After Destroying Your Kids’ Education, Teachers Unions Think We Should All Just Hug It Out

One couldn’t help but notice the ironic timing. One week after the release of results on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) showed a historically large decline in student test scores during Covid-induced lockdowns, American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten tweeted out approval of an article in The Atlantic calling for “a pandemic amnesty:”

Apart from the obvious quip of whether there’s an amnesty the left will not support, Weingarten represents perhaps the last person who has the right to advance this message. School lockdowns went on for far longer than they needed to, thanks to Weingarten and her union cronies — and America’s children paid the price. Parents across the country can and should take offense at Weingarten’s dismissive attempt at self-absolution.

Public Schools’ Prolonged Shutdowns

Weingarten’s intervention aside, The Atlantic article has more than a nugget of truth in it. At the beginning of the pandemic, we didn’t know a lot about Covid — exactly how and where it was transmitted, how to treat it, and so much else. In such an environment, people obviously would make statements they thought were true, and promote policies they thought beneficial, only to discover that later evidence proved them wrong.

To that end, writer and professor Emily Oster makes a fair point:

There is an emerging (if not universal) consensus that schools in the U.S. were closed for too long: The health risks of in-school spread were relatively low, whereas the costs to students’ well-being and educational progress were high. The latest figures on learning loss are alarming. But in spring and summer 2020, we had only glimmers of information. Reasonable people — people who cared about children and teachers — advocated on both sides of the reopening debate.

Notice the key qualifier here: “In spring and summer 2020,” people had little information about how Covid spread, and therefore (in Oster’s view) school lockdowns seemed reasonable.

But lockdowns didn’t last only through spring and summer 2020. In many cases, they lasted through the spring of 2021. A tracker of schools’ opening status found that a majority of public schools did not go back to fully in-person learning until the week of April 19, 2021. That’s more than one year after the pandemic began, and well after the period in which Oster argues incomplete and imperfect information should excuse public officials’ poor policy choices. Well into January 2021, at least 1 in 6 public schools remained fully remote, with the schoolhouse doors shut to all would-be learners.

By contrast, an op-ed in The Wall Street Journal, released on the heels of the dismal NAEP scores nationwide, notes that Catholic schools took a different approach. Most Catholic schools had reopened their doors by the fall of 2020. And whereas public school students’ test scores dropped dramatically from pre-pandemic levels, scores in Catholic schools actually rose — particularly for African American and Hispanic students.

In other words, by the fall of 2020, school closures, and the drop in test scores that appear to

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