Divided into quartiles, the more school districts were remote rather than in-person in 2020-21, the worse they did on reading and math tests.
In every category of STAAR Test achievement (Masters, Meets, Approaches, or Did Not Meet Grade Level), in every subject, in every grade, the more remote school districts had worse learning loss than the more in-person school districts.
If one were designing policies to intentionally weaken the long-term competitiveness of Texas students in the global economy, remote "learning" would be a great place to start.
These learning losses in math are statewide aggregates, but they're concentrated in remote districts.
In reading, the learning losses were not as severe as in math, but these numbers still don't portend great things for Texas students going forward:
Who needs writing, science, social studies, or history, anyway?
Eanes was not classified as fully in-person in 2020-21.
Let's look at STAAR test achievement in E.I.S.D.
I just grabbed the reading and math numbers from 3rd, 5th, and 7th grades in the interest of time and to keep it simple. Maybe other grades/subjects performed better. Who knows. You can look it all up yourself here: txreports.emetric.net
Failure was up in each category.
On the STAAR Test, third graders failing reading and math in @EanesISD doubled and more-than-doubled, respectively, from the 2019 test to the 2021 test.
On the STAAR Test, fifth graders failing reading and math in @EanesISD nearly-doubled and more-than-doubled, respectively, from the 2019 test to the 2021 test.
On the STAAR Test, seventh graders failing reading and math in @EanesISD increased significantly and more-than-doubled, respectively, from the 2019 test to the 2021 test.
Failure doubling in most categories is bad enough, but @EanesISD also saw the proportions of those mastering reading and math plummeting dramatically from 2019 to 2021.
On the STAAR Test, the percentage of @EanesISD third graders mastering reading and math fell significantly from the 2019 test to the 2021 test.
On the STAAR Test, the percentage of @EanesISD fifth graders mastering reading fell only a little, while the percentage mastering math fell significantly, from the 2019 test to the 2021 test.
On the STAAR Test, the percentage of @EanesISD seventh graders mastering both reading and math fell significantly from the 2019 test to the 2021 test.
What proportions of increases in "did not meet" scores and declines in "masters" scores are attributable to "the pandemic," generically?
What, more specifically, is attributable to lockdowns, shutdowns, closures, quarantines, remote/hybrid "learning," and even mask monomania?
Moreover, what role did @EanesISD's abrupt shift in focus toward Critical Race Theory play in its declining standardized test scores?
Woke rot in Texas government schools is far more pervasive and systemic than almost anyone will admit. It goes both deep and wide. Urban, rural, and suburban. Libraries. Curriculum. Teachers. Administrators. Don’t go down that rabbit hole if you want to imagine the kids are okay.
If you do any searching of your local school's library, you'll definitely find tons of weird porny graphic novels and embarrassingly cringe woke toddler books and such. But it's more than just a handful of books "slipping through the cracks," it's a relentlessly one-sided bias.
The top school district in Texas, @EanesISD, has its library catalogue online, and, sure, the activist books and sexual content books are disturbing, but it is also amazing what is missing.
If not having a book is a "ban," Eanes I.S.D. librarians are Bowdlerizing aficionados.
In late November of 2018, San Francisco Mayor James Rolph, Jr. asserted that "strict enforcement of universal masking" in his city had cut short the usual course of Spanish Flu by weeks and prevented widespread death.
Recently, a Baby Boomer extended relative shared this "Do's and Don't's for Influenza Prevention" list from the November 15, 1918 edition of the Douglas Island News in Alaska, with the suggestion that this advice is somehow... good. You can find it here: newspapers.com/clip/47051883/
1918 was a lot like 2020. A lot of folks were very willing to try out masks in response to a deadly virus (Spanish Flu was *far* worse than COVID).
Masks were mandated in very few places in 1918. The rationale for masks in 1918 was personal protection, not societal protection.
By the 1919-1921 timeframe, a strong consensus had formed against masks.
I've taken a serious deep dive into documents and newspapers from the Spanish Flu era to get a sense of what was going on. A few things stand out.
Last year in the U.S. broadly and Texas more specifically, some schools were mask-optional. Other schools forced or coerced children to wear them for hours each day, every day, often even outside during exercise.
Forced-mask schools had higher infection rates than mask-optional.
In U.S. schools, staff in forced-mask schools had higher COVID-19 (SARS-CoV-2) infection rates than those in mask-optional schools.
In real-world data, rather than wish-casting, hunches, or theoretical models, forced-mask schools had higher infection rates for both students and staff.
Texas, from January peaks to latest data:
- COVID hospitalizations down 19.9%
- COVID patients % of capacity down 22.9%
- COVID patients % of all patients down 27.7%
- COVID patients down 21.4%
- COVID ICU patients down 17.2%
- All ICU patients down 11.7%
Although there was only one lonely, single, solitary randomized controlled trial on masks in the COVID era (in Denmark), we do have U.S. data from last year.
Turns out, the COVID results were better in mask-optional than in forced-mask schools.