The Pandemic School Closures’ Terrible Toll

National Review Online

Thursday, June 22, 2023

 

The results from last fall’s National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) are in, and they are grim. Children in many states are hitting their lowest level of academic achievement in decades. Reading scores for American 13-year-olds regressed to the same level as had been achieved in 1971, when the test was first given. Math scores dropped to 1992 levels. The cause is quite obvious in the data: The longer schools remained closed during the pandemic, or virtualized across screens, the more learning loss students experienced.

 

There may be other factors marginally contributing to the loss of academic achievement among America’s students. California has dramatically reduced the number of students who can enroll in advanced math in eighth grade in order to create more equal outcomes. But, on the whole, the story is the pandemic stealing crucial instructional time from students and teachers. The 13-year-olds who took last year’s NAEP would have been mastering multiplication and important skills in reading comprehension during the Covid-19 years when their schooling was impaired.

 

As predicted by many observers at the time, minority students that depended most on the daily structure schools provide were the worst-off after our experiments in closures, Zoom school, and masked and distanced classrooms. Black students fell a grade level behind Hispanic students in last year’s NAEP. The educational gains that black students had made from 2000 to 2010, narrowing the gap between themselves and their white counterparts, were completely reversed by the pandemic closures. Not only are black students more likely to have less support at home, black students are disproportionately concentrated in urban districts — which happen to be the districts afflicted with the strongest teachers’ unions. Those unions in cities such as Chicago and Los Angeles demanded closures for the longest time, and the most restrictive environments afterward. An educational catastrophe is the legacy they leave their students.

 

The federal government has sent schools $190 billion in pandemic recovery funds. Some districts are using that money to expand summer school and after-school programs. Some are merely using the funds to hire more teachers in a tough market for instructors. A few districts are contemplating more radical changes, such as a dramatic shortening of summer breaks, in order to make up for hundreds of lost days of schooling.

 

The fault for this educational disaster must also be pinned on our public-health bureaucracy, which constantly exaggerated the danger of Covid-19 to children, and the danger of spread at schools, while underplaying the adverse public-health outcomes of school closures. Particularly galling was the CDC’s taking the non-scientific advice of teachers’ unions while developing guidance on school reopening. America was a strange global outlier in masking children, restricting their movement and play, and shutting down their schooling. The baleful results are only just now being tallied.

 

Parents and children are owed not just an apology but a strict public accounting of what went wrong and why.