U.S. Public ED- Failing Report Card – Pandemic Lost Learning Never Recovered – Ever Widening Future Skills & Opportunity Gap

Best Metaphor of Public Education’s Lost Learning.. If you miss a deposit into your account because of a short-term emergency, you have to find a way to make up that shortfall, and you have to make it up with interest.”

Dr. Martin West: ?Harvard University Vice Chair National Assessment Gov Board

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The exodus from the Public System has been a stampede between 2019 to the present

..what excites/pleases me most is that Working and Families of Color have found the means to zoom onto the exit ramp in order to exit a Two Tier Public Education System

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In a place like New Hampshire where we hear nonstop the jawing boning about “Freedom” the stark reality would be bad enough but as the report by the National Assessment Board states

…..the trajectory of this gap is widening with increasing rapidity

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Math Skills, Reading/ Reading Comprehension which hugely impacts writing and communications skills all are continuing to fall

Basic Skills that you need to interact in American Society

This despite an additional 190B USD in Pandemic Education Aid

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Far more disconcerting is the inequality

…a disparity that my research over the last year and a half in New Hampshire is accelerating to create two fundamentally different trajectories of opportunity

Harvard’s West Concludes the same observation

Certainly the most striking thing in the results is the increase in inequality,

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Parents are desperate to remove their children from the Public Ed System that is now locked into a vicious cycle of decline

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My local School District where I have served as an elected official for Thirty-Six Years

…more than a third of our educators are uncertified

…twenty or more open positions that we cannot fill

…our inability to pay competitively with Property Rich Town/ School Districts

Corner Office, State Senate, House Leadership in Concord protecting a Funding/ Tax system that is eminently in need of equalization /reform

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The results mirrors the study in the quality of the instruction that we can provide

This is not to criticize of our hard-working Superintendent, Principles or School Board – staff that are placed in no win operative situations

In which they must work harder and harder to just maintain the current poor results status quo

If they stop running that fast ….pause …take their eye off the ball the results will become even more significantly lower

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The pressure is ever present while a hostile public at every meeting abuses our Teams – in any other setting the legal definition of Hostile Work Environment

Far worse …we have “normalized” this toxic behavior with a shocking de-sensitivity

…which in turns makes recruitment that much more difficult and far more expensive

—that places additional stress on our already constricted budgets that the public is concerned about.

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This decline in instruction quality is paired with increasing absenteeism

…that the study demonstrated as yet another factor in the declining results

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All the dynamics combine to create a Perfect Storm – a race to the bottom with no resolution in sight

By my nature I’m not pessimistic or dystopian

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Yet …I’m a realist that needs to put all the cards on the table and read what they are telling us

…we need to pay attention so that we can reverse this trend that will have ?substantial repercussions on the future of these children, Property Poor Towns, New Hampshire and the Nation

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It has not always been like this

…one of the legacies that I played a part in was the huge leap of our local children –whose parents worked on the production floor of the Gun Factory

..their bright well educated children leaped all the way to Manhattan C-Suites

Our Success Legacy with two generation of students is the quintessential American Dream Story

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The conditions changed during the second Obama term as priorities shifted

…much more educational experimentation

…misplaced initiatives away from Basic Skills

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During Trump 1.0 the Public Education Establishment, Big Labor, Big Curriculum doubled down

…leading us further from the traditional Basic Skills recipe

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The Pandemic was a coffin nail that sealed our fate

….disastrous Remote Learning

…debilitating Socio- Emotional Unwellness

….misguided ethnography studies

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The Biden Years will be seen in the future as a time of Regression

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All of the extra funding never found its way to Basic Skills

…an our Kids Never Bounds back

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From my local students I’ve learned more about psychology/education than all the finest universities I attended in Boston

Each one gave me a pearl of wisdom that are …

Highlighted in a dozen books – hundreds of articles

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We sent our children out of this environment because the factors for Formation were not optimal

Which is even more critical in America to Marginalized people like us

This Credentialing is the only manner that we can be competitive in a bias opportunity system

Most people do not have the luxury of our resources

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Formation is simple when it’s done well

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Place – We Learn Content

Path? -? We Teach Context

Pace -? We Train Character

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The combination of these creates habits- behaviors- life style- culture

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Still more revealing in my research is the process of Formation that must follow a Certain Flow

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My Learning Theory...

Skillset Acquisition is cumulative ..but even more critical ..its chronological

Certain skills learned at the optimal age are building blocks that create the scaffolding of total skillset development

While we can replicate this process later.

We can never authentically duplicate the natural progression process

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Herein may be why we could not just bound back from the Lost Years of the Pandemic

As I said at the time

…it one thing to lose a year or two out of your life when we’re sixty-five

…an entirely different impact when your seven- eleven or fourteen

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My perspective on the matter is most regrettably bleak, that does not mean we do not continue to fight for our kids

..against a system that begins in the Corner Office in the State House who protects basic inequality

…refusing to dialogue and let the merits direct the discussion

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Short sighted leadership is the source of our children’s declining results

…not just presently but over the previous dozen years

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This tendency to continue Kicking the Can Down the Road is not working

In the past when the disparity was not so wide such leadership could hide

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The Gap is Colossal but if that was not bad enough

….the trajectory we see in the facts on the ground point to an even more rapid decline

Most troubling Indeed !!

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Such Learning Study “Snap Shots” are important for with the power of empirical research only confirms what we observe as the facts on the ground

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The Public more than vent its ire at local school districts staff must raise their vision much higher to those in their Statehouses that protect a Two Tier ?Public Education System that is depriving our children from equal opportunity