B2 EZ RE THE WASHINGTON POST.MONDAY, MARCH 7 , 2022
education
BY WASHINGTON POST STAFF
The Centers for Disease Con-
trol and Prevention recently
loosened its mask guidance for
most places, including inside
schools and on school buses.
According to the agency’s revised
metrics, indoor mask-wearing is
no longer necessary for most
areas of the country because the
coronavirus risk is greatly re-
duced. Before that, the agency
had recommended universal in-
door mask-wearing at schools foranyone older than 2, regardless
of vaccination status.
The CDC revisions came as
many school systems, including
local districts, were already
dropping mandates as parents
pushed for a return to normalcy.
Virginia lawmakers passed
legislation making mask-wear-
ing optional in schools effective
March 1. The move followed a
controversial and contested or-
der previously issued by Gov.
Glenn Youngkin (R) doing the
same thing. Maryland officialsfollowed late last month, when a
legislative committee approved
the state education board’s deci-
sion to allow local school dis-
tricts to decide their own mask
policies. Several of those districts
have made masks optional.
Within the metro area, D.C.
Public Schools, along with the
Montgomery and Prince
George’s school systems, are con-
tinuing to require indoor mask-
wearing for now.
Here are the mask-wearing
requirements for local schools:The latest on mask use in
schools across the region
AMANDA ANDRADE-RHOADES FOR THE WASHINGTON POST
Teacher Gabby Mondelli works with her fourth-graders at Samuel W. Tucker Elementary School in
Alexandria last Augus t. At th at time, masks were required indoors for everyone.complex issues like the war in
Ukraine and the anti-vaccine
movement.
They can ask their parents
and grandparents about the hot
issues. That will at least give
those adults a chance to feel
like their views mean
something. If the children think
their elders are wrong, that may
motivate them to find out
what’s correct.
I am the opposite of an
expert on this. I don’t do
Facebook or Twitter. My favorite
online destinations are
Wikipedia and the Internet
Movie Database. But we have
many online geniuses skilled at
finding imaginative ways to
capture young people’s
attention. My grandsons are
obsessed with their work.
Those video game inventors
might produce irresistible ways
to promote media literacy.
There are plenty of nonschool
hours waiting to be used to
enlighten young people about
how to detect nonsense on the
great wide Web.ways of vetting digital
information into the teaching of
core school subjects,” he said in
an email. “A biology class
learning about nutrition and
the dangers of sugar — k ids
have to know how to vet very
polished, very monied groups.”
H e showed me an example: a
website promoting nutrition
textbooks backed by nonprofits
financed by food, beverage and
chemical companies.
The Moyer article made the
sad point that if you ask
students to be skeptical about
the information they encounter
online, that may only encourage
cynicism. It won’t dispel the
distressing but widespread view
that we media folk are all liars.
A few experimental classes in
online literacy might be okay.
But I wonder if my trade’s long
efforts to get newspapers into
classrooms is still a good idea.
Perhaps we should work harder
to make sure students
understand the Civil War and
the nature of microorganisms
before they are introduced toa new barnacle that attaches
itself to the hull of a bloated
curriculum — is a non-starter,”
he said. “Other than a few early
adopters, it’s an idea that will
be stuck at the starting gate.”He favors instead what he
calls “modest interventions,”
like t hose being done by his
Stanford History Education
Group. “Our approach now,
working with teachers in
Naperville, Ill., a district
outside Chicago, is to integratealready inadequate six-hour
school day? Our most successful
schools have shown that a key
element to raising achievement
is lengthening the school day.
Dedicated teachers who don’t
have that advantage will often
welcome kids into their
classrooms before or after
school, or during lunch, to
make sure learning happe ns.
Also, having students look for
falsehoods on social media is
likely to inspire more fights at
school board meetings. Do we
want that? It would be better to
let kids figure out the perils of
Facebook during their leisure
hours, since research indicates
they spend almost all that time
on the Web.
I asked Wineburg, o ne of the
authors of the online reasoning
study, w hy we need to waste
precious class time on media
literacy. As the Margaret Jacks
Professor of Education at
Stanford, he is smart enough to
know that the best way to
handle me is to agree with me.
“The idea of a new course —educate our children on how to
detect fraud.
But, I’m not sure. Why should
we add lessons on online
trickery when we are still not
giving students enough time to
master reading, writing, math,
science and history?
Good-hearted attempts to
encourage intelligence in web
surfing are worthy but risk
being ineffective. It is like
telling people they should not
eat too much ice cream. It won’t
work for most students a nd will
take time away from more
fundamental classroom
subjects.
A recent article by Melinda
Wenner Moyer in Scientific
American, “Schoolkids Are
Falling Victim to
Disinformation and Conspiracy
Fantasies,” revealed much
disagreement over how to teach
media literacy. Few high
schools have such courses.
Those that try that approach
discover there is little research
to guide them.
Why add such stuff to anStanford
University
researchers Joel
Breakstone, Mark
Smith and Sam
Wineburg
deserve a prize
for clairvoyance
based on their
remarkable study of online
reasoning in 2019.
They tested 3,000 American
high school students on their
ability to spot fraud on the Web.
There was a Facebook post with
a grainy video of election
workers surreptitiously stuffing
ballots into bins. Fifty-two
percent of their sample said it
was strong evidence of
skulduggery during the 2016
Democratic primaries, even
though the polling place was in
Russia, which the students
could have verified online.
The survey foreshadowed the
widely reported falsehoods that
became a b ig deal after the
2020 elections. Such social
media distortions seem to prove
that schools must do more to
Online falsehoods plague us, but should we depend on schools to cure that ill?
Jay
Mathews
“The idea of a new
course — a new
barnacle that attaches
itself to the hull of a
bloated curriculum —
i s a non-starter.”
Sam Wineburg, Stanford researcherS0129-6x2.
Retropolis
Stories of the past, rediscovered.
washingtonpost .com/retropolisThe latest r ules
School mask mandates are easing in the D.C. area.
School system/
jurisdictionRequired
indoorsRequired
outdoorsRequired
on busesUpcoming
actions
D.C. Public Schools Yes No Yes
Virg inia public schools No No NoMaryland public schools Systems decide Systems decide Systems decide
Montgomery County Public
Schools
YesNoYes
School board to discuss
masking March 8Prince George’s County Public
Schools Yes
No YesCounty must reach
80% vaccination before
schools go mask-optional
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