Bethany Almond is editor of the children’s book publisher Heroes of Liberty
America’s children are wrong and it’s America’s adults who are hurting them.
In May 2020, I was just one of millions of parents — on the political right, left, and center — asking policymakers to weigh the potential benefits of our draconian measures to contain the pandemic against the potential harms.
I was deposed and vilified on Twitter as a “granny killer” for refusing to sacrifice my children’s quality of life to protect vulnerable adults.
But I fought back.
I would not lock my children in our home out of irrational fear of Covid and I was right. Today my children are fine; few parents in the liberal regions of the country can say that.
At my local elementary school, which my children would have attended had they not been homeschooled, third graders’ math scores have fallen from 38.7% in 2019 to 5.6% in 2021.
Reading scores, or ELA (English Language Arts) scores, fell from an already dismal 26.7% in 2019 to 7.5% in 2021.
Statewide, test results are also dismal, according to the Nation’s Report Card from the National Center for Education Statistics.
I was deposed and vilified on Twitter as a “granny killer” for refusing to sacrifice my children’s quality of life to protect vulnerable adults. (Above) Author Bethany Mandel with her family
Math and reading scores for 9-year-olds, the kids who were halfway through their first year of school when the pandemic broke out in spring 2020, fell off a cliff in the first two years of the pandemic.
The survey is the first comprehensive assessment of the impact of school lockdown measures and their heartbreaking impact.
Math and reading scores for 9-year-olds, the kids who were halfway through their first year of school when the pandemic broke out in spring 2020, fell off a cliff in the first two years of the pandemic.
Children tested in the top 90th percentile lost three points in math. Students in the lower 10th percentile showed a 12-point decrease.
Average reading performance fell five points — the sharpest decline in 30 years.
As homeschoolers, my kids have always been better able to study during a crisis. But there was a trickle-down effect for her, and many of her extracurricular activities were taken over by public school policies.
This approach has failed for everyone.
It’s disgusting and it shouldn’t have happened.
Peggy G. Carr, commissioner of the National Center for Education Statistics, told the New York Times that she was “startled by the scale and magnitude of the decline.”
You want to know who wasn’t surprised?
Former President Donald Trump.
Trump has been explicit about the cost of school closures in the summer of 2020 as he campaigned to reopen schools, facing opposition from the progressive establishment in government and the media alongside teachers’ unions.
“According to McKinsey and Company, learning loss is likely to be greatest among low-income Black and Hispanic students,” he said during a news conference. “They are the ones who are hit the hardest. We don’t want that to happen.”
Lo and behold, Trump was right.
While math scores for white students fell 5 points, scores for black students fell
dropped 13 points and 8 points for Hispanic students.
So what can be the result of erasing our children’s years of educational growth?
In late 2021, a nonprofit education news site founded by a former CNN anchor and former New York education official put a price tag on the cost of learning loss.
We have proof that Covid lockdown guidelines are harming our children. And undoubtedly the most sickening claim from the Covid scolding and lockdown fanatics has been that our children would be fine.
Their analysis found that “a 9 to 11 percentage point drop in math performance (if it were permanent) would represent a loss of $43,800 in expected lifetime income.”
“Spread out across the 50 million public school students currently enrolled in grades K through 12, that would be over $2 trillion — about 10 times the $200 billion that Congress allocated last year, to help schools respond to the pandemic.”
Unfortunately, this is no longer a hypothesis.
We have proof that Covid lockdown guidelines are harming our children.
And undoubtedly the most sickening claim from the Covid scolding and lockdown fanatics has been that our children would be fine.
You are resilient, we have been told – over and over again.
It was a lie!
American youth will not fare well without a real reckoning in the face of what we can no longer deny, a catastrophic crime that was committed against them.
In a somber coincidence, the announcement of these national test results came as the White House, along with the United Federation of Teachers and the National Education Association, hosted a webinar on returning to school safely last week.
In attendance were Randi Weingarten from UFT and Rochelle Walensky from CDC.
The panelists were a who’s who of those responsible for keeping schools closed and kids staying in hybrid and/or distance learning for far too long.
Perhaps it felt like a reunion of sorts given how closely the Biden administration and the CDC have worked with teachers’ unions to keep schools closed throughout the 2020-2021 school year.
In a somber coincidence, the announcement of these national test results came as the White House, along with the United Federation of Teachers and the National Education Association, hosted a webinar on returning to school safely last week.
But in 2020, we knew school closures were harmful.
The American Academy of Pediatrics advised in June 2020 that students should be “physically present in schools” as much as possible.
But the AAP changed its mind when President Trump advocated opening schools; and liberals decided that opposition to Trump was more important than the welfare of our children.
As a result, some schools – particularly in urban and mostly liberal parts of the country – remained closed.
As recently as the winter of 2022, the teachers’ union in Chicago, where 90% of the public school population is minority, held a five-day strike, barring 350,000 students from any class at all.
The unions didn’t want their teachers to go back to work, and they vocally opposed any effort to help reopen these inner-city schools.
United Teachers Los Angeles president Cecily Myart-Cruz even claimed California Gov. Gavin Newsom’s plan to reopen schools would exacerbate “structural racism.”
On May 4, 2021, Biden Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona defended teachers’ unions for refusing to reopen schools, stating, “Reopening schools in the middle of a pandemic is not as easy as some might think.”
The next day, when Cardona appeared on Morning Joe, he refused, saying keeping schools closed was a mistake: “It’s vital that we listen to our health professionals because this is a public health pandemic.”
These self-proclaimed child advocates aren’t just hypocrites; they are villains.
The Biden administration and teachers’ unions have made it crystal clear that they have each other’s backs while leaving our children in the dust. And now we have the arsonists who are responsible for rebuilding our education system.
It would be criminal not to do anything with this information and it would be a total betrayal of our children not to act on it.
