Conservatives (notably Ron DeSantis) were mocked throughout 2020 and 2021 for opposing remote learning and demanding a return to in-person instruction for K-12 students.
Now that the damage is done?
Even The New York Times is forced to reckon with the data.
Here’s what senior NYT writer David Leonhardt wrote on Thursday in a column simply titled “Not Good for Learning”:
On average, students who attended in-person school for nearly all of 2020-21 lost about 20 percent worth of a typical school year’s math learning during the study’s two-year window…
But students who stayed home for most of 2020-21 fared much worse. On average, they lost the equivalent of about 50 percent of a typical school year’s math learning during the study’s two-year window…
“It’s pretty clear that remote school was not good for learning,” said Emily Oster, a Brown University economist and the co-author of another such study. As Matthew Chingos, an Urban Institute expert, puts it: “Students learned less if their school was remote than they would have in person.”
No shit, sherlock!
What’s more, Leonhardt acknowledges that partisanship (as opposed to science) played the biggest role in Covid-19 school closure decisions:
Partisanship played a much stronger role in local decisions than state decisions. We analyze local district reopening plans and public opinion on reopening in the politically competitive state of Michigan. Partisanship was much more associated with district reopening plans than COVID-19 rates. Republicans in the Michigan public were also far more favorable than were Democrats toward in-person learning. States’ decisions to leave reopening plans to their districts opened the way for students’ experiences to be shaped by their area’s partisanship.
…
Were many of these problems avoidable? The evidence suggests that they were. Extended school closures appear to have done much more harm than good, and many school administrators probably could have recognized as much by the fall of 2020.
“Avoidable.”
“Probably could have recognized.”
It’s frustrating as hell, folks; I know it is. I’m with you.
But at least future generations will know the truth: the Covid-19 lockouts were a trans-generational disaster.
