Teachers Warn About Students Failing Grade-Level Standards Nationwide

Teachers across the country are warning that students are largely failing to meet basic grade-level standards in the aftermath of the Chinese Coronavirus pandemic, and that current attempted solutions are insufficient.

As reported by Fox News, one such teacher is Marquis Bryant in Atlanta, Georgia. Bryant, who has been teaching for three years, said in a viral TikTok video that no one else around him seems to be worried about the massive decline in standards.

“We all know that the world is behind, like you know, globally, like because of the pandemic and stuff, but I don’t know why they’re not stressing to ya’ll how bad it is,” said Bryant. “I teach seventh grade. They are still performing on a fourth-grade level.”

Bryant said that many of the students in his class cannot do basic computations like addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division, warning that they are all “well behind where they should be.”

Following Bryant’s video, other teachers also came forward. Angelique Schoorens, a seventh grade teacher in Enfield, Connecticut, said that “it felt like a relief that a teacher was actually speaking about it in a public forum.”

In San Diego, California, middle school teacher Sarah Shemirani suggested that one cause of the decline in scores was parents’ indifference to their children having poor performances.

“The want to do well has been dwindling,” Shemirani said, “and then COVID happened and it was like now there is zero care, or like the idea of failing is just an option and if you fail, it’s going to be okay.”

Multiple reports and standardized test results have confirmed that academic scores dropped by historic numbers in the aftermath of the pandemic, when schools shut down for a period of time and were temporarily replaced, then gradually phased back into, with “remote learning” or “hybrid learning” that crossed in-person school time with remote learning.

In the aftermath, math scores saw the biggest decrease ever, dropping among fourth and eighth graders to lows not seen since 1992. For fourth grade students, the average math score fell by 5% from 2019 to 2022, while eighth grade students saw a staggering 8% decline. In the same time period, reading scores for both grades fell by 3%.

Following this decline, 38% of eighth graders registered scores that were determined to be “below basic.”