I asked AFT President Randi Weingarten to respond to David Brooks’s claim that “the teachers’ unions” were to blame for long school closures during the pandemic, which caused grievous harm to students.
She answered with a resounding “NO” and sent me the following timeline. If I had NEA President Becky Pringle’s personal email, I would have asked her the same question. Being that it’s Christmas holidays, it will be several days before I can reach her. I will try.
Meanwhile, Randi sent this comprehensive rebuttal of Brooks’ allegations.
Since the first months of the pandemic, the American Federation of Teachers has worked with parents and communities to safely reopen schools and other institutions vital to the nation’s social and economic health.
Even before COVID-19, educators knew that remote education, relentlessly championed and invested in (https://www.edweek.org/technology/betsy-devos-backtracks-on-remote-learning-options-she-had-championed/2020/07) by then-Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos, was only ever a supplement, not a substitute, for in-person learning. Remote learning can serve as a backstop during a public health emergency, but only if we address equity issues, including broadband accessibility, services and support. In-person learning is a prerequisite to fostering the deep social and emotional ties and close relationships with educators that are essential to kids’ development.
Throughout the pandemic, AFT members have consistently (https://www.aft.org/press-release/new-data-shows-majority-educators-willing-go-back-school-if-key-safety) expressed (https://www.aft.org/press-release/new-poll-shows-americas-teachers-want-return-classrooms-amid-growing) support (https://www.aft.org/press-release/americas-educators-are-vaccinated-and-back-person-poll) for in-person instruction with safety protocols in place. Those protocols served as the pathway, not the barrier, to returning to classrooms. The union held (https://www.aft.org/news/latest-town-hall-dives-afts-reopen-plan) numerous (https://www.aft.org/news/member-town-hall-showcases-back-school-all-campaign)town halls (https://www.aft.org/news/words-wisdom-mark-aft-back-school-town-hall) on the crucial importance of face-to-face instruction.
Since April 2020, the AFT has published four proposals for safely reopening schools and addressing the challenges of the pandemic.1 In the fall of 2021, the AFT invested $5 million in 28 states (https://www.aft.org/press-release/major-speech-randi-weingarten-reimagines-public-education-nation-emerges) to get kids back in classrooms, through billboard and radio ads encouraging reopening as well as health fairs and vaccination clinics.
At the same time, parents in major cities often elicited (https://www.chalkbeat.org/2021/2/18/22289735/parents-polls-schools-opening-remote) a strong preference (https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/08/world/most-families-of-color-have-chosen-remote-learning-over-an-in-person-return-to-nyc-schools.html?referringSource=articleShare) for remote learning. Charter schools were more likely (https://www.usnews.com/news/education-news/articles/2022-03-15/how-traditional-public-private-and-charter-schools-responded-to-the-pandemic) than other public schools to shift to remote learning, and stay remote, and private schools were just 4 percentage points more likely than public schools to stay open. In October 2020, Success Academy CEO Eva Moskowitz said (https://www.chalkbeat.org/2020/10/14/21516486/city-charter-schools-take-reopening-slow-similar-roadblocks-neighboring-school-districts), “The best way for us to protect teaching and learning was to stay remote and have a level of predictability.”
After a year of failed efforts under President Donald Trump, the Biden administration invested in and successfully reopened schools, with 98 percent open in January 2022 (https://www.ed.gov/news/press-releases/fact-sheet-one-year-biden-harris-administration-us-department-education-has-helped-schools-safely-reopen-and-meet-students%25E2%2580%2599-needs), compared with 46 percent a year earlier. Teachers across the country advocated for the American Rescue Plan, which included $126 billion for public K-12 schools and funding specifically to address learning recovery.
Tale of the tape
On Feb. 4, 2020, as Trump downplayed COVID-19’s seriousness (https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2020/04/20/what-trump-did-about-coronavirus-february/), the union held a press conference (https://www.afacwa.org/aft_afa_join_coronavirus_prevention) with Association of Flight Attendants President Sara Nelson and others to push for a coordinated response to the emerging pandemic.
In April 2020, the AFT launched its landmark plan (https://www.aft.org/press-release/aft-launches-landmark-plan-safely-reopen-americas-schools-and-communities)to safely reopen America’s schools and communities—months before many other groups, including the federal government. In July of that year, the AFT launched its detailed follow-up plan (https://www.aft.org/press-release/aft-launches-landmark-plan-safely-reopen-americas-schools-and-communities)to safely reopen school buildings.
