According to the New York Times, the pandemic lockdowns of our schools have been disastrous to our children. It’s reported that the reading and math scores of 9-year-olds has dropped to what it was two decades ago! The damage to minority children is even more profound! They are finally admitting what most of us knew all along.
I know it’s not very stylish to criticize the education cartel, but they have it coming. They locked kids out of school who had a zero chance of dying from COVID absent other health issues. Nobody, including and especially the teachers union leadership, thought to do an analysis of what would happen if you locked kids out of school for up to two years.
In many states the lockouts continued even after teachers were given priority for vaccines. Of course this disruption can’t happen in a vacuum. It takes collaboration with political leaders to drive this kind of insane policy. In California and many other states, politicians lined up to do the union’s bidding. Political leaders did so willingly and eagerly and to hell with the kids and what it meant because they knew there were millions of dollars in campaign contributions at stake.
Even worse, the United Federation of Teachers consulted directly with the Centers for Disease Control on pushing for lockouts. I guess this is the state of our society where a public-sector union can direct public health policy for tens of millions of children with zero expertise in the matter. The teachers’ unions had no more expertise than a firefighter or banker or a pilot in directing complex pandemic public health policy.
It would be interesting to compare and contrast test scores between lockdown states like California with those that did not lock down. Maybe California isn’t the best state to use as a comparison anyway, given our dismal 44th ranking (scholaroo.com/state-education-rankings). The entire situation wouldn’t be nearly as bad if they would just own their mistake, but we all know that’s never going to happen. “Oh, your kids are dumber? Nothing to see here, move along.”
Finally, I want to state that the public schools here in Santa Clarita are excellent. But this isn’t really about kids here in Santa Clarita although I’m sure a large number of them suffered as well. It’s really about the kids in urban and rural areas of the state who were already having a tough time at it.
You know, the ones unions and politicians pretend to care about the most.
Brian Richards
Stevenson Ranch
