White House rebrands as school reopening champs as COVID-19 learning loss revealed

Average math and reading scores for students at the age of 9 declined substantially over the past two years, according to the National Assessment of Educational Progress, also known as the Nation’s Report Card, a period of time correlating with COVID-19-related school closures.

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The same day the data were released, Education Secretary Miguel Cardona penned an op-ed touting the Biden administration‘s efforts to reopen schools.

“When @POTUS took office, schools were closed,” Cardona wrote in a tweet accompanying the piece. “The former admin talked a lot but took no action. We had a plan to get teachers vaccinated, pass the American Rescue Plan, and focus on safely getting back to in-person learning.”

White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre made similar comments later in the day when she was asked if the Biden administration should shoulder the blame for not pushing schools to reopen sooner.

“In less than six months, our schools went from 46% open to nearly all of them being open full time,” Jean-Pierre said. “That was the work of this president. And that was the work of Democrats, in spite of Republicans not voting for the American Rescue Plan, of which $130 billion went to schools to have the ventilation, the tutoring, and being able to hire more teachers.”

Administration officials began rehashing the 2021 issue of school reopenings because the data about closures was damning.

The most pronounced decline overall was in math, for which student scores dropped by an average of 7 points, the first-ever recorded decline in the subject for that age. In reading, scores declined by an average of 5 points, a drop that hadn’t been seen in 30 years.

But the White House’s claims drew quick scrutiny.

A 2020 Democratic National Committee ad made the rounds on social media. The ad attacked then-President Donald Trump specifically for trying to reopen schools that fall.

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Betsy DeVos, the education secretary under Trump, described the White House’s statements as gaslighting.

“The only reason the Biden administration is making this claim is because they know families and voters across America are holding them accountable for the union-driven lockouts and catastrophic learning loss that resulted,” she said in a statement sent to the Washington Examiner. “But they can’t gaslight America’s parents, who know exactly who held their kids hostage until they got their payday.”

Teachers unions, aligned with President Joe Biden and the Democrats much of the time, were seen as reluctant to embrace reopening.

The Cato Institute’s Neal McCluskey questioned the role of the American Rescue Plan in reopening schools given that many reopenings predate it.

“The ARP was signed on March 11, 2021, and many schools were already open at that point,” said McCluskey, director of the Libertarian think tank’s Center for Educational Freedom. “It bends credulity to think that act was necessary to get schools open. We saw many private schools reopen long before that and some public schools as well.”

Much of the education-related funding from the American Rescue Plan remains unspent today.

In May, a group representing school districts requested an 18-month extension on spending education-related funds from the legislation, and the group followed up on that request last week.

Both DeVos and McCluskey pointed to teachers unions as a strong force against reopening, and as recent as January of this year, unions in places like Chicago were fighting plans to walk through classroom doors.

There was a strong political tint to school reopenings throughout the pandemic, with right-leaning states like Wyoming, Arkansas, and Florida opening earlier and more consistently than blue states like Maryland, Oregon, and California.

“Our schools were not open full time until [August] 2021,” said Jennifer Grinager, chairwoman of the Moms for Liberty chapter in San Luis Obispo, California. “Where was the Biden administration all those months? To suggest they saved the day for California kids is a rewrite of history.”

The learning loss was widespread and was most pronounced among black and Hispanic students, whose reading and math scores declined more so than white students.

In his op-ed, Cardona said the newly released data should “further call to action for states, districts and communities” to use federal COVID-19 relief funds allocated to address learning loss.

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That’s one thing McCluskey and the White House agree on — that extensive tutoring will be needed going forward in order to make up for the learning loss of the past two years.

“Our priority remains to make sure states and schools and districts are using these funds — that $130 billion,” Jean-Pierre said. “This is going to go, again, to tutoring, to more teachers, real solutions to make sure that our kids are getting what they need.”