I've been meaning to get to this New York Times analysis all week despite the fact that it's not revelatory. The truths laid out aren't new – but they're published by a journalist to whom elite progressives may actually pay attention. The piece also arrives at a time when the teachers union in America's third-largest city is outrageously forcing more anti-child school closures. They don't have a leg to stand on in terms of the science or the established data. This has been true of school closures since at least the fall of 2020, but it's egregiously brazen to see a major union triple down like this in 2022. Just before the CTU pulled the trigger, The Times' David Leonhardt summarized the state of play for American children, which only highlights the abusive nature of the closures:
American children are starting 2022 in crisis. I have long been aware that the pandemic was upending children’s lives. But until I spent time pulling together data and reading reports, I did not understand just how alarming the situation had become...Children fell far behind in school during the first year of the pandemic and have not caught up. Among third through eighth graders, math and reading levels were all lower than normal this fall, according to NWEA, a research group. The shortfalls were largest for Black and Hispanic students, as well as students in schools with high poverty rates...Many children and teenagers are experiencing mental health problems, aggravated by the isolation and disruption of the pandemic. Three medical groups, including the American Academy of Pediatrics, recently declared a national state of emergency in children’s mental health...Suicide attempts have risen, slightly among adolescent boys and sharply among adolescent girls...Many schools have still not returned to normal, worsening learning loss and social isolation....The Omicron variant is now scrambling children’s lives again...
Most schools have stayed open this week, but many have canceled sports, plays and other activities. Some districts have closed schools, for a day or more, despite evidence that most children struggle to learn remotely, as my colleague Dana Goldstein reports. Closings are taking place in Atlanta, Cleveland, Milwaukee, Newark and several New York City suburbs, among other places...For the past two years, large parts of American society have decided harming children was an unavoidable side effect of Covid-19. And that was probably true in the spring of 2020, when nearly all of society shut down to slow the spread of a deadly and mysterious virus. But the approach has been less defensible for the past year and a half, as we have learned more about both Covid and the extent of children’s suffering from pandemic restrictions. Data now suggest that many changes to school routines are of questionable value in controlling the virus’s spread. Some researchers are skeptical that school closures reduce Covid cases in most instances. Other interventions, like forcing students to sit apart from their friends at lunch, may also have little benefit. One reason: Severe versions of Covid, including long Covid, are extremely rare in children. For them, the virus resembles a typical flu. Children face more risk from car rides than Covid.
Again, none of this constitutes breaking news. But all of the information being assembled by a respected Times reporter as Chicago's union trots out the same garbage playbook it and its colleagues around the country have been deploying for almost two years is useful and instructive. Public sympathy has worn so thin that even some Democrats – who have shamefully coddled and enabled the unions' anti-science infliction of harm on children in the name of "safety" and "health" – are criticizing the CTU. As I said on television this week, these Democrats only get half a clap for finally catching up with the science, and only really doing so after their hand has been forced by public opinion. The pivot is both better late than never and too little, too late. Extra kudos are due to, however, Leonhardt for contextualizing the exceptionally low risk COVID poses to children in that concluding sentence in the excerpt above.
Apologists of the failed virtual "learning" experiment love saying that "kids are resilient." That's very true. Physically, kids are extremely resilient in the face of COVID. They're much less so, we've been learning, in the face of adult-imposed "safety" measures against COVID. The Chicago teachers are reheating similar demands about health readiness, etc. during the (much less severe) Omicron wave, a position so untenable that even a number of reliable union allies and more government/more spending leftists are questioning the premise:
I feel like there’s a weird memory-holing of the fact last spring Congress distributed $123 billion dollars to K-12 schools for Covid preparedness. That’s nearly $1 million *per school*. So big q is: what was that used for?
— Chris Hayes (@chrislhayes) January 5, 2022
The unions' insistence, always (besides "we don't really want to show up for work"), amounts to we need more money. But they just got a staggering windfall of cash over several rounds of multi-trillion-dollar so-called COVID relief bills. Where did that money go, if they're still crying unpreparedness and alleged lack of resources? The same logic applies, by the way, to the current COVID testing shortage. Democrats passed a party-line, amazingly wasteful "COVID" bill early last year. Price tag: Nearly $2 trillion. And months later, we don't have enough tests. It's almost as if these boondoggles weren't really focused and targeted on the pandemic crisis. Imagine that. On "Special Report" this week, I mentioned that perhaps the one silver lining of the CTU disgrace is that it's reinforcing the pernicious influence of teachers' unions, laying bare the reality that their selfish interests lie with their members, not children. Conservatives have been saying this for years, but now it's beyond dispute. The unions and their allies have effectively produced a two-year infomercial making the point better than any critic ever could:
The one silver lining of the Chicago Teachers Union’s latest harmful, anti-science attack on children & learning — via @SpecialReport #SchoolChoice pic.twitter.com/GkgK8yV3Rz
— Guy Benson (@guypbenson) January 6, 2022
The White House insists that the president believes schools should be open, including in Chicago. But where is Biden himself, using his bully pulpit in defense of the children in that city and elsewhere? We hear a lot about putting "country over party" these days. Biden should be out front, loudly telling his political allies (who use taxpayer dollars to funnel gobs of campaign cash to Democrats every cycle, by the way) to knock it off. So far, he's taken a passive approach. One final reality I'll mention is America's outlier status on school policies during the pandemic. American exceptionalism is usually a good thing. Not on this count. Our closures and draconian masking requirements are unusual compared to the rest of the world, needlessly shoving our kids further and further behind. As we've covered often, there is scant (if any) scientific basis for masking kids in school, yet this has become a massive culture war skirmish, with the actual well-being of kids almost treated like an afterthought. I'll leave you with the latest data on school masking:
A review has found the evidence for using masks in schools to reduce the spread of covid is "inconclusive". Data was taken from 1,300 schools. There was barely any difference in outcomes between schools which mandated masks and those which didn't. https://t.co/CXPS7Cl7qw
— Paul Embery (@PaulEmbery) January 6, 2022
Schools where face coverings were used in October 2021 saw a reduction two to three weeks later in Covid absences from 5.3% to 3% - a drop of 2.3 percentage points. In schools which did not use face coverings absences fell from 5.3% to 3.6% - a fall of 1.7 percentage points. It said this was not statistically significant and the greater reduction in schools where masks were worn could be down to chance. The review also acknowledges the use of face coverings could harm learning...94% of school leaders and teachers [say masking] made communication between teachers and pupils more difficult.
Masks make many feel safer, but in schools, the data doesn't back up the sentiment. Surprise.