This disinformation campaign is story told on purpose to advance the dismantling of America’s public schools – a campaign that started long before the pandemic.
Curmudgucation The Panic Is No Accident PETER GREENE FEB 18, 2024
Learning Loss panic has been carefully crafted and aggressively marketed by two groups of people– the folks who are intent on dismantling public education, and the people who have a vested interest in responding to the “crisis.” As I pointed out back here, it was clear almost immediately. NWEA and CREDO hit the ground running with scary pronouncements about the severity of Learning Loss based entirely on numbers that were completely made up! McKinsey, the consulting behemoth whose entire business model is “Find a crisis and get paid to help fix it,” quickly joined the fray. By the time we had actual test result numbers to look at, those same folks had already done business selling pearls to clutch, and the usual public education slammers had their doomsday baloney headline generators warned up (looking at you, New York Times). As Ball notes, the fact that US students actually did better than most of the world at navigating the pandemic was largely ignored. But Ball, who is an actual college professor, education researcher, and head of a teacher training organization, chalks all of this up as “a habit.” Taking a big view, she sees this “habit” tracking all the way back to A Nation At Risk, which is a great place to start, as the “report” is not a careful piece of research, but a paper deliberately crafted and edited to advance one clear narrative–America’s public schools are failing. ANAR was not borne of some self-critical habit, and the last forty years of chipping away at public education didn’t just happen.