Yes, We Have to Point Fingers Over COVID ‘Learning Loss’

The “We Can’t Open Schools” crowd of 2020 became the “Kids Are Resilient” squad of 2021, and ultimately graduated to the “We Don’t Talk About Learning Loss” chorus of 2022.

Now that we’re in the aftermath of one of the biggest policy disasters in modern memory, the same people who made those decisions (or relentlessly advocated for them) would rather not talk about what’s happened since.

And why would they? It was a year or two ago already—shouldn’t we just move on and not play the “blame game”? Besides, a lot of them are being rewarded with new, powerful positions in education.

This must have been a rough week for the school shutdown memory-holers.

Scores released this week from the National Assessment of Educational Progress tests, used to evaluate students since the 1970s, showed—yet again—that COVID-related school closures caused unprecedented learning loss. They indicate a drop in math skills among 9-year-olds for the first time in the test’s history and the biggest drop in reading skills in 30 years, according to The New York Times. Low income and minority students suffered more, “in part because their schools were more likely to continue remote learning for longer periods of time.”

Days after this news broke, the White House held a Back-to-School webinar featuring two of the country’s leading school closure activists, union presidents Randi Weingarten (American Federation of Teachers—AFT) and Becky Pringle (National Education Association—NEA), while Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre argued getting schools open “was the work of Democrats in spite of Republicans.”

In fact, the cast of this back-to-school town hall, which included Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona and CDC head Rochelle Walensky, is a perfect picture of the alliance that kept kids out of school—exacerbating achievement gaps, not to mention the cascading food-access and mental health problems that followed. It’s also a symbol of the political and policy-making power the people who perpetrated The Stolen Year (as NPR education reporter Anya Kamenetz titled her book) still have in spite of their failures.

Millions of American school kids were out of in-person school—many barely signing into Zoom, and when they did, getting little instruction—for more than a year. An alignment of teachers unions and their ideological allies on school boards and local government in America’s major cities and suburbs put up obstacle after obstacle to opening, despite evidence early in the pandemic that it could be done safely, as it had been in much of the U.S. and overseas.

The results were predictable, or should have been, as Kamenetz noted in her book.

A much shorter disruption of schools post-Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans had created years of learning loss and a decade of lingering effects. And yet, conventional wisdom in elite liberal circles—who presided over the country’s largest school districts—held that it was uniquely dangerous to open schools, and that kids would be resilient in remote learning. The purveyors of conventional wisdom ruled with an iron fist, excoriating those who argued against it as would-be child-killers or racists who hadn’t sufficiently checked their privilege.

The Times headline—“The Pandemic Erased Two Decades of Progress in Math and Reading”—misses the point, as many of those who pushed to keep schools closed did.

It wasn’t the pandemic; it was largely the response to it. And until those responsible for keeping schools closed acknowledge that fact, there will be no fixing the problem. Private schools, rural schools, red-state schools, and schools around the world opened their doors to serve a population at low risk for COVID, but at high risk for developmental costs if their educations were essentially abandoned indefinitely.

Only in blue American cities were they so dramatically abandoned for so long. Where do we go from here? There are a couple camps.

First, there’s the “let’s not place blame” camp.

Kamenetz reported movingly on the struggles of families during remote learning and the devastating effects we knew were coming, but said we shouldn’t “relitigate this mess or point fingers.” There is no culprit in The Stolen Year. Alyssa Rosenberg, writing about the horrors pandemic policies wrought on children for The Washington Post, cautioned against “backward-looking recriminations” and “smugly rehashing who was right or wrong in summer 2020.” This camp at least acknowledges that closing schools was the wrong call.

Then there’s the “we did what we did” camp. These are the people who won’t even concede that prolonged school closures were a tragic mistake, much less admit to their own culpability. Repulsively, some of these people continue to cast themselves as champions of the same children they failed.

This is how Weingarten reacted to the news of these scores.

As late as Summer 2021, Weingarten remained cagey on schools opening, promising to “try to open schools.” Now, she wants to “accelerate learning.”

But the problem with the “let’s not place blame” approach is that it allows the “we did what we did” faction to remain in power.

Choose your adage. Rewarding bad behavior gets you more of it; doing the same thing over and over expecting a different result is the definition of insanity; admitting you have a problem is the first step on the road to recovery. There is something absurd about trusting the people who caused a giant problem to fix it—with absolutely no reckoning with their part in it.

And parents know it. Call them the “breach of trust” camp, many of them political liberals who became open-school activists during the pandemic, dismayed by the conduct and the content of their school districts’ offerings. It turns out the body-bag protests, sick-outs, strikes, and ridiculing of parents didn’t convince them that their kids’ educations should be so blithely sacrificed.

Parents like Siva Raj in San Francisco told The Times: “It felt like the school board had completely deprioritized learning and education. It was focused on everything other than education.”

Tom Chavez of Illinois said: “And then the distance learning, or the remote learning, and the lack of accountability and the lack of, it really seemed to be, any real focus on prioritizing education, that’s where I said, ‘Wow, I have to get involved here.’ And when you started to peel the layers back, you started to discover things that were unsettling as a parent.”

American public schools have lost millions of students since 2020, and millions of students and their parents will be reckoning with the consequences of the stolen year for many years to come. Experts suggest even expensive, ambitious interventions like high-dosage tutoring—which most parents cannot afford—would only make up a portion of the education lost.

To not admit that a choice was made, and that it was a failure, is to gaslight parents and advocates of reopening schools. To “just move on” from an unprecedented calamity, without any accountability, is to give tacit approval for those same mistakes to be made again.

Students will need creative solutions to come back from this damage. They deserve better than power consolidated in the hands of those who failed them.

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