Gadfly Bites 8/8/25—When “doing your best” is probably not enough

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1. Only one short news item to discuss today, and even it requires some reading between the lines to make it worthy of our time. The point of the piece is to tell us “how schools have adapted” since Covid school closures turned everything in K-12 education upside down, from the perspective of one fifth grade teacher in a big suburban Columbus district and one higher ed rep from northwest Ohio. My interpretation of their perspectives: schools are using their take on “what kids need” after the pandemic to adapt their practice to what they have long wanted it to be. Despite what our teacher believes, Schoology was in wide use before 2020, although many districts, schools, and individual teachers were indeed late to that party until forced to attend. But if she speaks for all or even many of her peers, I perceive that teachers still don’t understand or appreciate most education-related technology—despite its demonstrated effectiveness—and wish it all gone for their own comfort. And they are using their own “kids hated learning on a computer” analysis to push this narrative. Learning loss is still being downplayed (“At this point, kids are missing bits and pieces of…academic development”), despite the data showing it to be persistent and pervasive, and remediating such losses is a minor concern (“We just meet them where they are and try to do our best to help them grow.”). Nothing we haven’t heard over the last four years, but as long as you’re trying your best, how can we complain? Mental health concerns persist unrelated to and out of all proportion to anything actually happening in the real world, per both of our representative commentators, and educators would still appreciate if everyone could just shut up about the learning and the test scores and focus on the social and emotional lives of their students (and, I suspect, themselves) as the main business of every day. To summarize: adaptation, yes; for the better, not so much. (Spectrum News 1, 8/6/25)

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