A report on Nationwide Children’s Hospital in Columbus, Ohio now performing childhood literacy screens on preschool-age kids just came across my desk, and my first thought was, "What a great idea. Maybe they'll find children in need of a little educational boost before they hit the big leagues in first grade."
“They are all doing developmental screenings, they’re all talking to parents repeatedly,” Sara Bode, the hospital’s medical director of school-based health, told the Associated Press. “So this is an opportunity.”
Carneshia Edwards, who leads the hospital's kindergarten readiness team, told AP, “Parents are the first teachers, so we really try to encourage them to sit down with their child and just kind of work with them before going into kindergarten."
Isn't that nice?
Yes. But also no.
Nationwide Children’s started screening at Columbus clinics "based on their proximity to schools with lower performance scores on kindergarten readiness assessments," the report continued. "Across Columbus City Schools, more than 63% of kindergarteners were behind on language and literacy skills."
I had to stop and read that again, because it's just stunning that nearly two-thirds of kindergartners aren't where they should be on reading and speaking.
Columbus can't blame that figure on racism, poverty, lack of recognition for trans toddlers, or whatever lefty excuse-mongering is currently in fashion. By the time you get to 63% of kids being behind on the most basic communication and learning skills, you have a problem that's more or less universal, cutting across all the lines that (supposedly) divide us.
This lockdowns ended years ago. Today's kindergartners were never locked out of school, forced to "learn" remotely on Chromebooks, or had their intellectual development and social skills permanently held back by any of the COVID-era insanity their big brothers and sisters did.
This to me is unfathomable.
Have parents stopped reading to their children at bedtime? Is there something in the water? Did Dolly Parton confiscate all those millions of children's books she's given away?
The AP report doesn't delve into the why of what can only be described as a literacy crisis, so we're forced to look elsewhere. I asked Grok if there were any recent studies (no older than 2025) looking at childhood development post-lockdowns, and it produced a half-dozen results, complete with links and summaries.
One study — conducted last year by Monica G. Lee, Kathleen Lynch, and Susanna Loeb — was published by EdWorkingPapers, and summarized like so:
We examined language environments and language development among infants and toddlers in Early Head Start from pre-COVID, through the pandemic peak and beyond to 2025. Study children were aged 2-43 months... On average, measures of children’s classroom language environments improved post-pandemic, but children experienced declines in parent-reported language skills and growth lags in child vocalizations in the pandemic’s wake.
The study detailed that critical early developmental windows were disrupted, and the delays persisted even for kids born even after formal lockdowns ended, due to hangover-like, lingering indirect effects.
But still, 63%?
The pandemic — such as it was — ended years ago. But children born after it ended still pay the price for Big Government's illegal power-grab.
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