When COVID made its way onto the scene almost five years ago, it indisputably had an effect on America's students, especially those in the K-12 grades. But although the pandemic was like "this comet that hit our education system," as one expert puts it, "the downward trend for America's schools started about a decade ago," meaning the pandemic simply "destabilized an already weakened structure"—and neither presidential candidate is really addressing that in the aftermath, writes Jessica Grose in a new op-ed for the New York Times. Grose cites a continuing drop in test scores, "chronic absenteeism," and more public schools shuttering as enrollment drops, calling out both Donald Trump and Kamala Harris for not taking a more aggressive stance on what's going on in US schools, for different reasons.
Although Grose agrees with some of the Dems' education platforms, including free universal pre-K, "budgets are finite," she writes, adding, "I wish Democratic politicians would focus more energy on the K-12 system that already exists." Trump's camp seems "focused on inflaming culture war issues, not on building fundamentals," she writes. Meanwhile, kids who were in school during COVID are still suffering from their academic losses, and Grose is pushing for more easily understandable data from states on both school performance and kids' performance to start to remedy this. "I don't think it's acceptable to just give up on the kids who had the misfortune of being school-age during 2020-2022," she writes. "There's a month left before the election and the candidates still have time to say something—anything—about how they're going to help." Her full piece here. (More education stories.)
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