The full cost of the lockdown strategy is now coming in. From economic slowdowns, slower vaccination manufacturing, a spike in depression and drug use to a lost school year for millions of students.
It’s called “covid learning loss”. But it’s really political learning loss. The question that will be asked in coming years is whether it was worth it.
Thousands, if not millions, of parents across the U.S. are now wrestling with the question: Does my child need to repeat a grade? But in 18 states, including Tennessee, this decision will be made not by parents and their children, but by state officials.
“I think at that point, the parents are powerless. There’s nothing we can do about it,” Scruggs said. …
By some estimates, nearly 66 percent of third graders in Tennessee are not meeting English language standards and would be flagged for automatic retention under the new law. Other states have similarly staggering figures. If the laws are applied as written, that suggests hundreds of thousands of American school children may not advance to the next grade, causing bottlenecks in school systems and larger class sizes that could clog the nation’s education system for years to come.
Politico
“In response to the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic, 107 countries had implemented national school closures by March 18, 2020,” wrote the Lancet. But:
Data from the SARS outbreak in mainland China, Hong Kong, and Singapore suggest that school closures did not contribute to the control of the epidemic. Modelling studies of SARS produced conflicting results. Recent modelling studies of COVID-19 predict that school closures alone would prevent only 2–4% of deaths, much less than other social distancing interventions.
Lancet
Whether lockdowns achieved a worthwhile result in the USA is something for posterity to judge. Along the way it might also be worth examining how much of what the students missed learning was truly valuable. Why do we even need multiplication tables? How much of the social justice theory imparted gives students genuine problem solving skills?
It only seems right that if kids are going to have to give up another year of their lives to school as a result of political decisions then adults at least owe a quality product to them in return. Most people used to know the verse in Mark:
And He said unto them, The sabbath was made for man, and not man for the sabbath.
Mark 2:27
Which means schools were made for the students and their parents, and not for the educators.
Comments are closed.