Today’s editorial calls out what’s very wrong with modern-day assessments of Covid-era blunders, specifically with regard to prolonged school closures. That is:
It is nothing short of rewriting history to suggest that school closures were just another pandemic-era conundrum policy-makers had to navigate with imperfect information.
Yet that’s how it’s being framed today, as more and more data emerge demonstrating how damaging the push for seemingly interminable remote learning was to vulnerable students. You see, this was just a case of well-meaning, Solomonic officials doing the best they could in trying times. It’s a narrative that sounds reasonable, until you flip back a few pages in the history book. We recall:
Within weeks of that experiment, parents recognized the catastrophic circumstances that had been imposed on their families. They told anyone willing to listen — from pollsters to politicians — that this new status quo was unsustainable. . . . But those concerns were met with a blizzard of emotionally manipulative brushback pitches, in which parents were accused of wanting to sacrifice the lives of America’s educators only to restore the convenience that the pandemic had taken from them.
In the summer of 2020, teachers’ unions in places like California voted overwhelmingly against returning to the classroom in the fall in direct response to surveys that showed parents favored a return to in-person education. The alternative, a union statement read, was to use teachers “as kindling” to “reignite the economy.”
Expect to see similar attempts, someday, to justify or delicately contextualize the unjustifiable with regard to the explosion of antisemitism on campus and the expansion of “gender-affirming care” (puberty blockers and surgeries) for minors.
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