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Chuds smugpost over Atlantic article about kids being far, far behind in school due to lockdowns :marseywhirlyhat::marseyretard2:

https://old.reddit.com/r/LockdownSkepticism/comments/uwc8xw/kids_are_far_far_behind_in_school?sort=controversial

It's obviously the fault of schools re-opening way too early that led to this inequitable outcome and not what those chuds think smh :!marseydisagree:


Starting in the spring of 2020, school boards and superintendents across the country faced a dreadful choice: Keep classrooms open and risk more COVID-19 deaths, or close schools and sacrifice children’s learning. In the name of safety, many districts shut down for long periods. But researchers are now learning that the closures came at a stiff price—a large decline in children’s achievement overall and a historic widening in achievement gaps by race and economic status.

The achievement loss is far greater than most educators and parents seem to realize. The only question now is whether state and local governments will recognize the magnitude of the educational damage and make students whole. Adults are free to disagree about whether school closures were justified or a mistake. But either way, children should not be stuck with the bill for a public-health measure taken on everyone’s behalf.

I am part of a team from the American Institutes for Research, Dartmouth College, Harvard, and the educational-assessment nonprofit NWEA that has been investigating the impact of remote and hybrid instruction on student learning during the 2020–21 academic year. We have assembled testing results from 2.1 million elementary- and middle-school students in 10,000 schools in 49 states and Washington, D.C., and combined those with data on the number of weeks schools were in-person, remote, or hybrid during 2020–21. Our team compared student-achievement growth in the period before the pandemic, from fall 2017 to fall 2019, with the period from fall 2019 to fall 2021. For years, districts have regularly been using NWEA tests to measure how students’ performance in reading and math changes during a school year; in a typical week of in-person instruction before the pandemic, the average student improved 0.3 points in math (on the NWEA’s scale) and 0.2 points in reading.

During the spring semester of 2020, though, nearly all schools went remote. Distractions, technical glitches, and the many other pitfalls of online education made it far less effective than in-person school.

One-fifth of American students, by our calculations, were enrolled in districts that remained remote for the majority of the 2020–21 school year. For these students, the effects were severe. Growth in student achievement slowed to the point that, even in low-poverty schools, students in fall 2021 had fallen well behind what pre-pandemic patterns would have predicted; in effect, students at low-poverty schools that stayed remote had lost the equivalent of 13 weeks of in-person instruction. At high-poverty schools that stayed remote, students lost the equivalent of 22 weeks. Racial gaps widened too: In the districts that stayed remote for most of last year, the outcome was as if Black and Latinx students had lost four to five more weeks of instruction than white students had.

By our calculations, about 50 percent of students nationally returned in person in the fall and spent less than a month remote during the 2020–21 school year. In these districts where classrooms reopened relatively quickly, student-achievement gaps by race and socioeconomic status widened a bit in reading but, fortunately, not in math. And overall student achievement fell only modestly. The average student in the quicker-to-reopen districts lost the equivalent of about seven to 10 weeks of in-person instruction. (That losing just a quarter of a typical school year’s academic progress is a relatively good outcome only underscores the dimension of the overall problem.)

What happened in spring 2020 was like flipping off a switch on a vital piece of our social infrastructure. Where schools stayed closed longer, gaps widened; where schools reopened sooner, they didn’t. Schools truly are, as Horace Mann famously argued, the “balance wheel of the social machinery.”

Like any other parent who witnessed their child dozing in front of a Zoom screen last year, I was not surprised that learning slowed. However, as a researcher, I did find the size of the losses startling—all the more so because I know that very few remedial interventions have ever been shown to produce benefits equivalent to 22 weeks of additional in-person instruction.

High-dosage tutoring—which educators define as involving a trained tutor working with one to four students at a time, three times a week for a whole year—is one of the few interventions with a demonstrated benefit that comes close, producing an average gain equivalent to 19 weeks of instruction. One of those leading the charge on tutoring is Tennessee Department of Education Commissioner Penny Schwinn, who is offering matching funds to encourage school districts to launch tutoring initiatives. Tennessee’s goal is to provide high-dosage tutors to 50,000 students a year for the next two years. School systems elsewhere have similar ambitions. The educational-policy think tank FutureEd, at Georgetown University, reviewed the pandemic-recovery plans of thousands of districts and found that a quarter had tutoring initiatives in the works.

