It's a shame nobody could have ever anticipated this kind of catastrophic fallout as a result of closing down schools indefinitely with no real plan in place:
An analysis by The Associated Press, Stanford University's Big Local News project and Stanford education professor Thomas Dee found an estimated 240,000 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.
In short, they're missing.
240,000 students is a lot of students. It's essentially as if the entire population of Boise, Idaho just up-and-vanished.
And these are kids.
Here's a graphic showing the mass exodus:
Let's be perfectly blunt here: This was avoidable. Yes, in the crazy days of early spring 2020, everyone was terrified of Covid and you could understand the impulse to maybe want to close schools until the situation appeared to improve.
But we knew then — don't let anyone tell you that we didn't — that kids were essentially at zero risk from this virus. It was already in the data.
Here, for example, is a Washington Post headline from early March 2020:
So yeah, we didn't need to do this. But we did anyway. And the problem is almost certainly much larger than anyone realizes:
California alone showed over 150,000 missing students in the data, and New York had nearly 60,000.
...
The true number of missing students is likely much higher. The analysis doesn't include data from 29 states, including Texas and Illinois, or the unknown numbers of ghost students who are technically enrolled but rarely make it to class.
This is key:
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.
And as for the kids who remain?
In Los Angeles last year, nearly half of students were chronically absent, meaning they missed more than 10% of the school year. For students with disabilities, the numbers are even higher: According to district data, 55% missed at least 18 school days. It's not clear how many students were absent more than that.
