Democratic governors and the left-wing hacks who run the nation’s largest teacher’s unions owe massive apologies to tens of millions of American parents after they kept schools closed during endless lockdowns that lasted more than 18 months.
That’s according to yet another new study indicating that the closures did little, if anything, to mitigate childhood COVID deaths, even as the enduring closures put kids back years in terms of learning.
“The District of Columbia had the highest number of children who died with coronavirus per capita (12 deaths equating to 95 deaths per million children), even though its schools were almost completely closed for the 2020-2021 school year, with its school coronavirus policies arguably the most draconian in the nation,” the Daily Wire reported after doing an analysis of federal health data related to the pandemic. “Wyoming, which has a nearly identical population size to D.C. and whose schools remained open more than any other state, had the fewest deaths per capita (zero).”
“Wyoming was one of only three states that, by May 2020, had not ordered schools closed for the remainder of the 2019-20 year. By contrast, very few D.C. students attended a significant number of hours of in-person learning even in the following school year, and D.C. pledged to prohibit students from returning to school this year unless they had been vaccinated, though it ultimately delayed that requirement,” the report continued.
The data also shows that overall, COVID had a negligible effect on childhood death. In fact, the Daily Wire noted, for every child that died from the virus, almost 50 other children died from a different cause.
The revelations come on the heels of other data sets showing academic proficiency cratered to its lowest level on record in 2022 after some two years of pandemic school closures, forcing kids to learn ‘remotely’ — which obviously did not work out well.
Separately, the Daily Wire reported:
The National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) is administered to fourth and eighth graders every few years, allowing for a comparison of reading and math proficiency by state between 2019 — just before the pandemic — and 2022. The decline in math scores was the sharpest ever since the test began in 1990, and the average math scores were the lowest since 2005. The average eighth grade reading score was the lowest since 1998.
“Today’s NAEP results are the proverbial final nail in the coffin,” Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin, a GOP candidate who won his election in 2021 in a blue-trending state mostly due to parental anger over Democrats’ education policies, said Monday. “If this doesn’t wake you up, then you’re clearly trying to cover up your own bad decisions. In the business world, if this was your report card, there would be an immediate change in management. You would be fired. And I think that’s what voters did.”
He added that leaders kept “schools shut for an unnecessary amount of time, forcing students to learn through a screen and telling them that’s a meaningful education,” adding that coronavirus policies followed decades of equally bad education decisions made by the left.
