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Writer's pictureJoanne Jacobs

The students who never returned

A quarter-million students who left public schools during the pandemic are missing, according to an analysis of 21 states and the District of Columbia by AP and Stanford's Big Local News Project.


"These students didn’t move out of state, and they didn’t sign up for private school or home-school, according to publicly available data," report Bianca Vazquez Toness and Sharon Lurye.

Photo: Andrea Piacquadio/Pexels

"The analysis doesn’t include data from 29 states, including Texas and Illinois, or the unknown numbers of ghost students who are technically enrolled but rarely make it to class," they add. So the real number is much higher.


"During the prolonged online learning, some students fell so far behind developmentally and academically that they no longer knew how to behave or learn at school," Toness and Lurye write. Post-pandemic disruption has made it much harder for teachers to teach and their classmates to learn.


In the states covered by the study, public school enrollment fell by 710,000 students, but only 100,000 went to private schools and 180,000 to registered home-schools. Researchers estimated 240,000 students were missing, they write.


In states where kindergarten is optional, many five-year-olds weren't signed up for virtual school and their parents didn't report plans to homeschool.


Older students are probably working.

José Escobar, an immigrant from El Salvador, had only recently enrolled in the 10th grade in Boston Public Schools when the campus shut down in March 2020. His school-issued laptop didn’t work, and because of bureaucratic hurdles the district didn’t issue a new one for several weeks. His father stopped paying their phone bills after losing his restaurant job. Without any working technology for months, he never logged into remote classes.
When instruction resumed online that fall, he decided to walk away and find work as a prep cook.

Kailani Taylor-Cribb, who was struggling before her Cambridge, Massachusetts school closed, "stopped logging into her virtual classes during the spring of her sophomore year," they write. She found a job at Chipotle. She moved to North Carolina, passed her high school equivalency exams and now works as a dance teacher. She hopes to study choreography.

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댓글 3개


게스트
2023년 2월 14일

"according to public available data" NYC Public knows some went back 'home', to the country of parental or grandparental origin. They know because the login data shows where the child was logging in from during the shutdown year. Many realize now that home has a better educational offering than the included classroom, so they'll stay until free college time.

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게스트
2023년 2월 13일

"She moved to North Carolina, passed her high school equivalency exams and now works as a dance teacher."


Not sure I see the problem. Abandoned by the "educators" she got a job then passed the test. Is it that she avoided a few years of useless time wasting? I'm surprised more students at least in high school in 2020 didn't test out and get on with life. This is not about the missing students it is that the "educators" have lost a chunk of their revenue source.


Before the pandemic, maybe 10 minutes of the 50 minute class period was actual instruction on average. What is it now with even more disruptions and "initiatives"?

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Bruce Smith
Bruce Smith
2023년 2월 14일
답글 상대:

God knows where you get any evidence to back up this string of cynical slurs. Do you have some magical means of surveying the hundreds of thousands of classrooms in the United States, and did you carefully time even in a sample of those lessons, to define "actual instruction", or is this just a cliched mass insult of the millions of educators (note my foregoing of your pointless quotation marks) worldwide who worked, during the unprecedented conditions of the spring of 2020, when no high school equivalency testing was available anywhere, to serve their students as best they could?

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