Democrats trying to grapple with the fallout of school closures
Getting to say “I told you so” can be sweet for many. But I’d venture to guess that the phrase has turned sour for those in the liberty community over the past two years (or two decades, or two centuries…what have you).
While most of us spent the vast majority of 2020-2021 being censored online and labeled as “grandma killers,” “conspiracy theorists,” or “selfish” for merely presenting basic data and common sense facts that pushed back against the prevailing pandemic policies of the moment—history has proven us right on literally every front.
Nowhere is this more clear than the current reckoning occurring as the fallout from school closures becomes even more evident. This week, a New York Times headline read, “Math Scores Fell in Nearly Every State, and Reading Dipped on National Exam.”
The report began, “U.S. students in most states and across almost all demographic groups have experienced troubling setbacks in both math and reading, according to an authoritative national exam released on Monday, offering the most definitive indictment yet of the pandemic’s impact on millions of schoolchildren.”
It went on to note that the declines in math were the steepest recorded in history (and we were already doing not great before the pandemic in that regard). It also found that only one in three students currently meets proficiency standards (which basically measures if students are on track for their grade level and positioned for future academic success).
Predictably, the research found that these declines were especially pronounced among demographics that were already “vulnerable.” While they didn’t spell this out, one can only assume that means children who belong to minority groups and/or lower socioeconomic classes.
The Times isn’t the only one taking note of these reports either.
https://twitter.com/thehill/status/1584516583107751938 https://twitter.com/mngop/status/1565800239390408707 https://twitter.com/HannahDCox/status/1557469713147494402
If only literally everyone on the center-right had predicted these outcomes all along?
Oh wait. We did. From school choice activists like Corey DeAngelis, to US Senator Rand Paul who famously pushed back on Dr. Fauci for school closures and received an attack campaign online to thank for it, to parents who were labeled as domestic terrorists by their own “Justice Department” and FBI for protesting the closures—we told you this would happen.
And we told you it would happen for nothing. Kids were always safe from COVID. Shutting down schools did not save lives. But the damage it wreaked on a whole generation of kids will only become more apparent as we progress.
Never forget what they did.
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