On April 24, AFT President Randi Weingarten wrote an op-ed (https://thehill.com/opinion/education/494521-what-comes-next-for-public-schooling/) with former Education Secretary John King calling out the shortcomings of remote education and pushing for multi-week summer school to deal with learning loss.
In May 2020, Weingarten was appointed to (https://www.governor.ny.gov/news/amid-ongoing-covid-19-pandemic-governor-cuomo-announces-members-reimagine-education-advisory) New York state’s Reimagine Education Advisory Council, which was charged with safely reopening and reinventing schools.
In July 2020, the union joined (https://www.aft.org/press-release/pediatricians-educators-and-superintendents-urge-safe-return-school-fall) with the National Education Association, the American Academy of Pediatrics and the School Superintendents Association to commit to doing everything possible to safely resume in-person schooling at the start of the 2020-21 school year.
In November 2020, the AFT launched a new blueprint (https://thehill.com/opinion/education/528004-a-blueprint-to-safely-open-schools/) to reopen schools.
In January 2021, Weingarten joined Rajiv Shah of the Rockefeller Foundation to write an op-ed saying that schools could reopen (https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2021/01/24/re-opening-schools-precautions-and-testing-column/6661567002/) with comprehensive testing, before the vaccine was widely available. In February 2021, Weingarten reiterated her position (https://www.wgbh.org/news/education/2021/02/05/teachers-union-president-weingarten-vaccinations-arent-precondition-for-school-reopening-but-need-to-be-priority) that vaccinations are a priority, but not a prerequisite, for in-person learning.
In February 2021, the New York Times published a profile (https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/08/us/schools-reopening-teachers-unions.html) titled “The Union Leader Who Says She Can Get Teachers Back in School.” It reported that Weingarten was calling for schools to reopen, in person, as soon as possible.
Later that month, on NBC’s “Meet the Press,” Weingarten issued a clarion call (https://www.nbcnews.com/meet-the-press/video/full-interview-teacher-union-pres-there-s-no-perfect-solution-to-reopening-schools-101356613515?cid=sm_npd_nn_tw_mtp) for in-person learning, arguing that if the NFL could resume in-person football games, schools could resume in-person classes.
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Diane Ravitch's blog 
As usual, Randi does an excellent job making things clear.
How dare you ask for documentation and facts in this day and age! Get with the program.
As per usual those that want to denigrate unions get the spotlight and the attention of the mainstream media. Randi should ask for equal time on air to refute Brooks’ false claims. An alternative would be to get her rebuttal published in a major newspaper.
As union leader must support safe working conditions for the membership, and Randi was simply meeting her responsibility to her members. Most of mainstream media does not report on how many red state governors have failed to use their Covid relief funds to mitigate the spread of disease in public schools. Instead, they have fought against science and put the lives of those that work in public education in even greater danger while misappropriating Covid relief funds. That is the story that should be getting more attention.
Equal air time?
From so called “public broadcasting”?
Ha ha ha ha.
Fat chance.
The folks at PBS and NPR have only contempt for the public.
That’s why NPR doesn’t even call itself National Public Radio any more.
As former NPR head Vivian Schiller once explained about the moniker “NPR stands for nothing”
She got that right.
SDP,
The SAT also stands for nothing.
Originally it was the Scholastic Aptitude Test.
Then someone decided that “aptitude” was a bad word.
It then became the “Scholastic Assessment Test.”
That was obviously duplicative, like saying “Scholastic Test Test.”
So the College Board decided that the test would be called SAT, and SAT stands for nothing.
Maybe they should have renamed it “College Admissions Test” (CAT).
But they didn’t.
David Brooks should spend a long day with a sneezing, coughing, hurling group of students, packed 30 into a room designed for 25. And, be tasked with teaching them “common core” nonsense.
[See “Wait, What?”s comment on the previous post for more…]
‘Nuf said.
“David Brooks should spend a long day with a sneezing, coughing, hurling group of students, packed 30 into a room designed for 25. And, be tasked with teaching them “common core” nonsense.”
Great suggestion! But, one day would not be enough. One full year instead.
I think it would be a safe bet, if Brooks spent one day in a public school classroom as suggested. he’d forget he’d ever been there by the next morning and go back to his fake BS thinking.
