After months of battling with teacher’s unions to get kids back into classrooms, some parents may decide they’d rather keep their kids at home. The problem of course is that there’s lots of evidence that remote learning is bad for kids.

Officially, of course, the mandatory schooling laws remain in place. Children cannot legally drop out this fall. Yet many school districts have signaled that they will allow parents not to send their children to school in the coming academic year and instead learn remotely. Recent polls suggest that as many as one quarter of parents plan to keep their children home…

The problem with remote school is that children learn vastly less than they do in person, according to a wide range of data about the past year and a half.

• Rand Corporation, a research group, found that students attending remote classes learned less English, math and science than students attending in-person school.
• An analysis by Opportunity Insights, a group based at Harvard, found that student achievement lagged with remote learning — and lagged the most for lower-income students.
• A study in the Netherlands found that “students made little or no progress while learning from home.”…

Remote schooling, in other words, may be more akin to dropping out than it is to attending in-person school.

What we saw during the lockdown was that kids who do really well at school tended to do pretty well with remote learning as well. But there were a lot of kids who were sort of on the bubble academically before the pandemic who completely failed with remote school. Many of these kids simply disappeared.

By one estimate, three million students nationwide, roughly the school-age population of Florida, stopped going to classes, virtual or in person, after the pandemic began…

“We do have students who have kind of disappeared,” said Barbara E. Cage, the principal of Oakhurst Intermediate Academy, the school Jordyn attends in Clarksdale, Miss. The district says the number of students with five or more absences since the fall has increased 20 percent over the previous year. “We’re not able to reach them.”

And according to the piece, the families who are looking to default to remote learning are disproportionately “lower-income, Black and Latino.” In other words, the kids who are probably on the wrong end of the achievement gap are being set up for failure.

As Allahpundit pointed out last week, the CDC is pushing for schools to reopen in person based on research that shows kids are very unlikely to be severely impacted by the coronavirus. The CDC is saying schools should reopen even if mitigation efforts aren’t perfect. That’s an acknowledgement of the potential downsides of remote learning. Some municipalities are already addressing this by mandating a return to classrooms but many are not. This sets up the potential for the hundreds of thousands of kids who were left behind thanks to the pandemic (and teachers unions) never having a real chance to catch up.

If some conservative organization was promoting a policy with these identical outcomes they would quickly be labeled racist and demolished by the media. But because this case involves teachers unions and minority parents there may not be enough pushback to prevent this from happening.