It is impossible to overstate the devastating impact that the Covid-19 pandemic has had on the education of America’s children. Over the past year, a growing body of evidence has produced something rare in education research — a consensus. These studies show that the disruption to schooling caused unprecedented learning shortfalls — worse even than the effects of school closures in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina — that have hit lower-income and minority students the hardest, erasing hard-won progress toward closing achievement gaps made in the late 1990s and early 2000s.
Tragically, much of this was avoidable. The blame falls squarely on highly politicized decisions made by local school districts, driven to a large extent by school-employee interest groups and partisan calculations (as Nat Malkus explains in greater detail elsewhere in this issue of NR). Most depressingly, the same dysfunctional politics that caused student learning to suffer continues to impede students’ academic recovery.
To understand what went wrong, it’s important to briefly review how we got here. In the early months of the pandemic, in spring 2020, nearly every American school closed. With the benefit of hindsight, many now recognize that was a mistake. But the initial closures were not unreasonable at the time. Policy-makers saw how the emerging pandemic overwhelmed hospitals in Italy and New York City, and a great deal remained unknown about the nature of the virus and the risks faced by different groups.
By the summer, however, much had changed. Emerging data clearly indicated that children themselves remained at very low risk of severe disease, evidence from European countries where many schools remained open showed that teachers similarly did not face dramatically worse health outcomes than did adults in other occupations, and it appeared that schools were not the primary drivers of community spread, as pre-pandemic statistical models based on the seasonal flu had predicted.
“It’s called ‘the Fauci effect’…people go to medical school and go into science…because I symbolize, integrity, and truth”pic.twitter.com/WNuMCG9YrG
— Aaron Ginn (@aginnt) August 12, 2022