1/4 million students (maybe half million) vanish from all schooling

By Taxpayers Association of Oregon
OregonWatchdog.com

The AP reports, “An analysis by The Associated Press, Stanford University’s Big Local News project and Stanford education professor Thomas Dee found an estimated 230,000 students in 21 states whose absences could not be accounted for. These students didn’t move out of state, and they didn’t sign up for private school or home-school, according to publicly available data…During the prolonged online learning, some students fell so far behind developmentally and academically that they no longer knew how to behave or learn at school. Many of these students, while largely absent from class, are still officially on school rosters. That makes it harder to truly count the number of missing students. The real tally of young people not receiving an education is likely far greater than the 230,000 figure calculated by the AP and Stanford. In some cases, this wasn’t sudden. Many students were struggling well before the pandemic descended.”

The report tracks a huge surge in home schooling records in these 21 states (+180,000) but these missing students do not show up in these numbers.

In Portland and Beaverton areas, schools have seen 10% to 20% enrollment drop.

The report only covers 21 states and does not cover cover some of America’s biggest school states such as Texas and Illinois. This means the total number of vanished students maybe as high as a half million.

Observers make some guesses on what happened:

• Schools have become so bad, so dysfunctional (before pandemic), so disorientated from the pandemic, that parents just pulled their child out entirely.
• Some desperate parents may be homeschooling completely on their own with no connection to a formal home-school organization.
• Some parents may have bailed on schools and just transitioned their kids directly to unemployment as some families with certain occupations faced incredible disruptions due to the shutdown.
• The constant media state of fear over Covid, even at this late stage, may have kept parents from returning students to school.  This shows the damage of an imbalanced media coverage.

The media is stumped on what happened.

What other factors contribute to the near-half million vanished students?   Comment online or email us below, we are deeply concerned and would like to know.

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