The obvious challenge with tutoring is how to offer it to students on an enormous scale. To eliminate a 22-week instruction loss would require providing a tutor to every single student in a school. Yet Tennessee’s plan would serve just one out of 12 Tennessee students in the targeted grades.

Given the magnitude and breadth of the losses, educators should not see tutoring as the sole answer to the problem. School systems need a patch big enough to cover the hole.

Many district leaders I know are considering three additional measures. One option is voluntary summer school, which, according to prior research, has yielded about five weeks of instructional gain per student. Another option is an extra period each day of instruction in core subjects. A double dose of math over the course of an entire school year has been shown to produce gains equivalent to about 10 weeks of in-person instruction, although the evidence on reading is weaker. (Our team will be working with districts to measure the efficacy of these and other catch-up efforts over the next two years.)

Like tutoring, double-dose math will be hard to scale up. Staffing the additional sections of math requires hiring more math teachers amid a historically hot labor market. Unlike tutors (who can be contractors), districts are hesitant to add permanent teaching staff for a short-term catch-up effort.

Meanwhile, summer school has historically struggled with low student attendance. In a typical pre-pandemic year, only about 6 percent of students attended summer school. Even if districts managed to triple that number, enrollment would still fall far short of the magnitude required to eliminate learning loss.

A third alternative would be lengthening the school year for the next two years. Of course, districts would have to pay teachers, janitors, and bus drivers more, perhaps at time and a half, to work the extra weeks. But unlike with tutoring or double-dose math, districts already have the personnel, the buildings, the buses, the schedules. As long as educators, parents, and students view the extra instructional time as just an extension of the school year—like days added to make up for snow closures—the power of family and school routine will deliver higher attendance than summer school.

The primary problem with a longer school year is political, not logistical. After opposition from the local teachers’ union and some parents, the Los Angeles Unified School District was able to add only four optional days of school next year. This is, to be sure, more make-up time than many other school systems have planned, but quite inadequate given that the nation’s second-largest school district was remote for three-quarters of 2020–21.

I fear that, in areas where classrooms remained closed for long periods, school officials are not doing the basic math. High-dosage tutoring may produce the equivalent of 19 weeks of instruction for students who receive it, but is a district prepared to offer it to everyone? Alternatively, suppose that a school offers double-dose math for every single student and somehow convinces them to attend summer school, too. That, educational research suggests, would help students make up a total of 15 weeks of lost instruction. Even if every single student in a high-poverty school received both interventions, they would still face a seven-week gap.

Educational interventions have a way of being watered down in practice; many superintendents and school boards may tell themselves that they are taking a variety of steps to help students make up lost time. And yet most district plans are currently nowhere near commensurate with their students’ losses.

I understand the many practical challenges of implementing any of these measures—much less implementing all of them quickly. Yet speed is essential. State and local school agencies received $190 billion in federal pandemic relief, much of which remains unspent. Districts have more than two full school years in which to spend the aid. But if they do not get started at sufficient scale during the coming school year, they risk using the aid for other purposes and running out of time and money later.

Last year, Miguel Cardona, the secretary of education, urged schools to return to in-person learning. Now the department that he leads should be encouraging (or requiring) districts to update their recovery plans in light of achievement losses. Local school boards should have to show that their recovery programs are plausibly sufficient to cover those losses. When Congress approved federal aid packages for schools, the magnitude of the achievement losses were unclear, and many analysts were preoccupied with potential shortfalls in the state and local tax revenue used to fund schools. Thus, the law required districts to spend only 20 percent of their COVID-relief money on academic recovery; the rest could go to the day-to-day needs of a school district—salaries, curriculum materials, teacher training, facility improvements. But many districts, especially those that were remote for much of 2020–21, will have to spend nearly all of their federal relief funds on academic recovery if they want students to catch up.

