Learning loss continues to manifest

Disasters often reveal underlying structural weaknesses. That certainly happened during the COVID-19 pandemic with the Los Angeles Unified School District, the largest school district in the state.

Test scores released this month showed 72% of students failed to meet California math standards, worse by 5 percentage points from the pre-pandemic school year of 2018-19. For English standards, 58% failed to meet state standards, worse by 2 points.

Superintendent Alberto Carvalho lamented at a news conference, “The pandemic deeply impacted the performance of our students. Particularly kids who were at risk, in a fragile condition, prior to the pandemic, as we expected, were the ones who have lost the most ground.”

True, the pandemic was bad for everybody. However, “Los Angeles Unified stayed closed much longer than other districts in California and the United States,” Lance Izumi told us; he's senior director of the Center for Education at the Pacific Research Institute. “The United Teachers of Los Angeles was one of the biggest boosters of keeping the schools closed. If they had put the children first, the schools would have opened much sooner.”

He added that, even if the schools had opened sooner, they were “not exactly lighting the world on fire before COVID. They started from a really low bar, then went through the floor after that.”

Now the union is resisting staffing four extra school days the kids can attend, if they choose, to make up for the lost learning days. Even though the teachers would receive extra pay.

“It just shows how the teachers unions put their own self-interest above the children,” Izumi said. “The union is unwilling to add a couple more days to bridge these gaps. Even so, how much help will a couple school days do for the kids? The district was doing such a miserable job prior to the pandemic. The same people doing the same old thing in the same old system won't improve the learning of these kids.”

Indeed, consider this bleak reality in relation to what the district's teachers union president said last year about learning loss. “There is no such thing as learning loss,” United Teachers Los Angeles president Cecily Myart-cruz told Los Angeles magazine last year. “Our kids didn't lose anything. It's OK that our babies may not have learned all their times tables. They learned resilience…. They know the difference between a riot and a protest. They know the words insurrection and coup.”

Clearly, California needs more choice in education. This was apparent long before the pandemic, but it's even more apparent now.

The teachers unions which dominate education policy in California have only their best interests in mind, and couldn't care less about the interests of students.

Let the parents decide what school their kids attend — and how long the school doors are kept open.

Cearly, California needs more choice in education. This was already apparent long before the pandemic, but it's even more apparent now.