The media find it’s a lot easier to point fingers than it is to come up with solutions to complex problems:
https://news.stanford.edu/2022/10/28/new-research-details-pandemics-impact-u-s-school-districts/
The Education Recovery Scorecard, published Oct. 28 by researchers at Stanford Graduate School of Education (GSE) and the Center for Education Policy and Research (CEPR) at Harvard, combines local and national test score data to map changes in student performance over the past three years within individual school districts….
“Even in school districts where students were in person for the whole year, test scores still declined substantially on average,” said Reardon, noting the toll that pandemic-related disruptions took on students’ routines, family and social support, and mental health. “A lot of things were happening that made it hard for kids to learn. One of them seems to be the extent to which schools were open or closed, but that’s only one among many factors that seems to have driven the patterns of change.”
The past almost three years of Covid have been hard on everyone to varying degrees. While standardized testing was canceled for the first year, students were expected to be “test ready” by the end of the second year. Most states seemed to have greater interest in collecting data than helping students that had lost family members as well as supporting those suffering from disruption and emotional isolation.
Thank you for the quote from Reardon.
. “A lot of things were happening that made it hard for kids to learn. One of them seems to be the extent to which schools were open or closed, but that’s only one among many factors that seems to have driven the patterns of change.”
Not sure why they had to study test scores to figure out what should be obvious to anyone with half a brain.
And it’s not even clear what (if anything) test score “declines” indicate about learning over the past couple years.
For example, perhaps students actually learned a lot of things about life over the course of the pandemic that a test score says nothing about.
It’s ridiculous that people rely on ” experts” at Stanford and Harvard to tell them stuff that is blatantly obvious.
It’s not incidental that Stanford and Harvard “experts” have also been behind a lot of the test driven bullshit over the past decades.
Sometimes it’s useful to confirm the obvious, esp when airheads like Brooks blame the teachers’ unions for the disruptions caused by a worldwide pandemic. And go uncorrected on air.
How much crap do the experts have to spew before people stop paying them any heed?
I would liken this to the folks like David Brooks who were completely rong about the Iraq war.and yet are still getting a prominent platform for their claims and ideas.
My question is why?
So called “experts” at Harvard and Stanford did an enormous amount of damage to teachers and schools with their lamebrained ideas and as far as I can tell, never even admitted they were wrong and certainly never apologized.
In my opinion, giving them the time of day at this point is a big mistake, regardless of whether they confirm the obvious.
The so-called academic lags from school closures will not be programming millions of young people for life-long academic failure as so many in the media would have us believe. It’s “fake news.”
If they are not held accountable, they will have no incentive to change.
I can see the “Experts at places like Harvard and Stanford playing into this “lost generation” bullshit.
It’s actually hilarious.
We are seeing the Harvard created “disruption” idea played out at Twitter on a daily.
Of course, is a complete disaster.
But these people also visited the same ideas on schools with similar results.
Personally. I’m sick of these clowns. They should just butt out. They long ago demonstrated that they are not experts but foolish idiots.
Maybe someone (not at Harvard or Stanford, but someone who is a real researcher) should do a study to determine how much “learning loss” there was from all the nonsense visited on schools over the past two decades (test mania, Common Core, VAM, teacher firings and all the rest).
It’s a wonder students were able to learn anything at all with all the “disruption”.
Twitter is being disrupted daily by Elon Musk’s disrupted brain.
.Tbe Ice pick lobotomy comes to mind., Whereby an icepick was inserted through an eye socket and swirled around in the prefrontal lobes (the centers of higher thought)
Of course, the same Harvard developed method was also used on schools on a massive scale.
Not surprisingly, the result is usually a zombie.
By all indications. having had an ice pick lobotomy is a prerequisite for getting a job as an education “researcher” at Harvard or Stanford.
To clarify, the “disruption” idea was spawned at Harvard.
The ice pick lobotomy was spawned at Yale.
Sorry for any confusion.
Correction :
The ice pick lobotomy originator (Walter Freeman) was at George Washington University.
But Yale had their own lobotomist (William Scoville) who instead drilled two holes in the skull above the eye sockets and then sucked out part of the frontal lobes with a catgetere.
Obviously very high tech.
And brilliant!
But
The real originator of the frontal lobotomy did it with a rod three and a half feet long, all the way through. His name was Phineas Gage. After having the rod put through his head, his test scores were unchanged. That is a fact. https://www.britannica.com/biography/Phineas-Gage
What a disgusting story.
