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| Getty Images/ Leigh Vogel |
Brown University economist Emily Oster made a splash this week with her provocative and prescient Atlantic article imploring Americans to “Declare a Pandemic Amnesty,” forgive and forget the transgressions of the past 2 ½ years and move on with love in our hearts. American Federation of Teachers union leader Randi Weingarten enthusiastically echoed the sentiment.
But parents are not ready to forgive Randi — or the politicians who enabled her.
In late September 2021, parents across the country watched a promising and groundbreaking town hall entitled “A Safe and Healthy Reopening of Our Schools.” #OpenSchools parents organized it with Randi Weingarten and four mutually agreed-upon medical experts. It was our first opportunity for a real dialogue with Weingarten, by then widely understood to be the one making chief decisions about resuming normalcy in America’s public schools and a close confidante of our new president, Democrat Joe Biden.
By then our children had been through the ringer. Since March 2020, when schools first closed for “two weeks to flatten the curve,” normalcy had not returned. In New York City and most urban areas, schoolkids were still forcibly masked, routinely tested and quarantined. While restaurants were open, school lunch was eaten on distanced, frozen ground, even on the coldest days. The Two-Case Rule caused havoc for hundreds of thousands of New York City public-school families, forcing entire school campuses to shut down (even co-located schools in the same building) if two unrelated cases were found.
Contrary to the carefully curated narrative, we were not following “The Science,” which showed that schools were actually the safest place to be. This was clear by the lack of mass destruction from open schools across Europe and England, where children were not masked, distanced or forced to endure subhuman conditions in school buildings. --->READ MORE HERE
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| Alex Edelman/AFP via Getty Images |
National math test scores in fourth and eighth grades showed the biggest drop since a national testing program began in 1990, and the reading level for the same grades reverted to a level from three decades ago.
Eighth-grade math performance has dropped eight points since 2019, and about a third of students in both grades can’t read at the minimum required level, according to the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) report.
NAEP, also known as the “Nation’s Report Card,” is the only national and continuing assessment program administered by the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) of the Department of Education. The Nation’s Report Card is the gold standard for measuring student academic achievements. The results released on Oct. 24 were based on tests administered in the spring.
Peggy Carr, the NCES commissioner who presented the math and reading test results, said the eight-point decline in eighth-grade math was “troubling” and “significant.” According to her, a two and three-point drop is considered significant at the national level.
She began her presentation with contexts of the testing results: the pandemic, reduced in-person learning, and increased mental health needs of students. She said she would have to talk to reading experts to find out why students’ reading performance lost 30 years of progress. --->READ MORE HEREFollow links below to relevant/related stories and resources:
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