I think virtual learning could be at least as good as in-person for a lot of subjects but the world, and the US especially, didn't prepare anyone for it and didn't provide any resources to do it during the pandemic so I'm not surprised that the outcomes were terrible. They basically needed teachers who had never even done remote learning before to pivot on a dime, with no additional money, training, or resources, and then teach kids who had also never done the same and with no resources or training.

We, in the US, did nothing to try and prepare people for a situation like that. On top of that, you have a whole segment of parents who don't care about whether or not kids were actually learning but just whether or not schools were open. The number of stats that I've seen that compare days that schools were opened (especially in red states compared to blue states) is horrifying. If the metric we're using to determine whether education was successful is whether the doors were open, then we're focusing on the wrong things. On top of that, they act like the schools open in person had better outcomes simply because they were in-person while ignoring the lack of preparation and any other factors.

The whole state of education in the US is sad.

> with no additional money

What happened to the $190 billion schools got in COVID aid? Are both the paragraphs you wrote completely unsubstantiated and just based on your own gut feelings?

>What happened to the $190 billion schools got in COVID aid?

Why don't you look that up first before you write nonsense. Also, if you're not going to contribute anything to the conversation, why bother responding?

> with no additional money

That money did not go to teachers or students. So, yes... they got no additional money.

I don’t think virtual is anywhere as good as in person. I didn’t believe Ed unions when they said that. Anyone who has done virtual classes or conferences knows this (which is a LOT of folks at this point should know if you’ve ever done any learning online). Given that it may have been a reasonable option until covid was better manageable. I think some districts went too far. My school district thankfully was one where they did a hybrid in-person/remote. Parents could choose for the 2020-2021 school year. It was all in-person (no remote) 2021-2022.

College teacher CS here. You are right. Virtual teaching sucks. But that's not the whole story. Remote teaching can work for highly motivated people with lots of discipline.

And the younger they get, the less often they'll have these characteristics.

So in my opinion, never teach children remotely. Or students. Adults? Depends.

well, laser focused on educating the kids with the best pre-existing education at least.

Isn't it important that kids who are prepared for more advanced material get the opportunity to learn more advanced material?

Yes but it's also important that you educate as many students as you can to some baseline level of competence so we don't devolve into Idiocracy.

Finding the balance of lifting the tide for everyone while giving the most highly motivated/talented the support they need is the tricky part. This guy figured out the latter but the article doesn't say anything about if he knows anything about the former.

It's good that someone is.

There's really not any shortage of people willing to teach the most well educated students though, especially as their parents can usually pay a lot.

As someone who grew up in public schools that were able to put students in accelerated cohorts, I appreciate that people are finding ways to do that against the current of news suggesting that such systems are being phased out.

To say that wealthy people can achieve systems is less exciting; if they couldn't, that would be a terrible leading indicator of bigger problems. I'm interested in stories of people making good use of scarce public resources, because that's what all local governments should be attempting, and I read too much about districts making pushes orthogonal or downright antithetical to goals of effective education.

The key resource here seems to be a bored rich guy, not sure if that's really a "public resource".

This comment is recklessly dismissive of subsidiarity. Public libraries would have been set back decades, at least, without 'bored rich guys' making huge strides to spread the concept and build many libraries. Hospitals and universities are likewise benefeciaries of 'bored rich guys'.

There is a large public resource in question, the public school. All US Americans should be more or less familiar with public schools that make very poor use of those resources as suggested by our top-in-class spending per pupil and middling achievement levels. In this case a school had a great resource, a 'bored rich guy' with the requisite background and focus, and they recognized and took advantage of this fact.

In plenty of other circumstances in life, power struggles or many other flavors of bureaucracy would have prevented this outcome. In the linked story, this effort was allowed to flourish and supported, which is to the great credit of the school and probably the wider community. Consequently, a significant group of students are receiving phenomenal educations that extend far beyond the narrow scope of high school math curricula, and they are doing it seemingly all under the tutelage of a single teacher.