‘Biggest Domestic Policy Failure of Our Lifetime’: Education Experts Testify on Lockdown Learning Loss 

School closures during the Covid pandemic caused “the largest negative shock to student learning in the U.S.,” education professionals said in front of the House Committee on Education and the Workforce today.

“It is important that we weigh the interest of kids [now] higher than we did during the pandemic,” Nat Malkus, deputy director of education policy at the American Enterprise Institute, said, adding that being in a Democrat district had a higher correlation with school closure.

The subcommittee convened today to discuss learning loss in education. Witnesses said that public schools shut down nationwide during the pandemic, which caused insurmountable damage to students.

“It’s going to take multiple years to recover, and some students may never recover, because as [testifier Mary-Patricia Wray] rightly stated, many students were behind in their academic progress when the pandemic hit,” Catherine Truitt, North Carolina superintendent of public instruction, said. “Which one could argue is why so many parents are seeking alternatives to their neighborhood public schools.”

One million students opted out of public schools from Fall 2019 to Fall 2020, according to the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES). The number of homeschooled students rose 63 percent in the 2020-21 school year, and private school enrollment has also increased.

Public school districts received $189 billion in federal pandemic aid, which partly went to academic recovery — but the pace of student progress, Malkus said, is too slow.

“Recent data showed that most students learn more slowly than their pre-pandemic peers this school year,” Malkus said. “Unless that pace improves dramatically, hope for this academic generation is lost.”

Malkus called for increased urgency to combat learning loss with intensive tutoring and learning time, adding that only teachers can communicate that urgency.

“Test scores show learning loss that students’ grades do not. Parents will not act if teachers’ feedback reflects business as usual,” he said. “Communicating urgency is a difficult task to lay at the feet of beleaguered teachers, but if not them, who? Learning loss cannot be viewed as a past event.”

Mary-Patricia Wray, a mother and lawyer, testified that school closures saved children’s lives.

“Instead of making education accessible only for those with low risk, Congress supported all our children. By allocating $122 billion of American Rescue Plan funds for K-12 education, Congress recognized that extraordinary resources were needed to meet the moment,” she said.

Education reformer and advocate Derrell Bradford said that districts misused federal aid and added that some schools renovated athletic fields with the money instead of devoting resources to learning initiatives.

“Sadly, what’s been proven, is that if you give American school districts $190 billion, in a black box, with no accountability, they’ll spend the money on themselves. That is the lesson,” Bradford said.

Wray added that students were already behind before the pandemic and that achievement gaps existed among students with disabilities, students of color, and low-income students: “The cause of achievement gaps are systemic,” she said. “Not merely the result of pandemic closures.”

Malkus, however, said that decisions to reopen schools were highly politicized and that the connection between learning loss and school closures is clear. School districts were quick to make policies instead of enacting responsive measures, Malkus said. This caused masking and school closure enforcement to remain for years, regardless of a locality’s health.

“There was no relationship between school districts’ reopening decisions and their counties’ new Covid-19 cases per capita,” Malkus said.

Bradford, a self-proclaimed former “hardcore school-closer,” who called the learning loss a “generational tragedy,” bashed teachers unions for their support of closures.

“The Chicago Teachers Union said that an effort to try and reopen [schools] was about sexism, misogyny, and racism. In New York, and other places, frankly, teachers picketed with signs and coffins — this is not the sort of activity of a group of people that are particularly interested in opening schools,” he said.

American Federation of Teachers president Randi Weingarten is one of the union officials denying blame for closing schools. Bradford said that any teachers’ unions who now say they fought to keep schools open are lying.

“It is sophistry that the narrative being peddled in the public domain is that teachers’ unions had no role in keeping schools closed longer than they needed to be closed,” he said.