According to your recent report, the 2024 National Assessment of Educational Progress tests show that Maine is doing poorly, both compared with other states and absolutely. In terms of the latter, for fourth graders, 33% are proficient in math and 26% are proficient in reading. For eighth graders, 25% are proficient in math and 26% are proficient in reading.

As your subsequent editorial put it: “Our pupils, like most across the nation, have not recovered from the crippling ‘learning loss’ caused by the COVID-19 pandemic.”

Unfortunately, the COVID-19 pandemic is unlikely to be the last pandemic. Zeynep Tufekci of Princeton University recently wrote: “Almost five years after COVID blew into our lives, the main thing standing between us and the next global pandemic is luck.” In other words, we may well face a pandemic, and pandemic learning losses, in the future.

There is one basic skill that would help reduce such losses: Giving students the ability to learn on their own. After all, it was school closings that led to those losses. During those school closings students did not progress educationally because they were not in classrooms. Had they been able to study on their own, we could expect little to no such loss.

How might students acquire these skills? Consider a course that meets five days a week, and has a weekly quiz on Monday. After the quiz, students could be given the opportunity to learn the coursework for the next week on their own, with the proviso that they show up for the next quiz.

Those students who did well on the quiz could then be given the opportunity to spend more time on their own, while those who did poorly would be required to spend more time in the classroom. Eventually, over, say, a semester, most students could be spending most of their time on their own, learning both the coursework but also learning independence with respect to their own education.

There would be other advantages. Because of inflation, homeowners have less money for property taxes, and schools need more money. According to one news report from last October, “Maine schools often turn to taxpayers for school construction or renovation funding because of the state’s limited resources. But voters in those communities may not be open to picking up these big costs.” With students learning on their own, the money that would otherwise be directed to school budgets could be reduced, rather than increasing.

Schools, as currently organized, teach a range of students by fitting them into straitjackets. For example, some students tend to get up early, while others tend to get up later. Schools force all these students to start school at one specific time, thereby meeting the needs of only a small segment. Further, in a typical class, some students are being held back by the pace of work, while others are left behind. Learning on an individual basis opens the possibility of students both getting up when they want, and moving at a pace that suits them.

As Jenny Anderson and Rebecca Winthrop wrote in the New York Times last month, “There’s a reason the system isn’t serving people well, and it goes beyond the usual culprits of social media and COVID. Many recent graduates aren’t able to set targets, take initiative, figure things out and deal with setbacks — because in school and at home they were too rarely afforded any agency.”

A specific change, then, could in principle reduce educational expenses, thereby giving property owners a break on their property taxes. That change could also reduce likely deleterious effects of a future pandemic, and allow students to learn self-control with respect to their own education. What better way to prepare students for what will likely be a formidable future?