Tipsheet

Pro-Lockdown Randi Weingarten Claims Vindication As Students' Test Scores Plunge

Guy Benson
Guy Benson  |  October 25, 2022 1:05 PM

America will be grappling with the aftershocks of COVID-related school closures for years, as nearly an entire generation of kids was subjected to learning loss and social isolation at the hands of adults.  We've been covering this issue for many months, and the evidence continues to roll in.  This is just devastating, and the devastation appears to be most acute in places where actual science was ignored, in favor of politicized 'safety.'  The New York Times summarizes the top-line outcomes:

U.S. students in most states and across almost all demographic groups have experienced troubling setbacks in both math and reading, according to an authoritative national exam released on Monday, offering the most definitive indictment yet of the pandemic’s impact on millions of schoolchildren. In math, the results were especially devastating, representing the steepest declines ever recorded on the National Assessment of Educational Progress, known as the nation’s report card, which tests a broad sampling of fourth and eighth graders and dates to the early 1990s. In the test’s first results since the pandemic began, math scores for eighth graders fell in nearly every state. A meager 26 percent of eighth graders were proficient, down from 34 percent in 2019. Fourth graders fared only slightly better, with declines in 41 states. Just 36 percent of fourth graders were proficient in math, down from 41 percent...Reading scores also declined in more than half the states, continuing a downward trend...

President Biden's Education Secretary described the results as "appalling and unacceptable" -- words that ring hollow, given the reality that Democrats and their teachers unions patrons are largely responsible for the most harm to students. State-by-state data is messy and uneven in the latest numbers (it's not perfectly 'clean' that places that stayed closed for longer automatically performed worse, or vice versa), but some observers are seeing certain patterns:

Another billboard for school choice.   It also looks like the failed "remote learning" experiment was especially detrimental to already-lower-performing students: 

Some on the Left are trying to downplay the test results, or at least claim that the drops were inevitable 'because of the pandemic:'  

There is no evidence that having classrooms shuttered for a year-and-a-half in many places had any significant impact whatsoever on keeping people alive.  Schools were not major vectors for COVID transmission, but the myriad harms to children associated with "remote learning" are inarguable.  Also, the pandemic didn't force lengthy school closures, especially in the 2020-21 academic year; governmental responses to the pandemic did.  Because the new state-by-state data doesn't show neat, perfect correlations between school closures and falling scores, apologists for school closures are declaring victory, claiming that the data "proves" that students' performance dropped no matter what policies they were living under.  But a vast raft of data -- much more specific and granular data -- shows just the opposite.  Bookmark some of this information, because many on the Left will be denying it for years to come:

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Meanwhile in Sweden, whose anti-lockdown and anti-closure policies were venemously criticized at the time,  a major study found no evidence of learning loss among Swedish students:

The COVID-19 pandemic has led to worldwide school closures, with a risk of learning loss. Sweden kept primary schools open, but it is unknown whether student and teacher absence and pandemic-related stress factors affected teaching and student progress negatively. In this study, reading assessment data from 97,073 Swedish primary school students (grades 1-3) were analysed to investigate potential learning loss. Results showed that word decoding and reading comprehension scores were not lower during the pandemic compared to before the pandemic, that students from low socio-economic backgrounds were not especially affected, and that the proportion of students with weak decoding skills did not increase during the pandemic. Study limitations are discussed. We conclude that open schools benefitted Swedish primary school students.

Other data has shown that some of the harshest lockdown states, with the longest school closures, had the worst outcomes for residents, combining mortality, economic and educational factors.  Florida's governor used the occasion of the falling test scores' publication to emphasize his position that the Sunshine State was right to open schools in the fall of 2020:


I'll leave you with one of the pandemic's greatest villains, who used her special interest group's political clout and money to alter the official Science, now playing the role of an economist.  She effectively acted as a public health expert, and now she's an economic adviser, spouting Democratic spin:

The economy contracted for two straight quarters, a technical recession.  It likely grew last quarter, with experts warning that a deeper recession is likely on the horizon.  And the 'pay raises' are being wiped out by inflation, as real wages are down year over year.  Leave it to Randi to choose a variation of Democrats' worst-performing talking point to try to spare her party more electoral pain.  May she be as successful as she was on behalf of Terry McAuliffe in Virginia.  And, of course, she's spiking the football over the new awful test scores, willfully ignoring the mountain of data that directly contradicts her bogus theory.  This is harsh but accurate: