by Matt Hurt
On November 7, JLARC released the Pandemic Impact on Public K-12 Education. In this report, the challenges of educating students during the pandemic were outlined, and policy prescriptions were provided to mitigate these issues in the future. From the perspective of an educator, the report adequately addressed some issues, but failed to provide an in-depth analysis of various problems. This lack of understanding of these problems provided policy prescriptions which will likely miss the mark.
To be sure, this report highlights some major problems that have impacted student outcomes in Virginia. Chronic absenteeism, teacher shortages, and virtual instruction all negatively impacted student outcomes across the Commonwealth in 2022. While other factors highlighted in the report also attributed to lower performance in 2022, I will focus on these three in this paper. Continue reading
