“The Startling Evidence on Learning Loss Is In” was the headline of an editorial published last week by the New York Times.
The recent piece deliciously contradicts an op-ed published in the same paper on April 11, 2021:
Parents, stop Talking About the ‘Lost Year’ — Teenagers and tweens will be fine, experts say — if adults model resilience.
The headline of the April 11 piece was edited to the following, as it appears now on the website:
How to Help Your Adolescent Think About the Last Year — Hint: It’s not a “lost year.” Also, the screen time with friends? It’s good for their mental health.
Either way, the 2021 piece is a doozy to read now. (Although I must confess I received some sadistic pleasure in doing so.) The piece harkens to the advice of “adolescent experts,” saying parents “need to get their own minds out of crisis mode,” because although “the past year has been terrible . . . most middle schoolers will be fine.” The piece also encourages parents to relax their restrictions on their children’s screen time, as the author deems extensive use of social media by lonely tweens “healthy.” (News alert: They were not fine, nor was extra screen time good for their mental health.)
In the November 18 editorial, the Times changes its tune. My favorite part might be the editors’ assertion that “the evidence is now in, and it is startling.” Really? Just now the evidence is in?
As early as the fall of 2020, studies showed that such closures had little to no effect on reducing Covid-19 transmission rates in the community. Even in the studies that did suggest transmission rates were slightly lessened by extended school closures, the effect was too marginal to support such a sweeping policy change. It was by no means evident that the community-health gains of closing school for an extended period mitigated the detrimental effects of keeping millions of kids out of school for semesters — even years — at a time.
So, to be clear, “science” was not the leading reason for extended school closures during the pandemic. The overwhelming indicator of whether a district would close schools was neither the Covid case rates in the area nor the presence of remote-learning infrastructure. It was political persuasion.
Republican districts overwhelmingly chose to keep their schools open, while Democratic districts overwhelmingly chose to close their schools — sometimes for a year or more. The more progressive a district, the more likely it was to shut down in-person learning entirely. Most districts in Republican states such as Florida and Iowa kept their schools 100 percent open.
As the Times has finally acknowledged, we are only beginning to see the detrimental effects of such nationwide school closures.
The learning loss, of course, is behemoth. According to the latest epiphany of the Times editors,
“The school closures that took 50 million children out of classrooms at the start of the pandemic may prove to be the most damaging disruption in the history of American education. It also set student progress in math and reading back by two decades and widened the achievement gap that separates poor and wealthy children.”
If American schoolchildren are currently trailing behind in math and reading at a young age, this means there will be fewer candidates to hold needed positions in the American workforce in the next few decades. Those with an eye toward foreign policy would correctly label this a national-security issue. Without mathematicians, engineers, and a strong pool of intellectual capital in general, America’s technological and military dominance will give way to other nations investing in the education of their youth.
All told, an estimated 6.5 million more students became chronically absent across the nation due to the pandemic. Absences were most prevalent among Latino, black, and low-income students. In short, school closures were especially devastating to the nation’s most vulnerable students. While progressives wielded claims that school closures protected the students and families of minority and low-income students who were most at risk of contracting Covid-19, such closures ended up destroying their educational and developmental path.
Chronic absenteeism, apart from the obvious setbacks in learning, is positively correlated with delinquency, future incarceration, and drug abuse, among other negative outcomes. What does that look like on a local scale? I will refer to my hometown of Washington, D.C.
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Forty-eight percent of students in D.C. public-school districts were “chronically absent” in 2022 — nearly double the rate of 2018, which stood at 29 percent. In other words, nearly one half of students in D.C. regularly missed 10 percent or more of the school year. Currently, at certain DCPS high schools, three out of four students are chronically absent. Many have stopped attending school altogether.
Chronic absenteeism is, unsurprisingly, positively correlated with juvenile delinquency. On November 13, Mayor Muriel Bowser declared a “public emergency on juvenile crime.” “The District is experiencing an increase in violent crime, particularly among youth. In the first nine months of 2023, there have been 458 arrests of juveniles for robbery, including carjacking, homicide, or assault with a dangerous weapon — 10 percent more than the total number of such arrests in all of 2022.”
Nearly 11 percent of homicide suspects in D.C. in 2023 have been children (17 and under). Seven percent have been victims. As of the date of publishing, 100 children have been shot in D.C., 16 of them fatally.
As the Times belatedly acknowledged,
The learning loss crisis is more consequential than many elected officials have yet acknowledged. A collective sense of urgency by all Americans will be required to avert its most devastating effects on the nation’s children.
The “collective sense of urgency” was largely felt by Republican districts during the pandemic itself, along with the concerned parents across the country who moved heaven and earth to get their kids into private schools, establish “pandemic pods” with the neighborhood kids, or largely homeschool their kids themselves.
For the minority and low-income families who lacked the resources to devise an alternative solution to their children’s closed public schools, Democratic leaders had no answer (other than to “Stay safe, stay home!” and “Mask up!”). Their children — some of society’s most vulnerable — are now suffering the consequences.
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