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what? To quote one prominent hearing witness: What difference, at this point, does it make? Deflection is to be expected, especially in an election year. Yet Senator Patty Murray (D., Wash.) was on CNN last weekend praising fellow Democrats for getting kids back in school by way of the blessed American Rescue Plan. Once upon a time, Democrats attacked Republicans for it, as Brittany Bernstein recalls here. There’s also the nettlesome detail that red states reopened schools more readily than blue states did, and everybody knows this. Was the ARP the key to reopening this whole time? Doubtful. Fox News fact-checked the assertion and calculated that, though schools reopened on Biden’s watch, states and local districts tapped into only about 12.7 percent of the funds under that program. The thread fiber holding that claim just barely together was that Republicans opposed the (inflationary) American Rescue Plan (ARP), which designated billions for school reopening via Covid mitigation, among other things. More audaciously, White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre argued that Democrats managed to reopen schools “ in spite of Republicans.” This effort continued even after teachers in many states were given priority for vaccines and an overwhelming majority were vaccinated. Meanwhile, Weingarten and the unions lobbied the CDC to keep kids out of public-school classrooms. schools closed long after any point of reasonable concern.īy October 2020, 90 percent of private schools across America were open, providing instruction without the devastating Covid outbreaks unions predicted. While most schools in Europe were open as early as April or May 2020, the unions were hard at work fighting to keep U.S. When information about Covid-19 was scarce, closing schools was a reasonable response, but keeping schools closed when the evidence showed it did more harm than help to children was an extreme blunder. Weingarten failed to mention that teachers and parents are cleaning up the mess she and her union left behind.ĭespite gaslighting from unions and their allies , it’s no secret that the American Federation of Teachers and its affiliates fought tooth and nail to ensure public schools remained closed. It is true that countless teachers in schools across the country are hard at work trying to help struggling students recover. She had tweeted: “Thankfully after two years of disruption from a pandemic that killed more than 1 mil Americans, schools are already working on helping kids recover and thrive.” “ Staggering audacity” is how Walter Blanks Jr., of the American Federation for Children, described teachers’ union honcho Randi Weingarten’s response to the learning-loss report. Instead, those responsible for this education catastrophe are pretending to have done everything in their power to avoid it - to be leading America’s children out of it - while their allies emit a smoke screen intended to cloud an otherwise clear view of the very recent past. Not a note of contrition, nor a qualified admission.
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Yet the infuriated parents and policy-makers who saw this coming won’t get so much as an apology. This, of course, was only the latest evidence for the already-unassailable conclusion that pandemic-era school closures drove historic learning loss. Just before the holiday weekend, the National Center for Education Statistics reported that math and reading test scores for elementary-school students plummeted to the lowest levels in decades. The kids are back in class - and facing a learning deficit far deeper than your typical summer slide. White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre answers questions during the daily press briefing at the White House in Washington, D.C., August 9, 2022.