Beginning in March 2020, many bad decisions were made that will impact untold numbers of young people for the rest of their lives.
There has been nothing but awful news about the unnecessary Covid-related shutdown of American schools. Study after study and a mass of anecdotal evidence show the harm done by the forced lockdowns.
Yet more research, released in January, extends the grim scenario. A meta-analysis of 42 studies across 15 countries assessed the magnitude of learning deficits during the pandemic, and finds “a substantial overall learning deficit…which arose early in the pandemic and persists over time. Learning deficits are particularly large among children from low socio-economic backgrounds.”
The analysis finds the losses are larger in math than in reading and in middle-income countries relative to high-income countries. The learning progress of school-aged children slowed substantially during the pandemic and overall, students lost about 35%, of a school year’s worth of learning. One of the studies included in the analysis found that the average public school student in third grade through eighth grade lost half a year of math learning and a quarter of a year in reading.
Two countries, Sweden and Denmark, managed to avoid the upheaval. Swedish children experienced no learning loss because they were not subjected to mass school closures during the pandemic. While Denmark did have closures, it is theorized that the lack of learning loss could be attributed to the country’s “reliable digital infrastructure with Denmark being one of the absolute top-scorers in digital skills, broadband connectivity, and digital public services in Europe.”
Another recent study by the Institute of Educational Studies’ School Pulse Panel reveals that about half the students in the U.S. entered school in September 2022 below grade level in at least one subject.
The findings from the School Pulse Panel are very similar to the results of a survey compiled by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in April 2022. According to the CDC, a survey of nationally representative public schools showed that 49% of students began the 2022-23 school year behind grade level in at least one subject. The percentage is significantly higher compared to a typical pre-pandemic year, in which just over a third of students are behind.
The bad news isn’t all about academics, however.
The School Pulse Panel also notes that more than 80% of U.S. public schools reported “stunted behavioral and socioemotional development” among students because of the COVID-19 pandemic. Also, 70% of public schools saw increases in students seeking mental health services since the start of the pandemic, 56% of schools experienced an increase in “classroom disruptions from student misconduct,” and there was a 49% increase in “rowdiness outside of the classroom.”
Unless things change in a hurry and learning losses are reversed, the country’s current crop of K-12 students will grow up to be less educated, lower-skilled, and less productive adults. Per Eric Hanushek, a Stanford University economist, they will earn 5.6% less over the course of their lives than students educated just before the pandemic. Dr. Hanushek maintains that the losses could total $28 trillion over the rest of this century, adding, “The economic costs of the learning losses will swamp business cycle losses.”
One enduring result of the school closures is that many kids are not returning to their local public schools. In fact, U.S. government-run schools have lost well over a million students since the start of the pandemic, and many schools are closing as a result. Using data from the U.S. Education Department, The Wall Street Journal reports that public school enrollment fell by more than 1.4 million students to 49.4 million nationwide between fall 2019 and fall 2020 – a decline of roughly 3%. The newspaper adds that the following school year, enrollment failed to return to pre-pandemic levels and remained roughly flat.
Where are the students going?
Growing enrollment in private and charter schools – which typically stayed open when government schools were shuttered – is contributing to the decline in traditional public school enrollment.
Homeschooling is booming, having almost doubled nationally since 2020. The Census Bureau reports that between 2012 and 2020, the number of homeschooling families remained steady at around 3.3%. But the National Home Education Research Institute reports that during the 2021-2022 school year, there were 3.135 million homeschooled students in the U.S. or about 6% of the total.
The pandemic also ushered in a new era of hybrid homeschooling – where a student typically spends a day or two in an institutional setting and the rest of the time learning at home.
Also, statewide school choice programs are advancing in unprecedented numbers. Iowa and Utah have just initiated universal choice programs. Additionally, ten states are gearing up to add parental choice programs or increase their existing ones his year.
The silver lining in all this is that many parents have awakened to the fact that a one-size-fits-all unionized bureaucratized behemoth just may not have their children’s best interests at heart. It’s sad that it took a global pandemic – not to mention radicalized classrooms – to get to this point. But better late than never.
Larry Sand, a former classroom teacher, is the president of the non-profit California Teachers Empowerment Network – a non-partisan, non-political group dedicated to providing teachers and the general public with reliable and balanced information about professional affiliations and positions on educational issues. The views presented here are strictly his own.
Hi, Peloni
What you’re seeing in the video is the main entertainment at the 2022 Commonwealth Games (presided over by then Prince Charles). The “entertainers” are worshipping an idol representing Molech. As a Jew, you might be familiar with this phenomenon. Jews have done this in the past, always with disastrous consequences. Coupled with the blatantly Satanic worship at the Grammy awards, this ought to be convincing that idol-worship has gone mainstream in the West. These displays would have been unthinkable just a few years ago. Just FYI, of course. One MIGHT, of course, wonder why such worship is presided over by the now head of the Church of England (and most powerful monarch in the world).