Reversing pandemic-era achievement losses will take aggressive action over the next several years. And yet the problem also presents an opportunity for any governor or mayor or superintendent looking to make meaningful improvements in children’s education. Federal aid is available. No obvious partisan roadblocks stand in the way. Most communities just need leadership—and a sufficiently ambitious recovery plan. In Tennessee, Schwinn has at least recognized the enormous scope of the problem. Which other state and local leaders will join her?

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/05/schools-learning-loss-remote-covid-education/629938/

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In the next couple years as the fallout for the coof response becomes fully realized, you'll be hard-pressed to find someone who would admit being in favor of the restrictions during the time. You gotta be on The Right Side of History™ after all.

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Maybe some neurodivergent rightoid will make a bot to archive all of the pro-close-schools-because-of-coof—for the children and their mee-maws :derpwhy:—twitter comments to later throw in the face of people who said they were against closing schools this whole time

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/r/agedlikemilk jannies will be pulling some long shifts when these articles come out

@JoeBiden

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we can hope, cause the couff response is going to become the least popular thing in history, you are going to have fauci telling you how he was actually against it

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Fauci will confidently die before admitting wrongdoing

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We increased the starvation rates globally leading to a couple million dead and thats a good thing rightoid.

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I'm curious about this, because I've been predicting that since the beginning, but I'm no longer that sure.

For instance, I'm not seeing the epidemiology papers that I was expecting, comparing person years lost as a result of Covid versus those from the lockdowns. If anything, excess deaths are entirely attributed to Covid, either from undercounting, or saying that those deaths should still be considered as caused by Covid and not our response (i.e. if a cancer patient in remission misses an "elective" screening because their hospital was only focussed on Covid, that's caused by the pandemic and not our response).

Meanwhile, politicians don't seem to be getting flak for doing absolutely counterproductive things like sending Covid patients to nursing homes or shutting down outdoor activities.

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What I'm waiting for is seeing any changes in death rates by other causes over the next couple of years. There's a very real chance that post pandemic deaths will be below average and that we really did stunt an entire generations youth and prime working years just to buy a bunch of boomers a longer retirement on our social security.

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There's also the possibility that other deaths are going to increase as a fallout of the response. We'd need to isolate the reduction caused by having fewer old people from the increase caused by people not getting 2 years of proper treatment or whatever as a result of the lockdowns.

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There are still people arguing for lockdowns and mask mandates. It will be a few years before any real autopsies are done

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Andrew Cuomo "wrote" a book about his pandemic leadership 4 months into the pandemic.

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He received an Emmy award for it. I guess it was for acting like he was a good leader.

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Meanwhile, politicians don't seem to be getting flak for doing absolutely counterproductive things like sending Covid patients to nursing homes or shutting down outdoor activities.

I've brought this up IRL a few times. It's kind of crazy how quickly the topic gets changed (usually to something like Jan 6th).

Honestly, it's kind of why I'm now a committed troll. :marseyshrug:

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It’s amazing how just now people are coming around to the realization that locking everyone home for a year while the money printers run at full speed might have actually had negative repercussions for the economy.

I see people blaming Joe or Putin like we didn’t print 50% of our money supply during the pandemic

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I still see metric tons of cope over how printing one gajillion dollars per second is okay if it "just goes on the fed balance sheet" (as if that is somehow isolated from the rest of the economy). Inflation is solely due to supply chain issues :marseyseethe:

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Remember when Larry Summers was saying that exactly this will happen, and everyone else said not to listen to him because he's a chud and he's telling us what we don't want to hear? There's a deafening silence now from everyone who should be admitting they were completely wrong now.

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I honestly have very little hope for the future of this country when I see the average American. Even if we did miraculously start bringing manufacturing and resource extraction jobs back, Americans are too fat, stupid and drug-addicted to do the well-paid blue-collar jobs of the post-war economic boom anymore. The future of that country is catatonic obese whales shoving fried dough into their slobbery holes while languishing on the couch absorbing government assistance and tweeting about social justice and fighting the man

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I unironically think that it will have close to zero effect 10 years down the line. To clarify, I think the effect of school lockdowns on educational outcomes, which are large and measurable in the present, will be almost un-noticable in those same kids 10 years from now. I think that the effect on their productivity as workers will be entirely erased 10 years from now, and that there will be no real effect on other measures of success that are typically tied to educational attainment: advanced degrees, number of publications, patents held, etc etc. The caveat here is that the effect of the COVID lockdowns more generally, and the disease's effect on the economy as a whole will be fairly obvious, and the effect of a poor economy on kids's success will be noticable. I guess another way of saying it is that "kids not going to school is not what matters, at all, compared to the economic effect."