Heh. Abnormal brains are pretty disgusting. I have a degree in disgusting brain stories. Actually, it’s fascinating what you can learn about normal brains by studying abnormal ones.. Bill Gates would make a wonderful dissection.
The technical term for what Phineas Gage experienced was (rail)roadbotomy, which only occurs when one is working on the railroad bottoms.
“The Education Recovery Scorecard, published Oct. 28 by researchers at Stanford Graduate School of Education (GSE) and the Center for Education Policy and Research (CEPR) at Harvard, combines local and national test score data to map changes in student performance over the past three years within individual school districts….”
As Wilson notes, it’s all “vain and illusory.”
Or as I say “a bunch of mental masturbation.”
Especially coming from Harvard and Stanford ed departments, which employ some of the dumbest people on the planet as researchers.
Monkeys probably would do a better job.
So where was Brooks writing his OPINION pieces from . Did he have to ever step out of his multi million dollar home in DC . Did he during the height of covid retreat to an even more exclusive and remote location. . For certain he was not at a desk at 620 Eighth Avenue typing away. After going up an elevator with droplets hanging in the air.
Brooks is a columnist.
In this case he writes columny about teachers. He gets away with it because PBS is a purveyor of columny.
Brooks is a columnyist.
And PBS gets away with it because they have high paid lawyers (paid withubluc tax dollars) to defend their columny.
Maybe the teachers union should sue PBS for libel.
And name both Brooks and Woodruff.
I guess that would be slander, if it was verbal.
$$$ controls the messaging. If nobody challenges it, the slander and propaganda will stand in the minds of many.
That’s exactly right.
Maybe Brooks would not be so quick to claim falsehoods if he thought he was going to be sude.
And maybe Woodruff would be more careful about challenging claims if she thought PBS would be held monetarily accountable .
If nothing else, PBS should be stripped of ALL federal funding.
That we are paying taxes for this crap is just beyond the pale.
A Fifth columnyest?
(sp) columnyist…at his columnyest?
A calumnyist
And of course Brooks did not even have the guts to be full-throated about it. With his usual milquetoast manner, he dropped “the teachers unions” in there after a disclaimer, even lowering his voice as he did so:
“I just look at the schools, and the effects the long, and overly, overly, overly long school closures had on student attainment and the lifelong prospects of a generation of young people– and I do blame a lot of different people for that, but I think (shh…) the teachers unions bear a share of the blame (…end ‘shh’, raise volume) for really widening inequality and hurting social mobility, and hurting a lot of students, so they get my coal.
Listeners get the message loud & clear. Mealy-mouthed delivery provides CYA deniability.
He’s such an idiot. This is in response to the 5 and 7-point drops on the NAEP tests in ELA and Math, respectively. These are 500-point tests. So, a drop of 5 points is a 1 percent decline. A drop of 7, a 1.4 percent decline.
BARELY A BLIP. In a pandemic year. BARELY A BLIP.
There are your effects on “the lifetime prospects of a generation of young people.”
@#&@#%#$$&@$*!!!!!
It turns out this is not David Brooks’ first dig at the teachers’ union over COVID.
Peter Greene took him to the cleaners for a previous BS article (something which seems to be Brooks’ signature)
https://progressive.org/public-schools-advocate/dont-listen-to-david-brooks-greene-210203/
Apparently, he is also in Betsy DeVos’ good graces.
Good gracious!
Ha ha ha.
Here’s the question I have.
With Peter as smart and eloquent as Peter Greene, why do we end up with people like David Brooks passing gas at our major media establishments?
People as smart as Peter Greene
Is there something in the hiring stipulations at places like the NY Times and PBS
that says they have to hire a certain number of clowns?
SDP,
Thanks for pulling out the article by Peter Greene. No one should listen to David Brooks about education. I don’t know if he is better informed about the other subjects he writes about.
If the Ice Pick lobotomy were still all the rage, David Brooks could be the poster child.
Note: I’m not sure he ever had one, but he does seem to exhibit many of the characteristics of someone who has had one, especially in his mindless rants on the PBS Booze Hour
Brooks is very well remunerated to express the prejudices of the ruling class as received, obvious truths, something he does in a knee-jerk fashion, being a master of banality. In other words, he’s a court singer. Stephen Pinker is another of these, but he’s more aggressive in his assertions that things are just as they should be and those power and wealth have power and wealth because they are innately superior, so that’s in the natural order of things. Another well-paid court singer. Thomas Friedman, yet another.