@Michael
No, that was Naomi’s statement. I was simply critiquing her comment which I found to be over .
For myself, I am far less interested in guessing who might have been behind this awesome crime than I am in actually prosecuting everyone who is known to have had a hand in its implementation. From the highest politician to the lowest pharmacist, there are crimes aplenty to focus our efforts upon without the need of guesses which have no certain answers, at this point at least.
By the way, I am uncertain of what I am looking at in the link you shared.
Hi, Peloni
Ah, that’s it — you’re looking for the mastermind. Naomi dug far enough, to see all roads leading to China, before fuses began blowing in her head. Nearly all the gaps in her enquiry, of course, could easiy be filled in by the corrupt, self-seeking pursuit of money and power by EVERY level of society, from a janitor at the NIH to the President of the United States; and China, of course, can supply both money and power in abundance. It can even throw in cocaine and prostitutes. The majority of decent people (like Naomi), meanwhile, find it extremely hard to fathom that all humanity can be so depraved.
Getting back to the “mastermind”… Do you really think there’s a single person orchestrating all this? Do you think he’s in this picture?
https://youtu.be/5XDt7ljdPnQ
@Michael
Thank you for sharing this. Naomi has concluded that the CCP was the mastermind behind the Covid plot with the compliance and cooperation of many Americans and globalists. Despite her conviction in her conclusion, personally, though I am certainly quite open to the possibility, I am yet to be convinced that China was in fact ‘the mastermind’, to be honest. China was clearly instrumental in the exportation of Covid across the globe, and this was a critical step in the build up to the pandemic myth. Additionally, prior to this, they were also clearly seeding social media with the fake collapse of people who were struck dead by the WuFlu to invoke terror around the world to make the worlds’ publics more cooperative in their own destruction. Despite these facts, I am still yet to be convinced that China was responsible for the initiating events, releasing it in Wuhan, and if they had masterminded this pandemic, it would have required them to have managed the initial outbreak. Perhaps the Chinese efforts to quietly mask the initial outbreak in the Summer or Fall of 2019 was done to provide them some excuse of deniability, but I find this to be a rather disingenuous likelihood. To add weight to Naomi’s argument, in ~May 2019, the CCP did order an enormous number of tests which could have been used to detect the SARS-Cov2 virus, but Naomi doesn’t list this among her evidences supporting her conclusion. We could brainstorm the possibilities, but the truth remains that there is a great deal of doubt as to how the outbreak began, and failing this, any conclusion certifying who the real mastermind of the pandemic might have been would remain as nothing more than a guess.
Despite Naomi’s assertion that this was not a guess, per this interview, her conclusion relies upon a claim that Pfizer is not a German company but rather, she states, it is a German-Chinese company. She then goes on to explain that Pfizer has a memorandum of understanding with one of the biggest Chinese Pharma companies to manufacture the mRNA vaccines. The Chinese company manufactured 1 billion of the vaccines, but China (wisely) does not use these vaccines in China. Instead the joint cooperation of Pfizer and the Chinese company built 13 factories to distribute the vaccines in western Europe and they have now built two others in the US, in Massachusetts and NJ. And that is it, or that is all that she discusses. It does seem that she might have been interrupted by the interviewer, but if she has more to add in defense of her conclusion, it isn’t explained in this 2hr long video. Regardless of all of this, though, the evidence which Naomi does provide is impossible, I would suggest, to fairly draw the conclusion which she derives from it, despite her assertion that her conclusion ‘is not a guess’. I for one, hope to see justice done for all the sacrifices which were the result of this staged pandemic. I would, however, resist the urge to blend my great dislike of the CCP with the desire to see justice done in this matter.
Also, I don’t think that Bannon’s support of Naomi’s claim really changes much, since I believe Bannon would convict a ham sandwich if it was tied to the CCP. In any event, if there is more to Naomi’s underlying thesis, we are almost certainly likely to hear more about it in the coming days. Til then, color me unconvinced.
I’d be interested in your thoughts on the subject, or the input of anyone else who has some reflections to share on this subject.
For anyone who might be intimidated by the 2hr video length, the evidence she shares starts at 13min and is discussed over the next 5min, so you won’t have to sit thru this entire conversation, which to be honest is far less valuable as it goes on, IMO.
https://www.israelnationalnews.com/news/366855
Peloni, have you seen this?
https://metaxastalk.com/video/naomi-wolf-of-dailyclout-io-on-the-greed-driven-alliance-behind-the-pandemic/
What do you think of it? Naomi squarely implicates the CCP, plus a seemingly endless supply of corrupt people in the US and elsewhere — all from the solid evidence of the Pfizer documents.
542 Neurological Adverse Events, 95% Serious, in First 90 Days of Pfizer mRNA Vaccine Rollout. 16 Deaths. Females Suffered AEs More Than Twice As Often As Males.
From Etana Hecht Twitter acct
https://twitter.com/EtanaHechtDC/status/1627962194959663105?cxt=HHwWgoCwpba_15ctAAAA