The Patriot Post® · Dems and Their Teachers Union Pals Wrecked Our Kids
The Democrats and their mainstream media flunkies have been hard at work rewriting history of late. We can’t let ‘em get away with it.
Earlier this week, they tried to erase Ronald Reagan’s preeminent role in ending the Cold War. Just last night, they blithely covered Joe Biden’s disgraceful attack on 75 million “MAGA Republicans” while conveniently forgetting the repeated calls for “unity” that peppered his inauguration speech.
And now, in the wake of the release of our children’s disastrous NAEP scores, they’re trying to rewrite pandemic history. They’re trying to get you to forget who barred our kids from the classroom. As the Wall Street Journal editorial board reports:
The National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) scores for 2022 were released Thursday, and by any standard they are a calamity. An unprecedented decline in reading and math scores is the first national measure of the damage done by school closures to America’s children.
The 2020 NAEP tests were administered shortly before pandemic lockdowns and school closures, so this year’s results provide a snapshot of how students have weathered those two years. It’s not pretty. Average nine-year-old scores declined the most on record in math (seven points) and in reading since 1990 (five points). Two decades of progress have been erased in two years.
Let that sink in. And then consider that the lockdown damage was greatest among those least capable of affording it. “Results were even worse for lower-income and minority students,” the Journal continued. “Math scores fell by 13 points for black students and eight points for Hispanics compared to five points for whites. Reading scores for low-income students fell twice as much as for others. Higher achievers fared somewhat better [as scores] for students at the 90th percentile fell two points in reading versus 10 points for those in the bottom 10th percentile.”
One education bureaucrat, Peggy Carr, ladled out some excuse-flavored gruel: “School shootings, violence, and classroom disruptions are up, as are teacher and staff vacancies, absenteeism, cyberbullying, and students’ use of mental health services.” All these things were to blame, she lamely suggested.
And in an example to all children about how not to man up and take responsibility for one’s failures, here’s longtime American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten, whose union was one of the driving forces behind the lockdowns: “Thankfully after two years of disruption from a pandemic that killed more than 1 mil Americans, schools are already working on helping kids recover and thrive. This is a year to accelerate learning by rebuilding relationships, focusing on the basics.”
Nothing to see here. Move along, concerned parents.
Worst of all, though, was Joe Biden’s pathetic press secretary, Karine Jean-Pierre, who, no doubt under orders from above, blamed Republicans because they didn’t vote for her boss’s wasteful and ruinous and falsely named American Recovery Act.
Jean-Pierre blames Trump for schools being closed during Covid and says schools re-opening “was the work of Democrats in spite of Republicans” pic.twitter.com/X9kQjlzvHY
— Washington Free Beacon (@FreeBeacon) September 1, 2022
Ya can’t make this stuff up.
But we were worried for the children, your left-leaning friends will protest. That’s why we closed the schools. Or, as Biden chief of staff and teachers union apologist Ron Klain claimed, the schools “haven’t made the investments to keep the students safe.” That’s rubbish. As New York Magazine and others finally acknowledged more than a year ago, “The preliminary mortality data from China was very clear: To children, COVID-19 represented only a vanishingly tiny threat of death, hospitalization, or severe disease.”
It’s perhaps a crude comparison, but we’ll make it anyway: We’re reminded of those 376 law enforcement officials who congregated in Uvalde, Texas, and yet failed to act for more than an hour as a massacre of children took place within feet of them. In much the same way as one’s faith in law enforcement was shaken by this abject failure, so too are we shaken by the failure of good teachers within the unions to quickly demand an end to the prolonged and utterly anti-scientific insanity of the school lockdowns.
We must never forget Uvalde. Never. And, similarly, we must never forget the lasting damage these lazy, cowardly, hyper-political teachers unions did to our kids.
UPDATED with info on what we knew and when we knew it regarding the “vanishingly tiny” threat of COVID-19 to children.