Which was exactly what so many predicted, and what so many government and teachers unions denied
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February, 2021 In an interview with Axios, Randi Weingarten, the president of the American Federation of Teachers, said in reference to children who have been out of school for months, “kids are resilient and kids will recover.”
Axios’ Dan Primack asked, “Is there a point — and maybe you think we’re already past it — is there a point in which kids have been out of in-person school for so long that the education that they’ve lost isn’t really recoverable, that the third grade, the fourth grade, the kindergarten they lost, they can take extra semesters in the summer; they can do [that], but it can’t really be fixed?”
“No,” said Weingarten, whose union is the second largest teacher’s union in America, representing 1.7 million teachers. “I don’t believe that. I believe that kids are resilient and kids will recover. …[A] t the end of the day, we have to believe that this is recoverable,” she added. “And we have to believe that virtually all our kids will thrive with the opportunities that we’ve put before them.”
Bud did they? Of course not.
THE ECONOMIST HAS AN “UNEXPECTEDLY” MOMENT: Covid learning loss has been a global disaster.
When covid-19 first began to spread around the world, pausing normal lessons was a forgivable precaution. No one knew how transmissible the virus was in classrooms; how sick youngsters would become; or how likely they would be to infect their grandparents. But disruptions to education lasted long after encouraging answers to these questions emerged.
New data suggest that the damage has been worse than almost anyone expected [emphasis mine — Ed]. Locking kids out of school has prevented many of them from learning how to read properly. Before the pandemic 57% of ten-year-olds in low and middle-income countries could not read a simple story, says the World Bank. That figure may have risen to 70%, it now estimates. The share of ten-year-olds who cannot read in Latin America, probably the worst-affected region, could rocket from around 50% to 80% (see chart 1).
Children who never master the basics will grow up to be less productive and to earn less. McKinsey, a consultancy, estimates that by 2040 education lost to school closures could cause global gdp to be 0.9% lower than it would otherwise have been—an annual loss of $1.6trn. The World Bank thinks the disruption could cost children $21trn in earnings over their lifetimes—a sum equivalent to 17% of global gdp today. That is much more than the $10trn it had estimated in 2020, and also an increase on the $17trn it was predicting last year.
Who on earth could have foreseen this? Flashback: Politico: How Ron DeSantis won the pandemic.
Related:
● Why we must demand that leaders who got COVID wrong admit it and apologize.
—Karol Markowicz, the New York Post, March 6th.
● Speech Therapy Shows the Difficult Tradeoffs of Wearing Masks.
—Atlantic headline, March 2nd.
As Ace of Spades wrote, at the start of a lengthy post on that last headline, “The masking mandates that the corrupt US and state and local governments forced on children, under pressure from the corrupt teachers unions have imposed developmental disorders on children that they may never recover from. The early years of development are critical ones. You don’t get those back. These are critical years of development in which children’s brains are wired to rewire themselves like crazy. Their brains will reconfigure themselves during these years like in no other point in their lives, ever. There is no ‘Do Over’ switch on a child’s formative years.”
The only positive thing that came to education during the lockdown was that remote “learning” allowed parents to learn what these horrible people were doing to school children, how the curriculum was nothing but a program of indoctrination that teaches racism, victimhood, socialism and sexual pervasion. Now we have to put that lesson to work.