Thank you, Randi. As someone who watched all of this closely, I know all to be true. You were instrumental in getting NYC schools open; for that, my grandchildren, their parents, and I are grateful. As to Brooks, he consistently has put out negative information regarding public schools and unions while defending charter schools and private schools.
It is remarkable how little people know about school and what goes on in school. It is even more remarkable how much people think they know about school and what goes on in it. Everyone seems to think that their own experience in school is instructive regarding millions of students who are presently being taught. It is the most dramatic generalization ever practiced by a people used to life by logical fallacy. Brooks is but one fool on a sea of fools who think that their eye is omniscient.
This posting reflects the top priority of this blog: shilling for the education establishment non-stop, with the groupies among the commenters marching in lockstep conformity.
Attack messages, not messengers. Ad hoc, ad naueseum.
Rachel, instead of sneering, how about some facts?
As “a site to discuss better education for all” here is an informative link that ABSOLUTELY defends RW’s position that teachers unions were not to blame for school closures. https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2021/09/30/pers-s30.html
In the words of teenagers everywhere, OMG
Someone posted a 2021 article from The Federalist to your Tweet about this blog post claiming that Weingarten was trying to rewrite history about her position.
There is nothing there. Their “receipts” are her urging schools to open with mitigations. Mitigations include things like masking, social distancing when possible, testing and tracing protocols, quarantining protocols, ventilation, etc.
In their eyes, asking for mitigations is the same as keeping school buildings closed.
It’s a quality read-
https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2021/09/30/pers-s30.html
Again, this year there were 5 and 7-point drops on the NAEP tests in ELA and Math, respectively. These are 500-point tests. So, a drop of 5 points is a 1 percent decline. A drop of 7, a 1.4 percent decline.
The declines were BARELY A BLIP. In a pandemic year. BARELY A BLIP.
There are your effects on “the lifetime prospects of a generation of young people.”
If Brooks and the hundreds of other “journalists” who have written these moral panic pieces about the test results had bothered to do even the most minimal research–the kind that seventh-graders are capable of–they would know this. Here, from the NAEP website:
“NAEP assessment results are reported as average scores on a 0-500 scale (reading, mathematics at grades 4 and 8, U.S. history, and geography) or on a 0-300 scale (mathematics at grade 12, science, writing, technology and engineering literacy, and civics).”
These “declines” are margin-of-error small.
So, the whole story is a nothing burger, except in this respect:
It illustrates how completely and uncritically the U.S. journalistic establishment buys Education Deformer arguments.
Deformer groups like Fordham and The Gates Foundation and The 74 and The Emerson Collective and Jolly Oligarchs Serving Satan put out propaganda, and U.S. media simply “retruth” it. No messy research or critical examination necessary.
When I say, “margin-of-error” small, I mean things like this: how often does an 8th-grader, who is only 13 or 14 and has the attention span of a flea on methamphetamine, mark the wrong bubble on one of these stupid tests?
Also consider this: the tests have far fewer questions than there are “standards,” so each standard is represented by one question or, at most two, even though the standards are typically quite broad. So, how accurately, how validly, does ONE question assess a broad standard? Well, not accurately, not validly, at all. And then, the standards are often so vague that one couldn’t possibly say what, in fact, it SPECIFICALLY means–that is what it means concretely enough to assess that, to operationalize it enough to make attainment of it actually measurable. But do any of these columnists, calumnyists, and “journalists” ever ask themselves such questions. No. They simply take it on faith that these bs tests actually measure what they purport to measure. And then they freak out and write about how the end of the world is at hand if the scores drop by a percentage point.
And that’s not doing their job. Its journalistic malfeasance. That journalistic malfeasance is THE REAL STORY IN THIS.
I thought the “margin of error ” was all the answers written in the test margin that were not bubbled in.
This reminds me of Fermat’s last theorem.
Centuries of brilliant mathematicians wracked their brains on the problem.
And all because the margin of error was too small.
Not sure about fleas on meth, but in general, fleas actually have a pretty long attention span, especially the ones infected with bubonic plague.
The plague bacteria block their digestive tract, which results in the flea being always hungry and causes them to latch onto whatever warm body is within reach and not let go until they die of starvation — after passing the bacteria to their host, of course.
