Media Shows Surprise at Reports COVID Lockdowns Led to Massive Learning LossBy Bob Hoge
May 22, 2022
A steady stream of stories has been appearing in our nation’s media lately reporting on the staggering learning loss of learning our children suffered under COVID lockdowns.
The infuriating part about this is that the tone of many of these articles is one of shock and surprise, as if the authors and researchers had no idea this was coming. Anyone who had children in a lockdown state knew that remote learning was an epic disaster, and many of them protested vigorously and fought back against the mandates.
https://twitter.com/ZaidJilani/status/1528473173641003008“Worse than feared,” the tweet states. Not true—it’s exactly what anybody paying attention feared.
Nevertheless, the numbers are sobering. The New York Times reports:
…students who stayed home for most of 2020-21 fared much worse. On average, they lost the equivalent of about 50 percent of a typical school year’s math learning during the study’s two-year window.
One of the most alarming findings is that school closures widened both economic and racial inequality in learning.
* * *
Meanwhile, former Education Secretary Bill Bennett appeared Sunday on Fox News; he had this to say about the ineffectiveness of lockdowns:
One of the more interesting things that people haven’t talked about in this study is this: when they looked at the kids who went to school, went back to school late in the fall of, or in the fall of ’20 and then stayed through 2021, the worry about COVID didn’t materialize. Those kids in school did not have higher rates of COVID than the kids who remained at home. I hope we have learned this lesson.
* * *
Source:
https://redstate.com/bobhoge/2022/05/22/media-shows-surprise-at-reports-covid-lockdowns-led-to-massive-learning-loss-n568385