As for side-switching: My mind changed when the total death toll was 1/2 a million and of them only 300 were child deaths. I think that was January 2021? That said, I was forced into behaving more neuroticly than 90% of the country, and I was openly "this is an r-slured idea, but I guess this is what we're doing" within my household about it. It was an unironic "now put the mask on" "yes dear" situation, with me also occasionally losing it and neurodivergentally chudposting irl about the CDC and lockdowns not making sense like the shitposter I am.

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Some of those kids lost years that they can't replace though. Like all the ones around 15-17 who should have been going out on dates and learning how to interact with the opposite s*x. Now they'll all end up as spergs who have to ask /r/relationshipAdvice why they're pushing the right buttons on Tinder but nobody will have s*x with them, let alone a real relationship.

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That's a good point. I suddenly feel bad for the student athletes. Highschool sports were so much fun, plus imagine if you made varsity in your sophomore or junior year and then next year the sport just isn't allowed to exist, even though it's played outside, lmao. Must've been just absolutely devastating to a lot of kids' sense of identity. Even like band geeks, probably.

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Jesse what the frick are you talking about??

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Nah they'll justify it as being necessary to save ~10x as many lives or something. That's how they've always shut down coversations on lockdowns aka the killing grandmas argument.

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I know quite a few personally in favor of the lockdowns, even after it was realized that the starvation rate drastically increased causing millions of BIPOC deaths.

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The good news is that this only applies to the dumbs and poors while the kids that had potential are now more likely to be homeschooled.

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I was unironically seething at the ridiculous articles asking parents of means not to form pods/homeschool out of equity concerns.

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It's easier to keep others down than raise others up

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:#marseyrave:

Get back in this bucket, motherlover!

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Had a friend tell me the same sentiment "oh isn't it fricked how people are trying to get their kids better opportunities?" Yeah dipshit, it's so evil for you to want you kids to be better off than other, how shitty. Same dude always tries to use 'but what about struggling families?' to justify his support for govt programs that would also happen to massively benefit him.

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It's not even that I was trying to get my kids to be better off than others - I just wanted them to have a fricking education versus the remote learning the school was pushing. All I had was Hobson's choice, but I still took it.

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You should be trying to get your kids better off than others, the more advantages they have in life the better.

But I do agree, even if u were hands off parenting, remote learning was such an obvious crock of shit. Legit I see way more homeschooled people now. Not surprising when they basically forced ppl to do that for a year, and a bunch probably realized "hey this isn't to hard".

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I don't view it competitively - I'm just trying to give my kids the best I can. Of course, my kids have educated/involved/affluent parents, so they probably have it better than 95% of kids in the US (never mind globally). But I think there's an ethical distinction there.

I'm not trying to give my kids a leg up at possibly the expense of other kids. It's not like I was fighting for lockdowns while sending my kids to a private school with in-person instruction. But I'm not about to hold my kids back because society is unwilling to do more.

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All the private school parents I know are the most anti-lockdown

They were smart enough to see how r-slurred keeping their kids out of school was

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Alright yeah that's fair, I view "giving my kids the best I can" as the same as "giving my kids more advantages than others" since the results of actually living by both statements are basically the same for me (affluent, involved parents).

And good point about the ethical distinction, obviously I meant trying to give my kids more, not tearing down other kids, but I guess what I said leaves room for both options so "giving my kids the best I can" would be more ethical.

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The framing is important because I find that people like your friend view life as a zero sum game or something (even in cases where it doesn't make sense). For instance, there were two philosophers who were crying about how it's unfair that some kids have good families and others don't.

