Lockdowns put US schoolkids so far behind they need 4 extra months of schooling —study

Can you imagine being a schoolkid and being told there will be no summer vacation for the next few years?

That’s a logical response to the ugly reality of union boss Randi Weingarten’s championed lockdowns, which have put America’s younger schoolchildren some 4.1 to 4.5 months behind on educational achievement compared to kids before the pandemic lockdowns, according to a new study reported by Axios.

U.S. elementary and middle-school students’ academic progress last school year at best stalled, leaving behind lingering achievement gaps set off by the COVID-19 pandemic, according to a new NWEA study.

Why it matters: While billion of dollars have been spent to help them recover from pandemic education setbacks, the nation’s youngest students are academically behind — and may require more months of schooling just to catch up.

• The analysis reinforces recent data that showed U.S. 13-year-olds’ math and reading scores had dropped to their lowest levels in decades.

Details: NWEA researchers analyzed scores for approximately 6.7 million students between third and eighth grade at 20,000 public schools on NWEA’s assessments for reading and math.

• The results were then compared to scores from around 11 million students in the same grades who were tested during the 2016–2017 and 2018–2019 academic years.

Who the hell is responsible for that result?  Who forgot to plan?  Who gets fired for this kind of mass damage?

Or was this a plan?

Given that it was Weingarten who was the driving force behind the extended school lockdowns, even against medical recommendation, let’s just say it certainly coincides with fresh paydays for her union interests.

Billions in fact were spent on supposed “COVID alleviation measures” (they meant “lockdowns”), which in the end brought this damaging result, but certainly led to a lot of bonuses for school administrators.  Now that the money’s been shelled out, schoolchildren are left with the learning loss and the prospect of losing their summers in order to catch up.

This being the public school system, of course, they don’t really care if the kids never catch up.  They got those bonuses, so what’s the problem?  Quite likely, these public school will carry on as usual with no additional schooling to get the children back to the level that previous classes of kids had been at.  Alternatively, they will get the kids those extra months of teaching time — for a price.

Either way, the teachers’ unions win out — and either way, the kids lose.

Any questions as to why the public’s faith in the public school education system has hit an all-time low this year, with just 26% of respondents to a Gallup poll expressing any confidence in it?  

That’s a rotted-out system that has systematically stiffed America’s schoolchildren and still has yet to pay for it.  They’d don’t pay for anything in their failure-ridden universe — they just get paid.

Image: Pixabay, Pixabay License.