It is long past time for our political leaders, education establishment, and public-health authorities to admit their failures and own up to them.
It is long past time for our politicians, education establishment, and public-health authorities to admit their failures and own up to them.
O n Covid lockdown policies that kept children out of school, the time to pay the piper has arrived.
Early in the pandemic, an aggressive approach of mandated lockdowns simply made sense at a time when several thousand Americans were dying daily, with no real treatments and no vaccine on the horizon. We also didn’t truly understand the risk profile of the disease at the time (though even early data suggested that the elderly were most at risk). We simply didn’t know what we didn’t know, and caution was reasonable.
This all changed once we started receiving actual data and evidence, from here in the United States as well as around the world, showing that the elderly were at high risk; middle-aged persons were at risk, but a manageable risk; and children, amazingly, were at low risk from the disease. Moreover, children largely were not responsible for spreading the virus to further worsen the pandemic.
With this evidence and data at hand, what did our foremost thought leaders suggest as evidence-based policy?
To shut down public schools without end.
Those who made these unscientific policy decisions are now running away from their records as fast as possible. But we must have accountability, and we have the receipts.
From the outset, some experts, especially educators, argued that remote learning could fill the gaps as closures occurred. Anyone familiar with the academic literature on this topic knew this was false. There have been large-scale studies, for years, showing that remote learning, except in the most ideal situations, is inferior to in-person learning.
Closing schools was rational only at the height of the pandemic, because of the unknown risks of this deadly disease. But public debate largely ignored a different kind of risk: the damage that virtual learning was causing from the moment it was initiated. There was a risk/benefit ratio to the school-closure policy that our leaders never openly or publicly were willing to discuss. It was just a given that virtual schooling was the greater good, without an honest assessment of the costs that were being borne by our children.
Once closures occurred, rolling them back was a huge political task. The same political leaders who used fear to lead them into closures, even if that fear was warranted, now let fear prevent them from ending those same policies. Furthermore, the fear was so widespread and deep, they refused to even consider that the risks from long-term damage to children because of lack of schooling was a greater potential harm than actually opening schools and accepting a small amount of coronavirus disease.
What became clear is that some states and school districts understood this risk/benefit ratio. States such as Georgia, Florida, Texas, and Ohio slowly rolled back the school-closure mandates, and most of them allowed local districts to decide what was best for their children, families, and teachers.
Other states and districts did not allow such freedom of choice. Democrat-led states such as New York, New Jersey, Hawaii, and California resisted opening schools at all costs, dragging out school closures long past the point of providing any real-world benefit.
Some Democrats argued that it was President Joe Biden, upon being inaugurated, who helped open schools. That is disingenuous. The majority of schoolchildren in states led by Republican governors were back in school by January 2021, while a majority of students in states led by Democratic governors were still virtual. Although schools started opening in blue states by the spring of 2021 (largely because of widespread distribution of the vaccines), this process was led by Republican policy-makers and resisted by Democratic policy-makers almost across the board.
But to say that the closures were entirely a matter of party affiliation is only partly right. The other big factor was teachers’ unions. A study from Brown University found that school districts with collective bargaining were 40 percent more likely to stay in remote learning. The authors write:
Contrary to the conventional understanding of school districts as localized and non-partisan actors, we find evidence that politics, far more than science, shaped school district decision-making. Mass partisanship and teacher union strength best explain how school boards approached reopening. Additionally, we find evidence that districts are sensitive to the threat of private school exit. Districts located in counties with a larger number of Catholic schools were less likely to shut down and more likely to return to in-person learning. These findings have important implications for our understanding of education policy and the functioning of American local governments.
There is also a lot of evidence from early in the Biden administration that it was being heavily influenced by the teachers’ unions rather than focusing on the science. A congressional investigation revealed that CDC director Dr. Rochelle Walensky bypassed customary scientific processes and allowed the powerful American Federation of Teachers (AFT), a big supporter of Democrats, to rewrite key portions of the CDC’s school-reopening guidelines. The AFT’s edits led thousands of schools across the country to remain closed throughout the 2020–21 school year. A report by House Republicans on the Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Crisis included this statement by Steve Scalise (La.) and James Comer (Ky.):
The facts are clear: Biden’s CDC overrode routine practice to allow a radical teachers union that donated millions of dollars to Democrat campaigns to bypass scientific norms and rewrite official agency guidance. The damaging edits by union bosses effectively kept thousands of schools shuttered across the country, locking millions of children out of their classrooms. The Biden Administration abandoned medical science and replaced it with political science to reward one of their largest donors, harming millions of children in the process. They bypassed the science to put union bosses ahead of children.
Millions of Americans are still outraged at what these Washington Democrats put their children through, and all because union bosses demanded they keep schools closed longer. America’s children are suffering, academically and mentally, because of the Biden Administration enabled school closures. Republicans will not rest until we uncover all the facts and hold everyone accountable who was involved in holding back millions of children from having equal opportunity to achieve the American Dream.