I watched a documentary on how a large volcanic eruption of Krakatoa in 535 caused a years long cold spell that affected historical events worldwide: the death knell of the Roman empire, the fall of the Mayan civilization, among other things.
It turns out bubonic plague bacteria have the most pronounced effect on flea digestive blockage when the temperatures are below a certain value and the massive volcanic eruption blocked the sun and caused the temps to drop worldwide around 535, which then resulted in a historical chain reaction.
So, fleas not only have a long attention span but a very long impact.
But not sure how meth might affect that.
Different species can react very differently to the same chemicals.
It probably requires extensive study.
Maybe someone in the Harvard econ department would take up the challenge, which undoubtedly has a “Nobel” prize in it.
“The Impact of meth infused fleas on Future Earnings”
Maybe Raj Chetty will take up the challenge.
No, it was not a good idea to have kids and teachers in small, enclosed rooms, where they rebreathed everyone else’s air, at the height of an airborne pandemic that was killing hundreds of thousands of Americans, kids who could easily take the virus home and infect compromised or elderly people there, and if anything, the rush to reopen schools before we had vaccines doubtless led to unnecessary deaths. It’s not surprising, however, that rightwingers are busily trashing anyone who was the slightest bit cautious back then because they plan to trot out ex-Trump Mini-Me Ron DeSanctimonious as their next Glorious Leader.
People indulged in a lot of magical thinking back then, imagining, for example, that having desks a few feet apart would make a difference. Any teacher should know that when kids come back from break, they bring with them novel cold viruses from around the country or the word, and everyone gets sick from them. For the first few weeks after break, everyone is sick. Covid traveled in the same way as cold viruses. It was really stupid wish-fulfillment to oppose the school closures, which were absolutely necessary to remove a major vector for a killer disease.
1,116,095 Americans have died of Covid, many of them unnecessarily because people indulged in wish-fulfillment and opposed practical measures like CLOSING SCHOOLS DURING A DEADLY AIRBORNE PANDEMIC.
And what were the dreadful consequences? Well, according to Ed Deformers’ own measures, test scores, about a 1 percent decline. Barely any.
Bob I absolutely respect your point of view and where it is that you’re coming from (as I believe that we’re both educators in Oklahoma). I would just add a slightly different view for consideration.
If one begins questioning why it is that the tests have been seized upon by all familiar actors [Biden admin/former Trump admin, the general political establishment, and the corporate media] in cynically blaming remote learning during 2020–2021 for “learning loss” then it becomes a much more clear agenda.
US Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona said the onus for academic decline should be placed squarely on the Trump administration’s “mismanagement of the pandemic.” By this he did not mean Trump’s prioritizing of corporate profit over human life and his embrace of the pseudo-scientific theory of “herd immunity,” i.e., the deliberate infection of masses of people. After all, the Biden administration has adopted essentially the same policy, declaring that the population must “learn to live” with COVID-19.
No, Cardona was simply criticizing the temporary shift to remote learning, which was forced on state and local authorities not by Trump, who viciously opposed it, but by the demands and opposition from teachers, students and parents to being herded into dangerous classrooms.
“That’s why President Biden, from Day One of his Administration, pushed so hard to get schools reopened and students back into classrooms,” according to Cardona.
Major school districts have also blamed the preliminary results on remote learning. Los Angeles Unified School District Superintendent Alberto Carvalho stated, “as anticipated, the preliminary state assessment results illustrate that there is no substitute for in-person instruction.”
To the extent that standardized testing accurately measures academic achievement, which many educators and experts reject, there are a number of more profound factors contributing to lower scores than remote learning, none of which the Biden administration or media care to discuss
First, is the widespread illness of children over the past two years. A nationwide study published in Nature in May estimated that close to 51 million children had been infected, or a staggering 70 percent of US children. Nearly 160,000 have been hospitalized and at least 1,790 have died, according to the CDC. The vast majority of pediatric illness and death occurred under Biden’s watch during the Delta and Omicron waves, when schools were prematurely forced open amid soaring transmission.
To this must be added the impact of Long COVID, a far-reaching condition which, in children, is known to increase the risk of acute pulmonary embolism, myocarditis, venous thromboembolic events, acute renal failure and Type 1 diabetes, as well as debilitating symptoms, such as smell and taste disturbances, circulatory problems, fatigue and pain.
