by Kerry Dougherty
Geez. Who could have predicted this:
Only one thing wrong with The New York Times reporting on yesterday’s horrifying report that showed the sharpest drop in national test scores in three decades.
It’s this: the devastating failure of American education isn’t due to the pandemic.
It’s due in large part to school closures, hysteria, and the isolation that kids were subjected to during the pandemic. But it began before COVID provided an excuse to stop teaching kids. It began when schools did things like abolishing zeroes and scrapping honors and awards in the name of equity. It began when teachers unions obsessed about pronouns instead of achievement.
In other words, it’s the direct result of the feckless actions of government officials who closed schools but kept liquor stores open and the teachers unions who put ideology and idiotic politics ahead of teaching,
No state performed worse in math than Virginia. Gov. Glenn Youngkin held a press conference yesterday where he rightly dumped this reeking heap of embarrassment at the feet of Democrat Gov. Ralph Northam and his predecessor, the awful Terry McAuliffe.
“In the business world, if this was your report card, there would be an immediate change in management,” said Youngkin, according to the Richmond Times-Dispatch. “You would get fired — and I think that is exactly what voters did last November.”
The National Assessment of Educational Progress, dubbed the nation’s report card, tested hundreds of thousands of fourth and eighth graders this year for the first time since 2019. Significant losses were reported nationwide; national reading scores dropped to 1992 levels while math scores saw their largest decrease ever.
Superintendent of Public Instruction Jillian Balow, who also spoke at the press conference, said Virginia’s fourth graders had the largest decline in reading in the nation. Only 32% of Virginia’s fourth graders performed proficient or above in reading, compared to 43% in 2017.
For fourth-grade math, only 38% scored proficient or above, compared with 50% in 2017.
Our last governor was too busy tearing down monuments as penance for his blackface days to care about education. Before that he was too busy flirting with Randi Weingarten to care about schools.
Worse, Northam was one of the first governors in the country to happily announce that the two-week shutdown of schools to “slow the spread” in March 2020 would continue through the end of the school year.
Those of us who howled in protest were called “grandma killers” and “covidiots.”
Where’s our apology? Will anyone ever own up to the tragic mistakes made by government officials and teachers unions that merrily sacrificed children to the gods of COVID-19?
There needs to be a reckoning for what was done in 2020.
In his feckless, foolish overreaction to a virus that from its earliest days was clearly not a danger to children, Northam doomed Virginia’s students to failure. He finished what McAuliffe started.
When Northam announced in the summer of 2020 that schools could reopen in the fall only if they followed stringent, impractical, impossible mitigation rules — something like 13 children riding, masked, on a school bus that could hold 77, for instance — school boards around the commonwealth complied with the boneheaded governor and meekly stayed closed for most of the next year.
Truth is, the decline in educational standards — in Virginia, anyway — did begin during the McAuliffe administration and was simply magnified by the COVID restrictions. Lt. Gov. Winsome Earle-Sears issued a statement Monday pointing out that it was minority children who suffered most under these two “progressive” governors and their teachers union friends.
“This decline started in 2017, well before the Governor Northam-ordered pandemic school closures. The two previous Virginia administrations reduced accountability, transparency by our schools, and standards both for students and schools, resulting in these shameful consequences, all in the name of equity. Sadly, students of color were hit the hardest by these failed policies. Prolonged closures of in-person learning exacerbated the decline. Our children are not learning the basics of math and reading! We have known this for some time and the NAEP scores prove it; change is in order,” stated Lieutenant Governor Earle-Sears.
Youngkin is demanding that school districts use the $2 billion in unspent COVID emergency relief funds on tutoring programs to remediate the learning losses that occurred during the Northam and McAuliffe administrations.
You would think that the Virginia Education Association, which was complicit in every catastrophic policy, would have the decency to stand down now that they’ve seen the scores. But no sooner had Youngkin announced plans to try to repair the damage done by his predecessors than the largest teachers union in Virginia denounced him for not spending “new” money on it.
It’s always money with these militant greed balls.
TWO BILLION DOLLARS, you dopes. Now sit down and shut up. You’ve done enough damage.
This column has been republished with permission from Kerry: Unemployed & Unedited.
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