I don’t think parents reading their children bedtime stories should constantly have in their minds the way that they are unfairly disadvantaging other people’s children, but I think they should have that thought occasionally.

Anyway, I have libraries of seethe about this shit having followed bullshit education drama for over a decade now.

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Darn he has literally fricking said that "unfair that some people have good families". He def views it as a zero sum game, ie if my family is doing ok and he's doing shitty, he views it as me putting him down somehow. Dudes an antinatalist but constantly talks about how I should raise kids/etc. And I don't have the heart to tell him that if my kids ends up like him I'll kill myself lol.

Education drama is like heroin for me cuz no matter how much people seethe about the dregs of society not doing well in school, there's nothing they're ever gonna be able to do to fix it. There's no system you can create that gives a kid with divorced parents that smoke weed all day more of a leg up than my stable family. You can help close the gap (maybe) but there's no way to make it so that kid is on top. It's shitty if you actually think about the kid getting fricked over, but if you only look at the seethe from academics, it's great.

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More comments

It's such an r-slured mindset. I'm sure they aren't living in lean-to huts because it would be an unfair disadvantage to the Sentinelese if they didn't.

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do you have examples this sound hilarious

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those poor kids

![](/images/16534110251864614.webp)

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zoz

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zle

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zozzle

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Links? I also want to sneed

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I linked to two WaPo articles above. If you search for pandemic pod equity you'll find more articles.

Another thing that makes me angry is all these articles mention "opportunity hoarding," which is an abuse of the term. Opportunity hoarding is when privileged groups carve out exclusive access to some community resource, not when those privileged groups pay for something themselves. Even sociologists get in on this further proving that sociology is a junk "science" driven by ideology.

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It's too bad the people staying home collecting coof bux couldn't peel themselves away from Netflix and day drinking to help their kids with school.

:marseywhirlyhat: Can I go play on Groomercord?

:!marseydrunk: :!marseywinemom: Frick off, son! Mommy and daddy are busy!

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poorly educated kids is just political security for chuds

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How is the WEF planning to do the next industrial revolution whith a generation of r-slurs

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Slave labour by curries

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OK BOOMER OK BOOMER OK BOOMER SO STOP HOARDING THE WEALTH BOOMER YOU RUINED EVERYTHING FOR MY GENERATION BOOMER I CANT BUY A HIGH RISE CONDO IN BROOKLYN NEXT TO ALL THE BREWERIES BECAUSE OF YOU BOOMER wtf wear the mask are you trying to fricking kill grandma????

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The shutdown benefited the old at the expense of everyone under age 50. Frick the elderly. They were happy to kill everyone in their panic

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The school district around me is rich and will pass you at a 60% when 50% is the bare minimum you can get for showing up. Kids still flunk out

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I thought rdrama was pro illiteracy? Why are so many seething ITT?

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I can't read your post because I am illiterate, but I assume it was a really good one.

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Technically this could count as rightoid agendaposting, we should probably delete the post just in case. Can't be too careful

Posting rightoid propaganda under the guise of "drama" is still agendaposting

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We need to expose the fallacy and misinformation of The Atlantic being left-leaning so I don't understand how deleting this post helps since it serves as proof that they are full of rightoids

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hey, last night was fun but after watching you eat the rolls as soon as they came to the table I don't think I want to continue this.

Snapshots:

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/05/schools-learning-loss-remote-covid-education/629938/:

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We’ve been forced to give kids who failed state tests or didn’t take state tests last year 30 hours of tutoring. However, you can’t give that tutoring to them during the school day (the district won’t pay you if you tutor them during lunch, for example) and you can only give them 4 hours total of tutoring on the weekends. Also, they’re unwilling to hire more people to give the kids adequate tutoring and individualists help.

All of the teachers I know are doing the bare minimum for tutoring, mostly pre designed nearpod and edpuzzle lessons that the kids can just blast through without paying attention. Again, this is because there is no staff, they expect you to give 40 kids 30 hours of tutoring each but limit when and for how long you can tutor them, and they refuse to hire additional help to meet those hour requirements.

Education is ran by fricking r-slurs.

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