Is “Learning Loss” Real or a Function of America’s Need for Speed?
“Learning loss” has become a chief concern among parents, educational leaders, and politicians over the past two years, thanks to COVID-19 school closings.
Most recently, parents in Chicago have expressed their dismay over a five-day teacher strike in the face of surging coronavirus cases there.
“The strike just disrupts everything because you’re ripping schedules out from children who are used to a defined structure,” said Sarah Sachen, mother of four Chicago schoolchildren. “And it’s created a panic for me, because I’m brought back to that moment of the hell that was the pandemic and remote learning. Remote learning is dreadful for children with special needs.”
Remote learning entails teachers providing online lessons for kids at home. That this computer-based method has been a less than effective alternative to in-class education is a no-brainer.
But some go rather far in their critique.
“The damage to a generation of children’s social development and educational attainment, and particularly to the social mobility prospects of its most marginalized members, will be irrecoverable,” writes Jonathan Chait in New York magazine.
Damage? At some level, yes. Irrecoverable? Maybe a bit over the top.
The Great Depression was likely damaging to millions of children — especially the “most marginalized” — but history shows that most of them recovered, even prospered, when they participated in the post-war economic boom, the greatest in American history.
Even as I find Chait’s prediction regarding America’s COVID children hyperbolic, I think he’s missing a more important point — a point, in fact, that most people don’t consider when denouncing learning loss: America is simply obsessed with speed.
“Speed is creating a new world that transforms what we do, what we value, and, more important, who we are,” writes Mark C. Taylor in his 2014 book Speed Limits: Where Time Went and Why We Have So Little Left. “As acceleration accelerates, our very sense of reality morphs. The unquestioned faith in the New Age is that faster is always better and the quick inherit the earth.”
Taylor’s book, one I hadn’t read in several years, was rekindled in my mind as I read news story after news story about learning loss: Remote learning would set kids back years. Summers off had been detrimental to children’s education well before the pandemic. Schools would need to offer remedial education beyond regular classroom time to get students back on track.
The more I thought about it, the more I realized how much this country emphasizes rapid, nonstop advancement, as if there exists some “education speedometer” that measures success in school. In truth, we actually have created a “speedometer” of sorts in the way standardized tests demonstrate “success” only when scores continually improve. Many teachers’ annual performance reviews are tied to these scores: If test scores don’t “show growth,” teachers have failed, and students have no doubt suffered learning loss.
Perpetual growth at warp speed, after all, is the goal. American society rewards the fleet of foot who can deftly negotiate the challenging terrain of the working world. As one student in my 11th grade English class recently said, “The American Dream is to get rich as quickly as possible.”
That’s exactly what Elizabeth Holmes, now 37, did when she founded the blood-testing company Theranos in 2003. By 2014, the company was valued at $9 billion.
“Ms. Holmes’s resolve was so forceful, and fit so neatly into the Silicon Valley cliché of achieving the impossible by refusing to admit it was impossible,” recounts a New York Times article, “that it inspired belief right up to the moment on [Jan. 3] when a jury officially convicted her of four counts of fraud.”
Admittedly, more than speed was behind the downfall of Elizabeth Holmes, but it remained at the core of her value system, just as it overshadows the real meaning of teaching and learning.
To be clear, I don’t disavow the disadvantages of remote learning and the subsequent learning loss that might occur — whatever “learning loss” really means. Kids learn best when they’re in the classroom with a qualified teacher. For the record, that is exactly what’s been happening at my school since August of 2020, despite another of Jonathan Chait’s exaggerated claims that “the failed experiment [of remote learning] finally came to an end in the fall of 2021.” But the laser focus that public-school detractors continue to place on learning loss only accentuates the need-for-speed mentality.
“As acceleration accelerates, individuals, societies, economies, and even the earth that sustains us approach meltdown,” explains Mark C. Taylor. “Faster is not always better … Rather than improving life, acceleration creates a pervasive sense of anxiety. Anxiety, unlike fear, has no definite object or source; it reflects a profound unease that results from insecurities that cannot be precisely identified and can never be mastered.”
And if adults become increasingly anxious, kids become exceedingly anxious, and learning loss becomes the least of our worries.