Teachers’ unions own a significant amount of the blame for the irrational resistance to opening schools. Prior to the 2020–21 school year, AFT president Randi Weingarten threatened a strike to prevent schools from opening. The Chicago Teachers Union tweeted that the push to reopen schools was “rooted in sexism, racism and misogyny.” Education researcher Mike Antonucci looked at unions in seven of the nation’s eleven largest school districts. “In no instance did teacher unions advocate for schools to reopen with in-person classroom instruction,” he found. “On the contrary, they were classroom instruction’s primary opponents during the pandemic.” In fact, none of these districts fully reopened all of their schools until the fall of 2021.
The simple fact is that it was Republican governors in the summer of 2020 who let science dictate school openings. The majority of other modern nations across the world, especially in Europe, successfully opened schools even earlier in the summer. Republicans followed those examples. It was Democrats who resisted the science and let irrational fear drive their decision-making.
Compounding all of these political errors were those committed by our public-health authorities. In early 2021, Walensky publicly declared, “Vaccinated people do not carry the virus and don’t get sick.” This of course was scientific nonsense, and was almost immediately disproven. But the same fear and ignorance that led us into the school-closure disaster continued as politicians tried to roll back their own fear-induced policies.
We have only recently been able to start to take account of the social disaster that these policy failures have caused. The 2022 National Assessment of Educational Progress showed that in nearly every state and across all demographics and ethnic groups, fundamental skills such as math and reading are on the decline. Many education experts have argued that this is not directly related to Covid closure policies, and it is true that the NAEP data doesn’t clearly demonstrate a direct relationship between closure time and educational deficiencies.
But this conveniently ignores the large amount of worldwide data that has much to say on this issue. A study from Ohio State University found that school districts with full school closures and 100 percent remote learning saw declines in test scores “up to three times greater than districts that had in-person instruction for the majority of the school year,” with the findings even worse for poor and minority children. A 2022 paper published by the National Center for Analysis of Longitudinal Data in Education Research found that testing data from more than 2 million students in 10,000 schools across the country showed significant learning gaps in math “did not widen in areas that remained in-person” and that remote learning during the pandemic “had profound consequences for student achievement.” The worst part was that those most susceptible to declines did, in fact, show major deficiencies. In high-poverty areas, students lost more ground the longer they were remote. “If the achievement losses become permanent,” they wrote in their conclusion, “there will be major implications for future earnings, racial equity and income inequality.”
These findings were not exclusive to the United States, either. To take just one international study as an example, researchers for the World Bank tell the tale:
The longer the schools remained closed, the greater were the learning losses. For the 19 countries for which we have robust learning loss data, average school closures were 15 weeks, leading to average learning losses of 0.18 standard deviations. Put another way, for every week that schools were closed, learning declined by 1.2 point, or 0.01 standard deviations, on average. Most of our robust data come from 12 European countries. Given similar starting conditions overall (such as GDP per capita, access to connectivity and devices), these countries provide compelling evidence that the pandemic-related school closures led to learning losses. In these European countries, average school closures were 11 weeks in duration, and average learning losses were 0.16 standard deviations. Therefore, for every week of school closure, learning losses were about 1.5 points, or 0.015 standard deviations, per month.
In fact, the World Bank study shows almost a direct relationship between educational loss and time of school closure, and the trend was evident in every country studied, including the United States.
The World Bank also makes the most critical finding of all: The damage caused by school closures may last for the entirety of these children’s lifetimes. “As a result of the first wave of Covid-19-induced lockdowns and school closures beginning in March 2020, a student has lost on average about one-third to one-half year’s worth of learning,” the researchers say. “These learning losses may impact a student’s education trajectory, as the lost learning is likely to limit opportunities to advance to higher levels of schooling. There are also long-term future earnings losses associated with lost human capital, with students potentially losing trillions of dollars in future income.” In other words, we have witnessed the ill-considered implementation of a policy that will have generational impact.
One last effort by defenders of Covid closures to rationalize their policies was to argue that we simply didn’t know enough to risk opening the schools. This, too, was false. The evidence and data for the harms of school closures were mounting, daily. Only by rejecting evidence, data, and science — in essence, by dismissing reality — could one argue for continued school closures. There is some early research suggesting that the youngest children are able to catch up, but much of the damage to older children likely cannot be reversed.
In February 2021, I myself wrote this about Biden’s school-reopening policy, and it has stood the test of time:
The political dilemma for the president is obvious: Scientists are repeatedly telling him it is safe, even before widespread vaccination of the general public, to open schools with the appropriate limitations and safety guidelines. However, teachers’ unions, among his biggest supporters, refuse to accept the science, with fear being their driving motive to stay in a virtual environment. At this rate, there is no reason to believe we will have anything close to normal school days even as schools prepare for virtual learning into next fall.
Teachers have legitimate concerns regarding safety, but public-health experts and physicians have answered those questions, with extensive research showing the safety of such a school environment. It is time for Democrats, led by President Biden, to take a stand based on science, and in defense of educating our children. This is a gulf that cannot be crossed with more science or more data. The scientific evidence is clear. It is time to follow the science, or else admit that Democrats simply aren’t the party of science. There is no compromise or middle ground in this case, when the science is so clear. Joe Biden must choose, and choose wisely.
Democrats, including our president, chose poorly, and they should pay a political price for those mistakes. Their continuing lies about those past errors should not be allowed to stand. It is long past time for our political leaders, the education establishment, and public-health authorities to admit their failures and own up to them.