SCHOOL CLOSURES, THE DAMAGE IS DULY NOTED, RANDI WEIGARTEN ETAL.

They warned the closures would cause serious, possibly irreversible, developmental retardation. They warned of severe learning loss.

Alas.

The critics were not just ignored, they were also maligned by a vicious cabal of politicians, news media personalities, and education professionals, most notably AmericanFederation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten. The critics were called monsters and "grandma killers." They were accused of not "trusting" the science.

"Children are resilient," the pro-closure camp smugly asserted. (No, it’s not that children are resilient. It’s that they don’t yet have the words to describe the ways in which you are harming them.)

Now, a little more than two years after the pandemic first came to America, new data confirm the mass school closures, which, by the way, Democratic politicians and teachers' unions enforced with a religious fever even long after the restrictions were shown to be little more than superstitious hocus-pokery, caused serious harm to young students.

"American students’ test scores plunge to levels unseen for decades," the Washington Post reported on Sept. 1. "Test scores in elementary school math and reading plummeted to levels unseen for decades," the report reads, citing the first "nationally representative report comparing student achievement from just before the pandemic to performance two years later."........At the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal, the story is the same.Critics of the pandemic school closures have been vindicated (msn.com)