there are home school advocates, but it is not for everyone and I for one did not want to be more than a parent besides having the technology makes home schooling worse than before when people actually had to open books and take notes. In my opinion, it is the only way to learn not having an overwhelming amount of resources at your fingertips to copy and past without internalizing what you just read and without having the ability to create something applicable to interpret.
Sorry about the venting, this one is personal.