Yet more evidence has come to light showing that our COVID school shutdowns and hybrid learning were an unmitigated disaster.
Analytics firm Renaissance Learning’s analysis of nationwide K-12 test scores shows that students are hurting. Almost 40% of students in New York and across America fell below benchmarks in math for the 2021-2022 school year. Half fell below benchmarks in reading.
A quarter of those below the math benchmark scored badly enough to need intervention; an eighth, to need “urgent” intervention. In reading, a third of below-benchmark kids needs intervention, and more than one in six needs urgent intervention.
And those numbers represent a decline across both subjects, state and nationwide, over the previous year — so the trend here is also bad.
For younger students, the picture is even uglier: Half of entering first-graders this year were reading below expectations, vs. 28% pre-pandemic.
This follows equally dire reports showing the worst reading results concentrated among the most vulnerable groups. Per that earlier data, only 37% of black first-graders were “on track” for reading in 2021, down from 51% in 2019, with Hispanics down to 42% from 54%.
Meanwhile, the Centers for Disease Control just moved a cluster of significant developmental milestones for kids to later in life. (Almost as though the agency’s trying to cover up the massive damage these policies did.)
All this happened, remember, because teachers unions and alarmist public-health bureaucrats demanded schools stay closed after the initial cautionary lockdowns, long after it was objectively clear that reopening would be safe, and as schools did reopen safely in areas where union power is weak.
Kids need to be in school. They need teachers, friends and physical classes. And no future COVID wave will be any reason to close again.
Anyone who says differently — teacher, educrat, politico or otherwise — is serving someone else’s interest.