Politicians, both Democratic and Republican, wish the entire question of damage to children's educational attainment during the COVID-19 pandemic would just go away. Democrats don't want to discuss the issue for obvious reasons: it's their fault. Republicans don't want to talk about the problem because the hundreds of billions of dollars we've spent trying to help kids "catch up" are a drop in the bucket of what will eventually be needed.
Wishing the problem away won't help kids recover lost years of learning and development. Hiding from the public only breeds more distrust in public health and the good work it actually does.
First and foremost, a reckoning absolutely has to happen. Blame has to be assessed, punishments meted out, and people should lose their jobs for the most chaotic, slapdash, unthinking government clusterfark in American history. It's vitally necessary because, without a full and complete accounting of the steps taken to deal with the outbreak of what, in hindsight, was a disease dangerous to a fraction of the American population, we will repeat the mistakes made during COVID, and more people will die preventable deaths.
If you were over 65 and suffered from diabetes, COPD, asthma, emphysema, heart disease, or an autoimmune disease, you were at risk of becoming seriously ill. Otherwise, the rest of the country could have gone about its normal business. But the public health bureaucrats decided to "err on the side of caution" and probably killed more people by doing so,
The government's botched response cost thousands of lives, but this is rarely mentioned in the effort to distract people from the failures of many high-profile health "experts," including Dr. Anthony Fauci.
Fauci needs to be held accountable. If not for his support of funding dangerous research that may or may not have led to a lab leak that caused the pandemic, his advice, first to Donald Trump and then Joe Biden, ended up exacerbating the crisis, making it far worse than it should have been.
Barack Obama claims that the government had evidence that the virus was not dangerous to children as early as the Spring of 2020. Indeed, Donald Trump first urged the schools to reopen in April of that year. He repeated his demand in July, tweeting "SCHOOLS MUST OPEN IN THE FALL!!!".
But by then, the National Education Association (NEA) had politicized the school opening issue, and Democrats were saying Trump wanted to kill little kids.
Obama told a British reporter, “Sometimes we weren’t looking at some of the evidence that said: ‘You know what, most kids really need school.’” He added that “it got politicised and became ideological and was viewed as a Left versus Right issue.”
On 30 January 2020, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) recorded the first instance of Covid-19 in the US, and by the end of March all states had closed schools until further notice. In mid-September 2020, about 60% of US schools were fully virtual and only 20% were operating a traditional in-person schedule, while around 20% were hybrid. Well into 2021, many schools — primarily in Democratic states — were operating on reduced timetables with mask mandates and social distancing rules.
Masks and social distancing proved to be akin to using the eye of a newt and bird droppings in terms of their effectiveness in stopping the spread of COVID-19.
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Obama said, “More than anything, this pandemic has fully, finally torn back the curtain on the idea that so many of the folks in charge know what they’re doing. A lot of them aren’t even pretending to be in charge.”
These are the people who need to be hauled before a public tribunal—not a star chamber or a court of law. I hate the term "Truth Commission," but the situation calls for it. Use the testimony from such a commission to develop a plan for the next pandemic so we don't have to rely almost exclusively on public health bureaucrats.
Earlier this month, data from The National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), known informally as America’s report card, showed that reading and maths scores for senior high school students were down significantly from 2019. Average scores are down dramatically since 1992 among the worst-performing students, but experts suggest that pandemic closures exacerbated an already worsening decline in attainment. For example, a McKinsey study showed that by the autumn of 2020, students in the sample had only learned 67% of the maths curriculum they were due to cover by that point.
It will take a lot of tax dollars to try to save the COVID generation of schoolchildren from empty, unsatisfying lives. Our republic will suffer as well, as the number of truly ignorant, "low information" voters will only grow, helping elect those who can manipulate them into doing their bidding.
