News/Commentary

‘Seemed obvious!’ NYT finally concedes Dems got it wrong on prolonged school closures

March 19, 2024 | | Print Article

The New York Times came out with a report this week admitting that Republicans such as Florida Governor Ron DeSantis were right concerning school policies during the pandemic.

“Today, there is broad acknowledgment among many public health and education experts that extended school closures did not significantly stop the spread of Covid, while the academic harms for children have been large and long-lasting,” the New York Times reported.

“While poverty and other factors also played a role, remote learning was a key driver of academic declines during the pandemic, research shows — a finding that held true across income levels,” the leftist media outlet added.

The admission acknowledges and bluntly implies that Democrats got it horribly wrong during the coronavirus pandemic when it came to keeping kids out of school. The damage is far-reaching and long-lasting for students.

“There’s fairly good consensus that, in general, as a society, we probably kept kids out of school longer than we should have,” Dr. Sean O’Leary, a pediatric infectious disease specialist who helped write guidance for the American Academy of Pediatrics, which recommended in June 2020 that schools reopen with safety measures in place, stated according to the New York Times.

Keeping children out of school and forcing them into isolation caused test scores to drop across the board and those scores have not rebounded nearly fast enough.

“Both at the state and local levels there was a strong correlation between remote learning and a drop in test scores, the report said, according to analysis by the Times, Harvard, and Stanford. A separate study of 10,000 schools reached the same conclusion,” the Daily Wire reported.

“Such losses can be hard to overcome, without significant interventions,” the report contended. “The most recent test scores, from spring 2023, show that students, overall, are not caught up from their pandemic losses, with larger gaps remaining among students that lost the most ground to begin with. Students in districts that were remote or hybrid the longest — at least 90 percent of the 2020-21 school year — still had almost double the ground to make up compared with students in districts that allowed students back for most of the year.”

According to the report, Democrats justified their authoritarian measures regarding schools, education, and students during the pandemic as being taken due to “Their commitment to safety” among other concerns.

Experts told the New York Times that there is a lot of strong evidence that shuttering schools and mandating remote learning did almost nothing to stop the spread of COVID.

But the report also gave an out to Democrats, asserting that “there were no easy decisions at the time” concerning children and COVID.

Governor DeSantis was lauded for pushing back hard against COVID tyranny during the pandemic. He stopped mask mandates and other measures that turned people’s lives upside down thanks to Democratic heavy-handedness and their brazenly unconstitutional moves.

In the spring of 2020, the former presidential candidate introduced his plan which reopened schools in Florida and put students back in classrooms. Other conservatives followed his lead.

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