More Spin from the Washington Post
A recent article in the Washington Post is a masterpiece of spin.
Titled “Burst in covid spending helped students recover,” the article tells us that the $190 billion covid relief package helped students get back on track in the wake of covid-related school closures and “had a significant impact on learning”. But you have to get five paragraphs into the article to find out how paltry that impact was.
According to the WaPo piece, between 2019 and 2022, the average American student lost half a grade level in math and a third of a grade level in reading. The most recent data available indicates that they made up thirty percent of the lost math skills and twenty percent of the lost reading skills.
I am sorry, but that is nowhere near good enough. These people are like the carjacker who allows you to keep your cell phone so you can at least take an Uber home. He isn’t really doing you a favor. He shouldn’t be carjacking you in the first place. And the schools never should have closed in the first place. Children are at virtually zero risk for dying from the covid.
And, as the article notes, the funding for enriched teaching is drying up. People will forget about the matter and move on, while our rulers will distract us with something more important, like a slap fight at the Oscars, or two grumpy old men arguing about their golf game. Meanwhile the pernicious effects of school closures will be with us for decades to come – the New Normal.
Even if that weren’t the case, this still would have been a raw deal. The one thing you can never get back is time. What if we had the schools had never been closed, and we had the enriched teaching as well? How much better off would the students be?
In a related matter, the CDC reported that drowning deaths in children have gone up in the wake of pandemic restrictions. Is anybody surprised? If you close schools, fewer kids get swimming lessons.
Fewer kids learning to swim = more drowning deaths.
We are a nation devouring its own children.
My book They Told Us It Was Like Ebola: The Impact of Pandemic Restrictions on the Children of Ghana is now available on amazon.