The Other Pandemic--Dropping Out

This pandemic of school dropouts is likely to be far more widespread and will likely have more long lasting effects--depending, of course, on how you run the statistics. No doubt the government will find a way to soft peddle this catastrophe.

Here's an article that goes into this. This is totally at the doorstep of Fauci, CDC, the government teachers unions--and the Dems:

Schools Fight To Keep Students Amid Fears Of A Dropout Surge

Uh, if "schools"--by which I assume the NPR authors mean government teachers and their unions--really wanted to "keep students", the obvious way to do so would be to keep the schools open. Or am I missing something? Catholic schools and many other private schools opened on schedule and stayed open and had no Covid problems. The response of the government teachers? Find a way to force private schools to close, too.

Despite the attempt to paint an even remotely encouraging picture in the article, that attempt falls totally flat. Of course, we know what's really going on here, but the only hint of it that you'll find in the article is in euphemisms like "students at risk". Codeword.

Excerpts:

U.S. educators are doing everything they can to track down high school students who stopped showing up to classes and to help them get the credits needed to graduate, amid an anticipated surge in the country’s dropout rate during the coronavirus pandemic.

There isn’t data available yet on how the pandemic has affected the nation’s overall dropout rate — 2019 is the last year for which it is available — and many school officials say it’s too early to know how many students who stopped logging on for distance learning don’t plan to return. But soaring numbers of students who are failing classes or are chronically absent have experts fearing the worst, and schools have been busy tracking down wayward seniors through social media, knocking on their doors, assigning staff to help them make up for lost time and, in some cases, even relaxing graduation requirements.

What does most of this have to do with education? Your guess is as good as mine. It's about pushing these kids through the system.

To keep students on track, some local governments and school systems have waived certain testing requirements for graduation or changed grading policies so that missed assignments aren’t as damaging. But such leniency carries the risk of watering down academic standards, said Russell Rumberger, an professor emeritus of education at the University of California, Santa Barbara, who has written about dropouts.

“If they let you pass with a D and you don’t have to do very much to do it, maybe technically you are getting a diploma, but you are not getting the same type of diploma you may have gotten prior to the pandemic, when the standards were higher,” he said.

No sh*t, Sherlock! No wonder this guy was a professor of education.

Why GOPers aren't talking about this 24/7, why Trump didn't during his campaign, is a total mystery to me.