It was obvious since the start of the pandemic that school closures and restrictions would harm children while doing nearly nothing to prevent the spread of COVID. Now we know the effects of those decisions may well be permanent.
A study published in Nature Human Behavior
analyzed
academic data from 15 countries and found that learning loss in schools amounted to about 35% of a school year’s worth of learning. The study found that the losses have not been made up in the two years since the pandemic despite the fact that most schools have resumed normal operations.
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These learning loss delays were most prevalent in math, and they hurt poorer students the hardest. The losses were equal among all grade levels, and the damage done extends far beyond the classroom, with students developing anxiety disorders and losing basic socialization skills in their time out of the classroom.
While the study provides us with more precise data on the effects of school closures, the results were obvious back in the spring and summer of 2020. The data made it clear that children were not at serious risk from COVID any more than they were at serious risk from the flu. In fact, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the flu was far more
dangerous
for children than COVID. Shutting down schools was never necessary to protect children.
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If grocery store workers and others were deemed too “essential” to have their industries shut down, there was no excuse for teachers to work remotely. And yet teachers unions fought tooth and nail not just to initially shut down schools but to keep them shut down during the slow crawl to reopening. Politicians and bureaucrats went along with this, bloviating about how permanently setting back children academically, socially, and mentally was necessary to address “community spread.”
This was all entirely avoidable, and yet politicians, health officials, and teachers unions all peddled panic about COVID rather than examining the data and making sure that the most mentally and emotionally vulnerable population was protected during the pandemic. The result is a generation of students who may never be able to make up ground academically and who have had their emotional and social growth stunted. It is a failure at the highest levels of power that has yet to be truly addressed.
