As I said a few weeks ago: A lot of people are attempting to rewrite the history of the response to the coronavirus pandemic. That post highlighted Dr.'s Fauci and Birx flat out lying about their role in lockdowns. Here's more on the educrats and politicians, the teachers unions and their media enablers and what they did to the kids.
First up, The Brownstone Institute, September 2,
Yesterday, September 1, 2022, The New York Times had a front page story entitled: “The Pandemic Erased Two Decades of Progress in Math and Reading.”
The first paragraph states that “National test results released on Thursday showed in stark terms the pandemic’s devastating effects on American schoolchildren, with the performance of 9-year-olds in math and reading dropping to the levels from two decades ago.”
Further down, the article says: “Then came the pandemic, which shuttered schools across the country almost overnight” and “experts say it will take more than the typical school day to make up gaps created by the pandemic.”
The definition of a pandemic, according to the Bulletin of the World Health Organization (ref: Last JM, editor. A dictionary of epidemiology, 4th edition. New York: Oxford University Press; 2001) is “an epidemic occurring worldwide, or over a very wide area, crossing international boundaries and usually affecting a large number of people.”
According to the Association for Professionals in Infection Control and Epidemiology, “an epidemic occurs when an infectious disease spreads rapidly to many people.”
Thus, a pandemic is a disease that spreads rapidly to many people all over the world.
Based on this pretty much universally accepted definition, a pandemic can do exactly one thing: it can spread disease to many people around the world.
What can a pandemic NOT do?
A pandemic cannot impose mandates or lockdowns.
A pandemic cannot block borders or force people to stop traveling.
A pandemic cannot shutter schools – overnight or otherwise.
A pandemic cannot impact math and reading.
A pandemic cannot cause learning gaps.
What can our response to a pandemic do?
If we decide to shut down schools for months and years on end in response to a pandemic, then it is our response that has caused whatever educational deficits and devastation to children ensue. It is not the pandemic....
....MUCH MORE
From The Wall Street Journal, September 1. Ms Weingarten is the head of the second largest teachers union. Her AFT has 1.7 million members:
Scores on the national reading and math tests plummeted during the pandemic — a tragedy of epic proportions. Those who pushed to keep schools closed need to be held accountable, starting with the teachers unions, and their top boss, Randi Weingarten.
Overall, 9-year-olds scored, on average, seven points lower on the National Assessment of Educational Progress’ math test last winter than two years earlier, just before the pandemic erupted. That’s the steepest fall ever. They also scored five points lower in English, the sharpest plunge in 30 years.
Math scores for black students — who tend to live in areas where the unions kept schools closed longest — fell a whopping 13 points. (Talk about “systemic racism”!)
On the reading test, scores dropped 10 points for the lowest-performing 10th percentile (for kids of all races).
The downturns come after years of steady gains: “These are some of the largest declines we have observed in a single assessment cycle in 50 years of the NAEP program,” fretted Daniel McGrath of the National Center for Education Statistics, which administers the test.
The fear is that lower-achieving kids are so far behind that they’ll disengage from school, “making it less likely they graduate,” warns Brown University education expert Susanna Loeb.
Yet the tragedy was wholly unnecessary: By summer 2020, after just a few months of lockdowns, experts concluded that children weren’t at much risk from COVID — but were at risk of huge learning loss if schools stayed closed. Doctors, medical researchers and education experts agreed: Classrooms were the safest and best place for kids.
Yet Weingarten & Co. didn’t care about the kids. They fought to keep schools closed and kids home as much as possible; where they couldn’t shut schools entirely, they imposed “hybrid” learning, where some kids still never set foot in a classroom — and some who did only saw teachers onscreen.....
....MUCH MORE
And as she attempts to duck her personal responsibility for this disaster, note the passive voice "What happened to us" and the shut-down of discussion on her Twitter feed, she goes to the fable told by the NYT as her authority:
Thankfully after two years of disruption from a pandemic that killed more than 1 mil Americans, schools are already working on helping kids recover and thrive. This is a year to accelerate learning by rebuilding relationships, focusing on the basics https://t.co/FuqozCPONK
— Randi Weingarten ☮️🇺🇦🇺🇸 (@rweingarten) September 1, 2022