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| Photo by Alex Wong/Getty Images |
As the pandemic moves further into our rearview mirror, there are some voices that want everyone to simply move on.
We will. But not quite yet.
Election Day Tuesday is the first real opportunity to hold accountable all the people who caused so much damage to everyone, all across society — but to children in particular.
Writing in The Atlantic, Emily Oster called for “pandemic amnesty,” arguing, “Reasonable people — people who cared about children and teachers — advocated on both sides of the reopening debate.”
This is simply not true. Those opposed to reopening schools were neither reasonable, as no amount of actual evidence could persuade them that schools were largely safe, nor caring about children.
At the top of the list of people deserving blame for the academic destruction we’re now uncovering is president of the American Federation of Teachers, Randi Weingarten. She treated our public schools as her personal fiefdom, and Democrats let her get away with it.
That last part is so important. Anti-child special-interest groups couldn’t have hurt kids the way the teachers unions did without the support of Democratic elected officials. They kept schools closed, and we will be feeling the repercussions of that for years. These politicians chose Weingarten over the children, and there’s no guarantee whatsoever they won’t do it again. --->READ MORE HERE
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| AP |
With each new report on the effects of pandemic-era school closures on American children, the story only seems to get worse.
In September, the Associated Press reported that, according to a study from the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES), “Math and reading scores for America’s 9-year-olds fell dramatically during the first two years of the pandemic … Reading scores saw their largest decrease in 30 years, while math scores had their first decrease in the history of the testing regimen behind the study.”
On October 24, data from the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), often called the “nation’s report card,” shed more light on the abysmal declines. According to the AP, “Across the country, math scores saw their largest decreases ever. Reading scores dropped to 1992 levels. Nearly four in 10 eighth graders failed to grasp basic math concepts. Not a single state saw a notable improvement in their average test scores, with some simply treading water at best.”
“It is a serious wakeup call for us all,” Peggy Carr of the NCES told AP reporter Collin Binkley. “In NAEP, when we experience a 1- or 2-point decline, we’re talking about it as a significant impact on a student’s achievement. In math, we experienced an 8-point decline—historic for this assessment.”
As Derek Thompson of The Atlantic noted, several studies have tied falling test scores to school closures, including a 2022 paper published by the National Center for Analysis of Longitudinal Data in Education Research. The authors concluded: “It seems that the shifts to remote or hybrid instruction during 2020-21 had profound consequences for student achievement. In districts that went remote, achievement growth was lower for all subgroups, but especially for students attending high-poverty schools. In areas that remained in person, there were still modest losses in achievement, but there was no widening of gaps between high and low-poverty schools in math (and less widening in reading.)” --->READ MORE HEREFollow links below to relevant/related stories and resources:
After Destroying Your Kids’ Education, Teachers Unions Think We Should All Just Hug It Out
Swansea University: Fingers could hold Covid answers
USA TODAY: Coronavirus Updates
WSJ: Coronavirus Live Updates
YAHOO NEWS: Coronavirus Live Updates
NEW YORK POST: Coronavirus The Latest
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