Back in the summer of 2020, I tried to hammer home the point that preventing kids from going to school full-time and in-person during the coming school year would be a terrible idea with serious consequences for the kids and the country. School is more than just a place where younger students stay while their parents work, or a way for older students to get a certificate that helps them find better jobs. Deep economic research has shown that education really matters in helping kids grow into productive adults, including as workers in a complex, globalized economy. Those findings are seen to be as true today as when they were first identified in the 1950s. Indeed, a 2018 World Bank analysis shows the benefits increasing since 2000.

We now have a pretty good, albeit unsurprising, idea of the impact of the move to online learning and hybrid schedules. Here are some key takeaways from the Richmond Fed review …

Keeping kids in school was a national emergency worthy of massive funding and massive policy imagination. Now we’re living with the failure to treat school closures as the tragedy that it was. And we’re going to be living with the long-term impacts for decades.

[James Pethokoukis has plenty of data on this aspect of the public-policy disaster that was the American pandemic response. I will have more on other aspects of it later today. Read this one in full. — Ed]