A Foretoken of Virginia’s K-12 Catastrophe

Percentage of 4th and 8th grade students offered full-time in-person learning.

The Biden administration surveyed the 50 states (plus D.C., and Puerto Rico) in February and March to determine the number of students offered in-person learning, hybrid-learning and online learning experiences in public schools. Among the 31 states that provided meaningful data, 42.4% of students were offered in-person teaching in classrooms — widely considered to be the best learning environment.

In Virginia, only 4.0% of students were offered in-person learning as public school districts scrambled to respond to the COVID-19 crisis — the second lowest percentage of the 31 states surveyed. (See the complete Institute of Education Sciences survey data results here.)

Here is the detailed breakdown for Virginia:

In person learning
Offered to all — 4%
Offered to some — 19%
Not offered — 77%

Hybrid learning
Offered to all — 57%
Offered to some — 7%
Not offered — 36%

Remote learning
Offered to all — 84%
Offered to some — 5%
Not offered — 11%

Prediction #1: Insofar as there is a correlation between in-person learning and academic progress, we can predict that Virginia students will make significantly less academic progress during the 2020-21 academic year, compared to students in the other states surveyed.

Prediction #2: Insofar as there is a negative correlation between a gubernatorial administration’s educational failures and its appetite for drawing attention to those failures, we can predict that the Northam administration will do everything within its power to obscure the results.