By now anybody who has paid attention knows that school closures were a disaster for children.

Just how much of a disaster, though, is ill-understood by most people. And until recently other factors that harmed children during the COVID panic are only now beginning to be discussed.

But the research is clear: the longer schools are closed, regardless of race or income, the worse the outcomes for students and the more persistent the losses. And the more social restrictions put on child social activity outside school the worse off the children were.

"You might expect that the more affluent children in a district would be better protected from the educational consequences of the pandemic than their lower-income classmates. But that’s not what we found."

— Pradheep J. Shanker (@Neoavatara) May 15, 2023

A team of researchers from Harvard, Stanford, Dartmouth, Johns Hopkins, and the testing company NWEA has been conducting research and developing policies to help children, called the Education Recovery Scorecard project. Its findings are very bleak if unsurprising.

The bottom line? Learning loss was consistent and universal regardless of demographics. Black, white, rich, and poor didn’t matter. The longer kids were kept out of schools the worse the learning loss, and so far no learning recovery has taken place. And what determined how long kids were out of school is largely determined by how much control Democrats and unions had over closures, meaning that poorer and darker kids were disproportionately harmed.

Apparently, many parents believe that their children have been catching up, but so far that is an illusion.

Our detailed geographic data reveals what national tests do not: The pandemic exacerbated economic and racial educational inequality.

In 2019, the typical student in the poorest 10 percent of districts scored one and a half years behind the national average for his or her year – and almost four years behind students in the richest 10 percent of districts – in both math and reading.

By 2022, the typical student in the poorest districts had lost three-quarters of a year in math, more than double the decline of students in the richest districts. The declines in reading scores were half as large as in math and were similarly much larger in poor districts than rich districts. The pandemic left students in low-income and predominantly minority communities even further behind their peers in richer, whiter districts than they were.

But while the effects of the pandemic on learning were quite different across communities, they were, surprisingly, evenly distributed among different types of students within each community. You might expect that the more affluent children in a district would be better protected from the educational consequences of the pandemic than their lower-income classmates. But that’s not what we found.

Where a child lived determined how well they would do during the pandemic. Since the Bluest of the Blue cities were likely to be most controlled by the zealots, children who lived there did the worst and are still the farthest behind.

Instead, within any school district, test scores declined by similar amounts in all groups of students – rich and poor, white, Black, and Hispanic (we didn’t have enough data on Asian and Native American students to measure their learning). And the extent to which schools were closed appears to have affected all students in a community equally, regardless of income or race.

Overall, it mattered a lot more which school district you lived in than how much money your parents earned.

…

In districts closed for 90 percent or more of the 2020-21 school year, math scores declined by two-thirds of a year, nearly double the decline in districts that were closed for less than 10 percent of the school year.

Who could have guessed? I was assured–absolutely assured–that “kids are resilient” and there would be no damage done.

"Kids are resilient!" Weingarten bellows as she tosses them out of airplanes https://t.co/SRjNebIbQH

— Seth Mandel (@SethAMandel) February 22, 2021

Remember when that was a mantra? Kids are resilient! Kids are resilient!

It wasn’t just school closures that harmed students. All restrictions on social activity had devastating effects on kids, leading to learning loss, mental illnesses, anxiety, depression, and God knows what else.

Do you think that the acceleration of the social contagions we are witnessing is unrelated? If so, you are blind to reality. When you reduce a child’s world to staring at a screen the idiocies found on TikTok become their world. Clearly, it wasn’t educational content that was consuming their attention. Educationally COVID was dead time, so something else filled up all those hours.

Ask your newly transgender child what that something was.

What all this means is that the educational impacts of the pandemic were not driven solely by what was happening (or not happening) in schools. The disruption in children’s lives outside of school also mattered: the constriction of their social lives, the stress their parents were feeling, the death of family members, the signals that the world was not safe and the very real fear that you or someone you love might get very sick and die. The pandemic was a public health and economic disaster that reshaped every area of children’s lives, but it did so to different degrees in different communities, and so its consequences for children depended on where they lived.

The pandemic was deadly to a focused group of people for whom we should have provided focused protection to the extent that we could.

The pandemic RESPONSE was deadly to everybody, especially children, and the consequences will be with us forever.

Democrats and the unions fought tooth and nail to lock down the lives of kids, to keep them inside, alone, in front of screens. They closed down schools, playgrounds, and social gatherings in the name of “safety,” and did everything they could to keep that state of affairs as long as humanly possible.

They attacked–viciously–anybody who wanted to get life back to normal for kids as quickly as possible. And, in Blue areas, that plan worked out pretty well. Teachers even threatened or did strike to keep schools closed.

The results are clear: conservatives were right. Closing and keeping schools closed was a disaster. And it was an avoidable one.

Undoubtedly nobody who committed these atrocities will pay any price. Instead, as resources get mobilized to undo what fraction of the damage we can, those resources will flow directly to the people who did the damage. The arsonists who burned down the lives of so many children will get even more money to address the damage that was done.

It is always thus when dealing with government failures. The very people who caused a problem are the ones tasked with repairing the damage, inevitably getting raises because the job is so tough.

Even if you were to assume that the people involved have the best of intentions–I do not assume this at all–it is insane to allow the people who caused this damage to have any control over anything having to do with children’s education.

But no, the COVID tyrants got reelected, Randi Weingarten is doing a victory lap, and some schools even shutter their doors due to COVID in 2023 during a “surge.”