Student reading levels are at 10-year lows. However, one might doubt this when looking at Illinois, where the Chicago Teachers Union is doing its best to sustain the absenteeism that has set the school system back so far.
In time for Cinco de Mayo, the union is pursuing a five-day protest “to stop the billionaire agenda.”
Much can be accomplished in a measly five days — just maybe not what the teachers intended. In fact, the damage that compounds over three missed days of learning will probably exceed whatever dent the protest makes to the billionaire class. Fewer than 1 in 3 students can read at grade level in Chicago Public Schools. Far fewer can do math. Yet, to CTU members, this school environment is ripe for field trips to the protests, a time-off hack by which teachers can secure their attendance and students can “greatly benefit from seeing this level of advocacy and solidarity.”
These painfully low educational levels hold throughout the country. Students have not recovered from pandemic-era school closures, especially in reading. The swaths of time off, along with the curve back to in-person instruction and discipline, left them behind. However, the outcome is not just another COVID-19 externality: National Center for Education Statistics Commissioner Peggy Carr noted, “There’s a strong relationship between absenteeism and performance.”
Students’ persistent educational floundering shows that they are not improving. Some are, and as such, widen the performance gap. The factors that weigh most heavily on poor performance, such as home life, educational resources, and motivation level, touch more on school absence than COVID-19 setbacks.
Typical Left-based solutions, for which the CTU will march more broadly, have not helped the problem, either, and have likely even worsened it. When the tide of social justice convinced educators to forsake phonics and switch to sight reading, students suffered. Many are not learning to read in the first place, and cannot catch up when total skill collapse is imminent. As happened during the pandemic, Democratic officials typically allocate billions of dollars in funding to schools to counteract these effects. However, that route failed, especially when chosen over reopening schools.
MISSISSIPPI OFFERS A MODEL FOR EDUCATIONAL SUCCESS
But unions, politicians, and lobbyists on the Left are surprisingly welcoming to the “billionaire class” that threatens America when its money pours into favorable causes. If the Biden administration sent at least a billion dollars for diversity, equity, and inclusion programs in public schools, certainly much more filtered in by way of private donations.
All that may be coming to a slow end through the new administration, but its form remains under guises such as the Chicago Teachers Union: Students are being taught only what teachers want, and at that, nothing of substance. No wonder students don’t want to come to class.