Seriously, I want to know. Because we are being told that we have “learning loss” because the standardized test scores show a drop. However, a school will earn a 0 for a child who has not completed the test. We know this because in the middle of testing we pulled our child out when his school failed to protect him. If you have seen my content on this subject before, you’ll know that when he was picked up, children were sitting elbow to elbow (no social distancing) and many were unproperly masked (if masked at all).

I know of other parents who chose to not test their kids last year as well because they wanted to protect their kids. Get enough 0’s and they will add up, perhaps significantly so.

I am a guy who likes to dig into the numbers. I figured that if I searched I could likely find the raw numbers that the media is reporting their information from so I can perhaps try and see if my argument would hold water or if I was just thinking too far outside the box.

I was able to find the page for the Louisiana Dept. of Education of education performance scores for elementary and middles schools. Maybe you can look as well and see if you can see what I see?

They list the percent of students Assessed and not Assessed for 2018-2019 but not for 2020-2021! I am not going to automatically assume that there is a grand conspiracy to hide the data. However, I did go ahead and send a message to the Louisiana Dept. of Education to find out why that information is missing from the page. That is data that we need to know in order for us to determine if the numbers showing “learning loss” are legitimate or if there are extenuating factors (like more 0s than normal because of the pandemic) that would mean that we really didn’t have “learning loss” but that we just had attendance loss.

But one thing I will point out from another page on the site is that they said this about the “2020 Cohort Graduation rate“

So if Covid-19 made it so that we can’t look at the “cohort graduation rate” without using caution, why doesn’t the same apply for us looking at LEAP test results as well?

And if they are going to use falling LEAP scores to justify a return to distance learning (despite the increased dangers of the Delta variant of Covid-19) shouldn’t we be able to have all the data available to us so that we know that the loss of learning is legitimate instead of something that is simply a byproduct of the pandemic itself?

Remember, if you have not signed the petition yet to allow for virtual options in our schools during this dangerous pandemic, it can be found here.