Teachers Union Exec Suggests Learning Loss Made Us All ‘Equal’ | Eastern North Carolina Now

    Publisher's Note: This post appears here courtesy of the The Daily Wire. The author of this post is Mairead Elordi.

    A teachers union executive in Virginia defended remote learning during the pandemic by suggesting that since all students experienced learning loss, "aren't we all equal?"

    Melvin Hostman, a newly elected member of the executive board of the Richmond Education Association, made the remarks in an interview with ProPublica published Monday.

    "The whole thing about learning loss I found funny is that, if everyone was out of school, and everyone had learning loss, then aren't we all equal? We all have a deficit," Hostman told the interviewer.

    The interviewer then referenced data showing learning loss was worse among racial minorities.

    "Of course - because our society is inherently unequal," Hostman responded.

    Hostman, who has taught high school history for six years, told ProPublica he was reluctant to agree to a push for additional instructional time because of more pressing problems like a lack of toilet paper, school buses arriving late, and widespread absenteeism.

    He emphasized the needs of the teachers, saying many teachers felt like "the only time they had a work-life balance acceptable to them was during virtual school."

    Remote learning gave teachers more time to run errands, walk their dog, and exercise, "just like other professionals doing remote work," ProPublica reported.

    Richmond school administrators are considering lengthening the school year to address learning loss. The teachers union is opposed to extending the school year.

    School lockdowns during the COVID pandemic caused massive learning loss across the country among K-12 students in public schools.

    In 2022, eighth graders had the lowest U.S. history scores on record and among the lowest civics scores, the Department of Education revealed in May. Only about 13% of eighth graders met proficiency standards for U.S. history last year, and only about a fifth of students were proficient or better in civics.

    Math and reading scores have also suffered over the pandemic, the Education Department revealed last year. Math scores plummeted among fourth and eighth graders in almost every state, the Education Department reported back in October. Reading scores have also sunk across the country, erasing the last three decades of progress.

    Many students returned to classrooms last year reading at the same level as when the pandemic started, putting them two grade levels behind. A January study suggested that students lost about 35% of a normal school year's worth of learning, starting when remote learning began.

    Learning loss caused by many months of remote learning during the pandemic spurred parents across the country to demand schools return to in-person learning, especially after data showed that children were low-risk for serious cases of COVID.

    Some parents even ran for school board positions and won, hoping to stop the learning loss in their district.


    In Florida, mom and new board member Stephanie Meyer said failing grades and student behavioral problems made her unwilling to send her own children to the same schools she once attended.

    In Michigan, Tom Payne, a grandfather and new school board president, dubbed the district's academic performance before he was elected "mediocre at best."

poll#164

It has been far too many years since the Woke theology interlaced its canons within the fabric of the Indoctrination Realm, so it is nigh time to ask: Does this Representative Republic continue, as a functioning society of a self-governed people, by contending with the unusual, self absorbed dictates of the Woke, and their vast array of Victimhood scenarios?

  Yes, the Religion of Woke must continue; there are so many groups of underprivileged, underserved, a direct result of unrelenting Inequity; they deserve everything.

  No; the Woke fools must be toppled from their self-anointed pedestal; a functioning society of a good Constitutional people cannot withstand this level of "existential" favoritism as it exists now.

  I just observe; with this thoughtful observation: What will happen "when the Vikings are breeching our walls;" how do the Woke react?

845 total vote(s)     What's your Opinion?

poll#177

Considering the irrefutable fact that the Left /the Democratic Socialists, beginning in March of 2020, employed the repetitive use of the Covid Pandemic as a political cudgel to wrest a presidential election, where their candidate rarely left his basement, from a frightened and beaten down citizenry of this Representative Republic: What does your knowledge NOW, in hindsight, aid in your understanding of the motives of the Authoritarian Left?

  The "Left" cares about all Democratics, so it was imperative that we do whatever it took to elect a lifelong politician to become that Democratic Socialist to forever change US.

  Pandemics are serious business, where our leaders must use wisdom and practicable efforts of all that serve to protect the public from not only the pandemic, but these ignoble usurpers of the Left.

  I lost almost everything in the Covid Pandemic, and I want justice; a justice where only the truth prevails, and the rampant fraud that is now legend is remedied.

156 total vote(s)     What's your Opinion?