Second, there is the trauma and grief resulting from the life-altering loss of parents, caregivers and teachers due to the “let it rip” response of both the Trump and Biden administrations. In February 2022, it was estimated that over 200,000 children in the US had lost a parent or primary caregiver, a figure which has only grown. An estimated 8,000 educators in the US have died of COVID-19. Unlike missed school, for a child there is no such “recovering” from a dead mother or father.
Finally, the official response to the pandemic, guided by the principles of private profit and not public health, has led to an economic and social catastrophe for the working class. World governments, led by the United States, seized upon the pandemic to transfer unprecedented sums of money to the major corporations through the CARES Act bailout. The wealth of US billionaires increased by 2.1 trillion dollars, or 70 percent, between 2020 and 2021, while conditions of life for the working class have only grown more dire. Millions have lost their jobs, while wages have fallen far behind the 40-year inflation high.
During Biden’s tenure, the Democratic Party has overseen the expiration of pandemic-related unemployment benefits, the federal moratorium on evictions and the Child Tax Credit, which was estimated to reduce child poverty by as much as 40 percent. Most recently, they have allowed the universal free lunch program to expire, which has impacted an estimated 10 million children.
Setting these factors aside and accepting the premise that school closures on their own were a major contributor to academic decline, remote learning was carried out in a haphazard fashion with inadequate funding and resources from the start. Many educators even described the process as “sabotaged” by school districts. The federal and state governments never provided the resources to guarantee free, high quality internet to every student, adequate training in online technology for educators and students, or the necessary financial support for parents to stay home with their children.
Moreover, these chaotic school disruptions, during which students have been yo-yoed between in-person and remote learning, could have been entirely avoided had the necessary measures been taken to suppress transmission and eliminate COVID.
In any case, the correlation between testing declines and remote learning is ambiguous at best. The NAEP results showed that declines occurred in every region of the country, including areas that returned to in-person schools in 2020. The declines occurred across urban, suburban and rural settings.
Thanks, Kbam. Ofc, the Biden administration is clueless on a lot of matters having to do with education, and this is one of them. And there was no huge learning loss. The NAEP declines of 5 opercent in ELA and 7 points in Math are on 500-point tests, so they are declines of 1 and 1.4 percent respectively–almost no change at all. I’m getting really sick of Education Deformers playing Chicken Little based on spurious “data.” I ate 1 calorie less yesterday than I did the day before. OMG. I must be starving.
Even before you said you ate one less calorie yesterday and that you are probably starving, I was going to say that you need to put some meat on your bones.
Wrote it yesterday but want to repeat (as we’re known to do)
The AFT and Randi Weingarten were LEADERS in two-plus years of covid. There were several phases – each unique and required new AND UNPRECEDENTED anywhere protocols and prevention and actions.
Mr. Brooks (from yesterday’s blog) WALK IN A TEACHER’S SHOES! Any day but did you any day during covid? Preparing for at-home learning over spring break. Teaching kids with and without devices. Phone calls to parents. Closets converted to classrooms. And that was just March and April 2020.
(and for those who commented about my “and I’m an administrator” and received condolences, there are quite a few (thousand) out that leading (Carol Burris leading the way as example), giving teachers voice, and working with unions, not agin’ ’em!)
I appreciate you taking the time in repeating the idea that RW + AFT were leaders during this unprecedented time but what did they genuinely offer. Can you give specific examples because from what I’ve experienced throughout the last 3yrs is almost exactly the opposite— in form of support directly for/of educators. Educational support from AFT/Gov has been about like the support that railroad workers have received from their union heads/Gov. When it came to the showdown RR workers had no union support. In fact they were legally ordered to shut up and go to work (bc lip service is easy and real support would be an inconvenience and costly). When union leaders make well over $500,000 per yr and beginning educators make approx $30-40,000 (in real and usable $$) you have a rift that’s too great to find common ground. Form a Rank and File safety work group in your area. Make truthful communication your first and last priority.
The panic over learning loss is unwarranted and damaging to the public schools which serve over 90% of our kids. One story I like to share is about my experience reviewing scholarship applicants at a high school in Oregon. I was very impressed with the quality of immigrant kids’ applications. The hurdles they had to overcome, their high grade point averages and their commitment to community service.
This leads me to believe that given the supports of caring and competent teachers, kids will succeed even after experiencing horrific trauma
So, let’s support and not tear down our public education system.
Best Regards, Paul “Pat” Eck, Retired Public school educator Portland, Oregon